One of our discussions PickensPlan.com, "How much time to prepare before economic collapse?" led to this string of posts that I consolidated into a single article on the issues raised. These were posted just before the 2008 election. One year later, it is a fascinating time capsule given the events that have taken place in that time.
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One of our discussions PickensPlan.com, "How much time to prepare before
economic collapse?" led to this string of posts that I consolidated into a single article on the issues raised. These were posted
just before the 2008 election. One year later, it is a fascinating time capsule given the events that have taken place in that time.
I was asked to come and give some perspective on the art of the
possible and make some suggestions on how to proceed in a time of
cholera.
Back in 1981, just after Reagan took office, there was a time when the
prime interest rate had just peaked at 24%, oil had just peaked at $30
a barrel, unemployment was climbing toward 10%, and the economy was
suffering from horrendous inflation. The Fed had just jacked its rates
over 18%. It was not a great time to provide the world with advanced
solar power or highly efficient automobiles. In short, nobody was
interested.
Next, He who giveth taketh away, and the Congress decided to kill solar
energy and conservation, and pulled the tax credits and all the solar
R&D that was being funded in the late '70's. What a great time to
be a solar expert!
There were about a dozen great ideas that came from the solar folks of
that era, including the sleek wind turbines that you see everywhere
today, the passive solar home with active solar components that
practically made it 100% self-sufficient, the first ocean power plant
became operational off the coast of Hawaii, the first large scale solar
thermal central receiver at Barstow, the ideas for algae and biomass
conversion systems that were in first prototype phases, and fantastic
new turbodiesel engines that could run at nearly twice the efficiency
as spark ignition engines for autos.
Well, about the only things that survived in the USA were insulation
and passive solar green buildings until the price of oil began its
recent surge around two years ago. No one can compete with cheap oil
except other cheap fossil fuels. Oil fell to $12 a barrel back in '83,
and really dropped for a while down to $7 in '84.
I wanted to post this bit of history to paint the ugly picture that led
to a 26 year drought in renewable energy and conservation.
We are at a crossroads today. The economy has begun to tank (it's
nowhere near as bad as it can be -- that bad is just unimaginable). We
are facing imminent and very serious impacts from global warming. It
has just begun with the loss of just a few thousand lives. Losses in
the millions are just a few years away. We have the most dangerous
world today that we have ever faced since World War II, and our enemies
now surround us and destroy us on every economic battlefield.
We need a new way of doing business, and must live to a new standard of
performance. We need new leadership, and must be brave enough to employ
the new technologies that will enable success.
BTW, the period in question came after Nixon's 2nd term, when interest
rates shot up through 10% to about 12% just as Carter entered office.
Volker at the the Fed kept jacking rates all that period, destroying
the economy and ruining any chance at dealing with the construction of
new plants, housing, businesses, etc. Carter had nothing to do with
that. It was an outgrowth of poor fiscal management by Nixon and Ford's
war budgets that left huge structural budget deficits and out of
control growth in the money supply, aka inflation.
We can expect the same after the debacle of the Bush years.
Hyperinflation should happen almost immediately. Or not. The Fed may
just lower the lending rate to zero to the banks.
Let's begin by discussing some possibilities.
The Barstow plant, Solar One, was on a back road behind the coal
liquefaction plant they were testing at the time at Southern California
Edison. It was the succesful demonstration of solar thermal power towers, the most efficient type of large-scale solar energy conversion.
One of our better inventors, Mike Fallwell, has an idea for a new class
of wind machines that might have capital costs about four times less
than the sleek wind turbines that you see today, and much broader
siting and expansion potential. This is not some violation of the laws
of thermodynamics, it is a method by which one might harvest the wind
at altitudes of 500 to 1000 feet above ground where the wind velocities
are about twice what they are at ground level. the size of the
equipment is much smaller and lighter, which makes its energy density
much higher. I'll let Mike reveal some of his secrets, but the upshot
is that the technology could be mass produced and used in every state
with very little land impacts and with something else of great value --
a high capacity factor -- around 0.6. This is 150% higher than
ground-based wind systems.
A second very valuable solution is one that kills two birds with one
stone. As everyone knows, American automotive history is about to come
to an end with the demise of the Big Three. Each of these companies,
which together once employed more than 10 million Americans in good,
living wage jobs, is now on the verge of bankruptcy. American workers
in the Midwest still flee the automakers as they continue downsizing
and outsourcing labor. It's a disaster that has been unfolding for
decades.
