Walkabout #14: Hydroponic Hydropower Blues
Sun May 04, 2008 at 03:32:02 AM PDT
The Stranded Wind Initiative was formed to design, fund, and implement projects that can use renewable resources that are currently "stranded", or located in places where there aren’t enough people to use them and no way to get them out. Here in the U.S. that means primarily wind and we’ve got a good bit of sun, too, but as I’m traveling about New England what I see over and over is hydropower resources right next to towns that desperately need jobs.
I’ve got a couple of associates with very big ideas on what to do to get us out of this iron triangle of energy, economy, and environmental problems. The rivers and falls of Massachusetts hill town country provide a nice backdrop for a discussion of such things ... but I wonder if people will allow it to happen in a timely fashion.
The curious municipal cluster of Shelburne Falls, containing the towns of Shelburne and Buckland, is located a few miles from farmerchuck’s farm, straddling the Deerfield River at the site of what has historically been called Salmon Falls.
I say curious because what is now one town was once two; this 1908 trolley bridge connected them, lasting a mere twenty years before the automobile overmastered it in 1928. The citizens have converted it to a walking garden.
Have another look at those falls; a little bit of construction, a little bit of turbine, and this city could have a five megawatt Haber Bosch ammonia plant, producing $4,000,000 in ammonia a year at today’s prices and enough heat to drive an acre of hydroponic greenhouse; food miles for this town of 2,000 would drop dramatically.
Michael Garjian of E2M gets it. These guys are buying old factory buildings and turning them into what they call "city gardens". Greenhouse operations need heat which the older Haber Bosch process produces in abundance. I believe every old mill building in the area has some sort of hydroelectric resource that used to drive it. This would seem to be the perfect recipe for reducing food miles for the whole region and ensuring fresh fruits and vegetables year round.
This is cool and it’s a regional changer, but what can be done globally? Lets talk about Grand Inga a thirty nine gigawatt hydroelectric project on the Congo River. Of course, anything of this scope couldn’t be built without some BANANAs carrying on about every little detail. Oh, sure, it’s a very corrupt part of the world and there are injustices, but understand what the perfectionism of those opposed to this will cost us; thirty nine million tons of ammonia a year in perpetuity. That’s a 300,000 barrel a day oil well that’ll never run dry. Total cost? $100 billion. Nine year of operation at current oil prices will pay it off and those numbers aren’t standing still.
There are shipping and fishing businesses all around the African continent that would greatly benefit from ships powered by a clean, reliable fuel source in the region. Transport inland would benefit as well, although in many cases it will make more sense to electrify rail using the output of the dam rather than using ammonia as a hydrogen carrier to fuel trains. Oh, and let’s not forget ammonia’s first use these days – a basis for nitrogen fertilizers. The farmers of Africa can’t handle concentrated anhydrous for the most part, as that is a tractor and tank job, so there’d need to be a means to make urea, which can be safely transported and dispersed by hand.
So ... one of the things I hope to accomplish while I’m here is instigating some of this anhydrous ammonia production with the attendant greenhouses, just like we’re trying to get done in Graettinger, Iowa. I bet the good folks of Greenfield, Massachusetts would like to have fresh hydroponic vegetables twelve months out of the year and a few hundred shiny new jobs to go along with the food security improvement. But will the lawmakers of Massachusetts see things as they are and bulldoze away the barriers to this much needed stabilization of our food and energy supplies?
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