The Oil Drum

As an opening warning, today I am going to write a piece of fiction. Not that it suggests that I am trying to emulate James Kunstler, nor is it going to have the drama of the Science fiction/Fantasy by authors such as David Weber, Lois McMaster Bujold, or Jim Butcher that, to pick but three I avidly devour. No what I want to do is to try and explain is why it takes new ideas about 20-years to go from idea to significant market impact. I thought it might be amusing to do this by following a totally fictitious idea *cough* from concept to impact level to show some of the barriers to progress. Dixie Lee Ray once tried to do this in explaining why, even if cold temperature fusion worked, it could not be an instant contributor to the national energy supply. Unfortunately I have lost that reference and so you are stuck with this, should you choose to read it.

Let’s begin by saying that our protagonists are three faculty members: you, a young female electrical engineer called Angela, me, a somewhat old plant biologist called Burt, and Charlie, a medium career nuclear engineer. We are having a beer after classes end and I comment that in some work I was doing in Russia on birch trees I had noticed that one of the ponds on site had a thin oily scum on it. I’d brought samples back for testing and it seems as though the cause was algae, in the water, that was weeping a lipid. We all troop back to the lab for a look, and on top of the little reactor that I have built there is this thin film, but the water below is quite muddy and turbid, and this has been sitting there for quite a while. You suggest cleaning up the layers with a little applied electrical potential, and Charlie suggests a little radiation might weaken the algal cell wall and increase yield.

While writing the recent piece on home heating, I was surprised to calculate many different numbers for the energy return on firewood. Though the outputs were only slightly different in quantity of BTUs, there was a wide range of inputs. But the primary reason for the return disparity was the presence of the market economy - those processing firewood for their own use had higher energy returns than those selling wood for profit - the accelerated drying time to process large amounts of wood required an additional wood input which dropped the energy return. Graphically this showed up as a tradeoff between maximizing energy return on TIME versus maximizing energy return on ENERGY. This reminded me that energy return is not a hard-and-fast principle, and also that society, obviously, will optimize its resources based on what it perceives to be its most limiting input(s). However, in an upcoming world constrained by energy, or any limiting variable other than time/money, we can increase our energy available by reducing the return on other inputs, such as time.