The advanced turbodiesel engines have been mass produced in Europe and
Japan in recent years, mostly based on ancient American technology with
some new twists. The idea of adding ammonia or urea to the fuel mix
eliminates the NOx emissions, and allows much higher compression
ratios. This is exactly the same technology developed here 30 years ago
that nobody cared about. These engines can be run with diesel fuel,
biodiesel, or ammonia, or a mix of the three in virtually any
proportion, and achieve fuel to power at the wheel efficiencies in
excess of 42%. With very high compression, it can be over 50%.
In another post, I spoke of my work at NASA where we developed the
lightest and strongest materials known to man. One, which happens to be
composed of non-carcinogenic compounds and manufactured with recipes
that allow it to achieve virtually any shape and tolerance, is known as
RP46. It has about ten times the strength to weight ratio as steel and
is just as cost effective. You can make frames, panels, gears, and
amazing components with RP46.
If we were to mass produce these engines in our American factories, and
mate them to ultralight auto and truck bodies, the overall mileage of
these new vehicles would range from 40 to 200 MPG on straight diesel.
That's about five times what is now possible here and three times the
best results in Europe. We would leapfrog the Europeans and Japanese,
and take control of this market once again.
The higher the compression ratio, the higher the efficiency. The fuel
must be adaptable to the high temperatures at the high pressures
without igniting. That's why ammonia, biodiesel and straight diesel are
so good and CNG and gasoline stink.
Make the engines larger for the trucks, and they get the same
improvements, too. The real advantage is ZERO CARBON EMISSIONS. Icing
on the cake is better fuel efficiency than any gasoline or CNG fueled
vehicle, as much as 2:1 better.
The engine in the Mini Cooper D puts out over 100 HP. Given its size, that's pretty good.
There is lower flame speed in ammonia. That's why it works well at high
Temperature & Pressure in high Compression Ratio engines. The flame
speed can also be adjusted with additives. Don't ask! But dimethyl
ether (DME) works nicely.
The best turbodiesels in production today are in Germany. BMW's Mini
Cooper D gets 74MPG, and has about a 42% efficiency. Just to compare,
no spark-ignition ICE motorcycle gets mileage that good except a Vespa,
which is no more than a scooter. The Mini is a four--place auto.
The Otto cycle used in a diesel is inherently more efficient. The
advanced diesels use ammonia as a means to scrub the NOx from the
reactions. The CR is 40:1. The best ICE you refer to is about 13:1.
Transmissions can be quite efficient. The hydraulic hybrid powertrain
claims up to a 50% reduction in losses over conventional ATs. The
Mini's transmission has a computer-controlled solenoid that offers its
spectacular performance of only 140 grams of CO2 per kilometer
traveled. That's the lowest in the world.
The Web has some data on new engines, but the good stuff I've
seen is proprietary. Yes, ammonia is the key to success. Yes, you can
get 200MPG with a lighter body and these new engines and transmissions.
And yes, you can get 80MPG on ammonia with an ultralight, which has 40%
of the volumetric energy density of straight diesel and is about the
same volumetric energy density as compressed natural gas (CNG).
Here is a neat chart from DOE's labs on what's possible with an NH3 diesel:
In advanced solar power, here is an artist's concept of the Hidalgo solar plant, used as a model
for both Ridgecrest and the Ammonia plant. Note that the copper smelter
is in the foreground and the background, looking due west, is the
Cochise Mountain range that separates Arizona and New Mexico. Mexico
was just twenty miles south.
I thought I'd just get you folks comfortable with some of the other
stuff that will work to make us great again. Every one of these ideas
is a trillion dollar solution. The turbodiesel all by itself can end
our reliance on imported oil in less than five years. The "Fallwell
Flyer" (for want of a better name, maybe "Skypower") can put the nail
in the nuke coffin and end our reliance on coal-based generation of
power.
This power tower technology referred to is an outgrowth of the design that
we developed at Gibbs & Hill (about $10 million in 2008 dollars was
spent on that work) for systems to be built at Ridgecrest (near China
Lake, CA) and Hidalgo in SW New Mexico back in the early '80's. Both
were killed by the economic conditions at the time and the loss of the
solar tax credits.
Ridgecrest was envisioned to be a trigeneration facility, using a
combined cycle power generation system topping a cascaded process heat
system for food preparation and dehydration, and a water desalination
plant. It was designed to use nearly 90% of all collected heat from the
tower ranging from 1500 F down to 200 F. Its design scale was 560 MWe
with over 1.0 GWth of cogeneration. It also had a million ton thermal
storage unit using iron orthosilicate (copper slag). The field covered
6 square miles. It would produce all the water for a town of 60,000
people, power for 300,000 people, and food for three million people.
The solar field at Hidalgo copper smelter was to have had 10,000
tracking heliostats and an 800' tower with four downward facing
cavities to collect and trap the light from a square mile of mirrors.
