We published the National Renewable Ammonia Architecture Spring 2009 update on May 15th. There is some additional action happening regarding the publication which I can’t talk about at this time, but I am free to share some less technical, more visionary pieces on the future of ammonia and our civilization.
Futurescapes, three in all, will help the curious envision a future society powered by renewable ammonia. These are less technical (OK, non-technical) than the norm, but I hope they give folks an idea of what might happen due to the situations we face regarding energy, economics, and the environment.
Let’s have a look around the California coastal town that came to be known as Ammoniaville.
The offshore wind turbines were commissioned, the solid state ammonia synthesis plant was brought online, and then the darkness closed in around the town. Depending on where you stood it might have been the bank collapse, or the white on Hispanic friction fanned by a corrupt and irresponsible media, or the drying of the Sierras that laid the foundation, but everyone agreed that the H1N1 flu that came to be known as The Flying Pig was the spark that got the blaze going.
The sickness hit a state already stressed by the mismanagement driven by direct democracy and bowled it over. Police and firemen will show up for a while when paychecks are not a given, but in the public health equivalent of Katrina hitting New Orleans on top of fire season things just broke down. The roads had gotten bad, and then they became bad and dangerous, as freight hijacking became a more respected career than being a mortgage broker. People took to car pooling with a new urgency born of the need to not look vulnerable, and then that became sketchy as the fuel supplies themselves became sketchy. Peak oil had got down on its hands and knees behind the people of California, then climate change hit them head on.
After a few weeks it began to sink in; this "Long Emergency", christened by James Howard Kunstler, was the new normal. A citizen’s patrol was formed, warning signs regarding the town’s sundown to sun up shoot first/ask questions later policy were posted at regular intervals in both Spanish and English, and they all settled in for a long, sloppy siege.
The ammonia plant was a puzzlement at first with rail service to the interior being sketchy, but the peaker natural gas plant in town that had been converted to ammonia became the primary electricity source, and the electricity rate for the townspeople was reduced to zero; the wind plant operator needed the security around their cable station as well as safe homes for the maintainers. It all got a lot easier when Chinese buyers bearing hard currency found they could slip small tankers in close enough to load out the product.
As the days turned into weeks and the months it began to dawn on people; there wasn’t any way to get back to what had been. There were a few suicides, local marijuana patches became an open secret the harried police ignored, and then finally farmers from the interior took the rail line operation in hand and put a renewable foundation under the next year’s rice crop.
Rice and ammonia and Chinese ships; Ammoniaville grew because it made energy without using water, it was involved in the production of grain in something like pre-crash quantities, and it benefited from the trade with China, which stabilized, albeit repressively, much faster than the Democratic (and well armed) United States ever could.
Where ships, trains, and renewable energy gather other things soon began to congregate. A machine shop. A foundry. A failed hotel, bought by a well heeled local and turned to low income (which was everyone by then) housing. The local bed and breakfast keepers had a hand in that move. Gardens took over back yards and then side yards while fruit trees filled the fronts. Chickens were heard. Roosters were silenced, at first by hungry, annoyed neighbors, and later by a licensing requirement and the hand of a local vet.
The young people, raised on a diet of varying degrees of futurism in entertainment took to the changes far more easily than the adults. We become set in our ways, in the form of a loss of mental fluidity, around the age of fifty. Some of the older ones kept waiting, waiting for a child or grandchild who’d gone missing during The Flying Pig to knock on the door, waiting for a column of National Guard hummers to come over the hill and restore the order they’d known growing up during the years of the peak of America’s power, waiting for someone to make the precipitous changes in economics, energy, and environment just STOP.
Most confused of all seemed to be those who’d fought the wind turbines. California, epicenter of the anti-wind crazies who clung to the genuine concerns associated with the ancient installation of turbines in Altamont pass as a reason to never build anything anywhere finally came to believe. Those with renewable energy sources made their way, while darkness, both figuratively and literally close in around those who did not.