So I have now watched both George Clooney movies that came out 2005, Good Night and Good Luck, and Syriana. For my thoughts on Goodnight and Goodluck see my blog. Now as for Syriana, it is a very complicated movie, not one that you can watch only once. The Internet Movie Database, or rather the IMDB users, have give Syriana only a 7.1 out of 10 at the time of writing. That said, I thought it was at least an 8. However, more relevant was Syriana's study of the corrupting influence of oil. It is very disturbing, to see the amount of control the oil industry has over people's lives and the way big oil can make good people do some truly awful things.
After watching Syriana the natural discussion around the Cole table is what to do about oil. Having a technical background I devised a technical solution. I am still waiting for someone to shoot it down. Thus I present the following to the World in the hopes that it is either:
An awful lot of sunlight lands on the deserts in Arizona and New Mexico. These are largely unpopulated regions not overly far from the Pacific Ocean.
Now consider the following, dig a tunnel from the Pacific to somewhere in the middle of that red square. If you keep the tunnel a few hundred meters below sea level what you have is admittedly expensive, but what you have is also a steady supply of sea water to the middle of the desert.
Now take the sea water from in the desert and using solar power you first warm the water to about 60 degrees Celsius. At this temperature the water would rapidly evaporate, collect the evaporated water in a large cone that rests directly above the hole where the water evaporates. Redirect the highly humidified air down a tube and as the water cools it would precipitate, this precipitated water is distilled water, collect it in a second tank and using electro-chemical separation (electricity coming from a vast network of solar collectors), separate the hydrogen from oxygen in water. Release the oxygen into the air and use hydrogen in hydrogen powered internal combustion engines, hydrogen powered heating systems and possibly hydrogen electric generators (since you cannot efficiently transmit electricity from the South West to regions like the North East).
What have I just described? A hydrogen powered economy? Not exactly, rather a solar powered economy. No longer do you need to burn or fission stuff to create hydrogen, rather you get it from the most abundant energy source on the planet. Further since that solar energy is going to hit our planet no matter if we use it or not, what I am proposing would simply take existing energy that is warming New Mexico and Arizona and use it across North America as a useful energy source.
A system like the one I propose would be expensive, but consider, every day the World uses something in the Neighbourhood of 30 million barrels of oil, each barrel costs more than $60 USD today. What if we could end our dependency on oil. What if the United States no longer needed to play nice with countries like Saudi Arabia, countries whose leaders are known to support organizations like Hezbollah and Al Qaeda. What if we could end our addiction to oil and at the same time use an energy source that did not poison the air we breathe and the water we drink.
2006.01.01
I have received a number of questions, I attempt to answer some of them here.
You heat the water by using the waste heat from solar generators. Understand that industrial solar power comes from reflecting sun light onto a boiler which boils water which turns the water to steam the steam drives a turbine and then the steam is cooled and gets reheated and drives a turbine and gets cooled, etc. But how do you cool the steam? You need a cooler, what cooler? In most Nuclear and coal power plants they use regular air to cool the steam, but in my solar power plant I propose using ocean water piped in from miles away (that is the water I am trying to heat, actually cools the solar heated steam... think about it, it not only makes sense, its actually rather elegant). Understand that unlike pocket calculators which only convert a small portion of the light that hits the solar cell into electricity a big industrial thing will be more efficient but it will also produce an awful lot of heat.
Yes, solar power » electrical hydrolysis.
Eventually the salt would have to be returned to the ocean, you would probably want two water evaporation points and periodically shut one down, scrape out the salt and then dump it somewhere in the mid Pacific.
I believe distillation makes sense because you have so much waste heat anyway, and you have to get rid of it somehow, it also means that your platinum electrodes don't have to be cleaned all the time because of the calcification. Natural salt water is an electrical conductor, I do not know what it would do in an electro-chemical seperation.
Yes initially a lot of oil would be expended to build this, but once built, imagine a world with no need for fossil fuels because suddenly we have hydrogen powered cars, trucks, aircraft, etc. Remember, Hydrogen is a flammable gas and was in fact the fuel used on one of the world's first jet engines.
Back to Michael Cole's letters.