It was designed to produce 80 MWe of power while cogenerating process
heat for smelting copper using the Outukumpu Oy oxygen flash smelting
process. The smelting enhancements would have quadrupled the plant's
throughput of copper, and virtually eliminated all of its fossil fuel
requirements and noxious emissions of sulfur through its unique capture
process.
The new design, which would build on these two, takes the exhaust heat
from the gas turbine topping cycle at just over 1000 F to produce steam
for a solid state ammonia synthesis system. About 60% of the energy
required for ammonia synthesis would be replaced by the steam, and the
new solid state process eliminates the need for electrolysis of water
to retrieve the hydrogen. Air liquefaction is still needed to capture
the nitrogen which is then combined with the hydrogen to produce
ammonia with a Haber Bosch technique.
In this manner, no carbon dioxide is produced and only sunlight, water,
and air are the feedstocks. The plant output in the area of the Mojave
Desert would be about 400 MWe at a capacity factor of 0.34 and 175,000
MT of ammonia each year.
At $15 per million BTU ($1.50 per therm of natural gas equivalent) the plant ROI is well over 15%.
The ammonia market today is already importing 58% of our needs. The
potential, including both agriculture and turbodiesels for cars and
trucks, is over 200 million MT per year. It's a big deal.
The groundwater is what they use in Ridgecrest. It's mostly salty water
left from long ago deep underground. The surface is bone dry. The
groundwater at China Lake is too brackish to drink.
Then, there's ocean energy. Global cooling was a possibility if we
developed ocean thermal energy conversion. These plants would cruise
the oceans searching for the hottest surface waters to power their
ammonia-based Rankine cycle engines. If more than 30,000 of them were
built, they could lower the temperature of the ocean about 1 degree C
per decade, nearly enough to offset global warming!
On my Pickens Web page, you'll find a link to a discussion on just that point from 1977. I was aboard OTEC-1 during its shakedown tests in 1979. It worked.
Hidalgo is gone. The last US copper smelter closed its doors over a
decade ago, and Phelps Dodge died with it. Couldn't compete with
Chilean copper. DOE shut down all OTEC research and development in '83. Death to the invaders! Only the strong survive. Oil and gas are the kings.
We have fought wars over oil, and destroyed our economy. Yet politicians still sing out, "Drill, baby, drill!" at their conventions. Madness.
There are technological solutions, some of which I have begun to
reveal, but leadership is the unmeasurable factor that can make or
break the ultimate solution. My life is an an example of what can
happen when you're ahead of your time and no one listens because they
perceive no threat.
We still have that problem. The idiots in power still believe that we
have centuries' worth of fossil fuel, unlimited amounts of nuclear
fuel, and that global warming is a myth. The myth is their role as a
leader: They do not understand the importance of technical know how,
the power of invention, and the extraordinary creativity within the
human spirit. They have exceptionally poor education, and cannot allow
people with vision to take power.
We are electing a new crop of leaders tonight. How many have a good,
solid technical education to balance their political "science". Guess
-- maybe 2% at most?
Many of you are correct in assuming that we have a serious, if not
insurmountable crisis in leadership. We have solutions, just no will to
take the risks necessary to carry them out.
Authors Website: http://www.paulallencurto.com
Authors Bio:Designed first all-solar home for Ryland Homes in 1974. At MITRE, led a group of 35 of the best minds in the world (including Dr. Edward Teller, among others) who performed detailed engineering, scientific, socio-economic, and political analyses of all alternative energy choices for ERDA/DOE, NSF, and MITRE in 1975-80, and designed solar power plants at Gibbs & Hill in '80-'83. These included closed cycle gas turbines driven by a power tower, solar cogeneration 100MWe plant to power the Hidalgo, NM Phelps Dodge copper smelter using the Outokumpu Oy oxygen flash smelting process, the Ridgecrest Project with the Consortium of Alternate Energies, a seven-field power tower complex with 560 MWe peak power output with 100 hours of thermal storage for a 100 MWe base load system (China Lake/Ridgecrest, CA), and a 400 million gallon per year solar-powered ethanol plant. Known as world leader in alternative energy until the collapse of the field over the Reagan years.
Worked as a utility consultant for 8 years, and later at NASA for 16 years as a scientist and engineer, as Chief Technologist, reviewing all of NASA's R&D in every field of endeavor for the NASA Inventions and Contributions Board and the NASA Administrator.
20 invention disclosures, 5 patents, 87 scientific and technical peer-reviewed papers, 51 years in the profession, and successfully completed 15 projects on time, on budget, and meeting or exceeding specifications.
Listed in Who's Who In America and Who's Who In The World for the past several years and again in 2017.