| Mining the Imagination for
New Energy
Scientists call for a research
blitz targeting extreme possibilities.
The Los Angeles Times
July 25, 2004
TUCSON — To allay concerns
over dwindling oil and mounting carbon residues,
President Bush has proposed relying on "clean"
coal, a revived nuclear industry and hydrogen
cars, which he says could be widely available
by 2040. Critics denounce these ideas as either
impractical or environmentally outrageous, calling
instead for intensified renewable energy development.
Both visions are naive. The
dilemma isn't just getting enough clean energy,
but getting enough energy, period. As world population
quadrupled last century, power consumption increased
sixteenfold. With China and India joining the
industrialized feeding frenzy, by 2050 our current
usage will triple. And neither Bush nor environmentalists
know how to meet such demand.
To run the world on biomass
fuel (a favorite idea of John Kerry's) would require
dedicating an area comparable in size to all land
now used for human agriculture. Because sun and
wind energy aren't constant, tapping them on a
massive scale not only means huge arrays of solar
panels and turbines but redesigned grids with
vast new storage mechanisms. Atmospheric scientist
Ken Caldeira of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
calculates that if we somehow built 900-megawatt,
zero-emissions plants each day for the next 50
years, we'd barely double our current output.
Even if we embraced universal nuclear power, there's
far too little uranium — unless we again
accept breeder reactors, which proliferate weapons-grade
fuel.
Writing in the journal Science,
Caldeira and 17 other eminent American and Canadian
scientists conclude that the only hope for solving
the world's looming energy shortage is to consider
things we've barely imagined. They propose a research
blitz of previously unimagined proportions, far
beyond what any politician is currently suggesting,
in search of entirely new carbon-free technologies.
One of them, New York University
physicist Martin Hoffert, has resurrected a notion
broached during the first Arab oil crisis: orbiting
solar collectors in space, where the sun appears
eight times brighter, and beaming it to Earth
via microwaves ("probably no stronger than
your cell phone's"). In 1978, the concept
involved a mirror the size of Manhattan; today
the idea is smaller reflectors — possibly
balloons made of shiny Mylar — strung around
the Earth. David Criswell and John Lewis, of the
universities of Houston and Arizona, respectively,
set their sights higher: on the moon, where reflectors
could be made from silicates and metals mined
on site, rather than hauled expensively into orbit.
The moon might also hold the key to practical,
clean nuclear fusion, still elusive on Earth but
reportedly more promising if He-3, a helium isotope
found on the lunar surface and in the atmospheres
of Jupiter and Saturn, is used.
Or, they write, if we can't
wean ourselves from coal, then seed our own atmosphere
with sulfate particles, which would form an artificial
cloud cover to counteract greenhouse warming.
Or hang a 2,000-kilometer-wide screen in space,
which, like a permanent sunspot, might block enough
solar flux to compensate for a doubling of carbon
dioxide in the atmosphere. Or try to somehow harness
the explosive, fleeting potential energy of antimatter.
The idea, Hoffert says, is to imagine everything,
however outlandish, in hopes that something proves
possible. At Chicago's 1893 World's Columbian
Exposition, he notes, technology exhibits for
the coming century failed to predict airplanes
or television.
But to go from imagination to reality requires
commitment and investment. Hoffert proposes spending
several hundred billion dollars a year over the
next 15 years on an Apollo-scale project to force
technology for clean, abundant energy. Although
both Bush and Kerry declare that market incentives
like emissions trading will produce solutions,
Hoffert argues that major technologies of the
last 50 years, from space travel to atomic power
to the Internet, sprang from government mandates,
not markets. "Markets only react to short-term
opportunities. They're not equipped to address
long-term problems like this one," he said.
Last July, Hoffert and his coauthors
gathered in Aspen, Colo., with other scientists
to brainstorm. Discussions included a proposal
by high-altitude-wind specialist David Shepard
for suspending turbines on giant kites at 30,000
feet, where jet-stream power is enormous. UC Irvine
physicist and science fiction novelist Gregory
Benford had a low-tech, low-cost plan: Instead
of using crop wastes for biomass energy, we'd
save even more carbon buildup in the atmosphere
by simply burying them at sea. Much talk involved
revolutionizing the electrical grid, possibly
with superconductors, or by connecting the entire
world so the off-peak side could power the half
in shadow, as Buckminster Fuller once proposed.
The keynote speaker was Rice
University's Richard Smalley, a Nobel laureate
and discoverer of the fullerene, the geodesic
carbon molecule named for Fuller. When these "buckyballs"
align to form carbon nanotubes, they are the strongest
substance known — possibly strong enough
to send a tether into space. An elevator moving
along such a nanotube cable to a satellite in
a fixed geosynchronous position 22,500 miles above
Earth could ferry materials for space-based solar
collectors far more cheaply than space shuttle
launches.
On Earth, the highly conductive
nanotubes might form lighter, more flexible grids,
vast enough that we could move all our energy
through wires rather than with tank trucks. To
these grids, Smalley would connect all kinds of
storage, ranging from wind compressed into airtight
caves to appliance-sized home units that might
be batteries, flywheels, hydrogen tanks —
whatever would let us both tap and feed the total
power supply as needed.
Of course, all this is speculative
— the longest carbon nanotube produced so
far measures barely half an inch. But Smalley
concurs that another Apollo-like project is crucial.
Not since then, he notes, have our universities
been filled with engineering students inspired
by a great challenge. A line graph he projected
at Aspen showed the sobering result of subsequent
generations diverted to Wall Street or Silicon
Valley: As numbers of science and engineering
PhDs plummet in the United States, in China and
India they've soared.
"Suppose" he said,
"from 2004 through 2009 we collect 5 cents
from every gallon of oil. We invest the resulting
$10 billion per year in frontier energy research.
Maybe for the decade after, we collect 10 cents
a gallon: $20 billion a year. At worst, we'll
create a cornucopia of new technologies and new
industries. At best, we'll solve the energy problem
before 2020 and lay the basis for peace and prosperity
worldwide."
An expensive long shot, but,
as Hoffert noted, the U.S. went from the Wright
brothers to the first atomic pile in less time
than from now to 2050 — when either we'll
have carbon-free energy or face temperatures the
Earth hasn't seen for 100,000 years.
"To continue more than another
century, we'll have to do all this stuff,"
he said. "Otherwise, we'll use up all the
coal, then maybe methane hydrates on the ocean
floor. When we've completely exhausted fossil
fuels, civilization will collapse. We'll go back
to being hunter-gatherers. It will be much harder
for the next intelligent species that evolves
because they won't have cheap fossil fuel like
we did. They'll have to go directly to fusion
and photovoltaic cells. That may not be so easy."
No easier, probably, than imagining
Bush's or Kerry's political handlers daring to
float so bold a vision. The only thing harder
to contemplate is what will happen if some leader
doesn't, and soon.
Copyright 2004 Los Angeles Times
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Selected Works
Books
The World Without Us
An Echo in My Blood: The Search for a Family's Hidden Past
Gaviotas: A Village to Reinvent the World
La Frontera: The United States Border With Mexico
Articles
Three Planetary Futures Vanity Fair, April 2008
Earth Without People
Cartoon Op-ed
Mining the Imagination for New Energy
The
Cocaine Connection
Diamonds in the Wild
Power Trip
The Sacred and Profane
Vanishing Forests, Endangered People
Radio
 Chiloé: A Bridge Too Far?
Resurrecting the Zápara
Laguna
Madre
Straw
Bale Homes in Mexico
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