Stranded Wind

This is the lead part from an article called "Wind Turbines and Trains" that I recently did. Here is the intro:

A National Renewable Ammonia Architecture

This paper describes the current manufacture and uses of ammonia as well as describing a path forward to a fully renewable future for this vital fertilizer ingredient. The primary author and editor is Neal Rauhauser with assistance in its development rendered by Dave Bradley, Bryan Lutter, and Larry Bruce.

I recently met Bill McKibben, founder of http://350.org, at a conference in Boston. He showed this video and talked a bit about it being language neutral - it's easily understandable - the Arabic numerals used are globally ubiquitous.

We've worked for this last year exploring what to do with stranded wind, solar, and hydroelectric power, and ammonia has been a particular focus. This commodity chemical is the basis for about half of all protein humans consume and we go through twenty million tons a year in the United States alone.

Three quarters of ammonia plants run on natural gas and the rest are coal based. I knew that we'd had hydroelectric powered plants, most notably the Norsk Hydro facility in Tinn, Norway, closed eighteen years ago. What I did not know until today is that the largest one ever built, the Sable Chemicals plant in Kwekwe, Zimbabwe, is still in operation, albeit with great difficulties.

I gathered up what the Google could tell me about it and I'm trying to make sense of the operation.

Last night I heard I was getting a ten minute slot on WNJC 1360 AM, a Progressive radio station out of Philadelphia. I guess I did OK, because the host, Rob Kall, editor at OpEd News kept me talking for half an hour.

I'm a good enough speaker on agriculture, energy, and economy that I'd like to do more of this, but I'm not sure how to get started. Are there any other outlets, either Progressive or Conservative, that might be willing to have me?

Last week I attended a meeting that was a public forum about a proposed petroleum coke to methane facility perched on the coast of Lake Erie. This system would consume about 6,000 tons/day of pet coke (95% carbon, 5% sulfur), a waste by-product of refining crude oil, where the fuel oil/asphalt component is fried into carbon to squeeze more valuable products from the stuff that would otherwise be used to make roads or heat industrial processes. Actually, pet coke has a higher carbon content than coal, but they are both fossil fuels.

This has been a busy year for the Stranded Wind Initiative and I'm not sure I take the time to sum things up as often as I should. We've launched a hydroelectric powered ammonia plant, assisted in fundraising for a solid state ammonia synthesis method, filed a patent for a methanol synthesis method suitable for use with wind power, and our next effort will be the exploration and possible patenting of the century old Haber Bosch ammonia synthesis method, making it behave with the variable power typical of renewable sources.

If we execute on all of the things describes above we'll have cut the first little bit of brush on the path to freeing our agriculture from fossil fuels for both transportation and fertilization.

As of the beginning of November, 2008 there are some big happenings in the world, ones which will affect the wind industry on many dimensions. One was the tricky and crafty inclusion of the renewable energy incentives (MACRS, PTC, REPI, CREBs, etc) into the $700 Billion Big Bank Bailout package in October of this year. While the incentives are only extended one year (drop dead date now is midnight, December 31 2009 instead of 2008) it is certainly better than not having them at all. There is good reason to believe that these will be extended several years past the end of 2009.