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.
This is the last of three short essays in a series entitled Futurescapes, it’s the longest, and it stretches out the furthest. For many reasons renewable ammonia may be the vehicle to correct a great many social and environmental problems that we face.
Let’s have a look around Dirigible Woods, where advanced post industrial humans make their stand not against but with Mother Nature in the face of climate change.
The river in the valley is smaller than it was two generations ago, an affect of the warming and drying of the world. The ‘head’ from the foothills to where it joins a larger flow some thirty miles away is significant and run of river turbines produce electricity all year round. They fought this change to the river, the old ones who remember the time before the world moved on, but now they’re grateful for the stabilization it provides to the local economy.
They fought again when the wind companies came. Fought, and lost, and again found gratitude. The area isn’t even a blip on the national wind map, but the ridge line the river follows was perfect – and forty seven of the largest turbines available, mighty five megawatt German built units, were installed.
The residents are relentless guardians of the remaining forty three. As the world got hotter and drier the fires came, then torrential rains. Places that never would have eroded before did, and one of the giants fell. Three others were at risk, so the dirigibles that replaced helicopters in the installation of heavy equipment came and they were brought down safe, protecting power lines and providing spare parts for the survivors.
The Haber Bosch plant preferred the stable flow of power from the hydroelectric source but the wind turbines were installed specifically to drive a second generation ammonia synthesis method that would tolerate the whims of the breeze. Two hundred megawatts of turbines yielded eighty megawatts of power on average and from that flowed nearly a hundred thousand tons of ammonia – the 21st century equivalent of an oil well in the back yard. That volume coupled with the original plant required 2,000 rail cars a year to move it across country and the line rebuilt to support this meant the town of 11,000 had the things one would find in a place ten times its size: not only doctors but specialists in some fields, and a local college that trained both old and young in the skills our brave new world demands.
New skills. You’d have to hunt to find a mortgage broker, and even harder to find a young person aspiring to the job. The young men of the town favored jobs in the rail sector, the various plant maintenance trades, or the plum job of dirigible crewman if they had a mind to wander. The larger dirigibles were gypsies, with four to eight man crew compartments they’d move with them slung beneath as they went about the country.
Things had changed for the young women, too. The lower, slower lifestyle brought on by peak oil began to undo the changes since World War II. Fully half of all women simply stayed home, gardening and mending and child rearing, a mode of life their great great grandmothers would have immediately recognized. Those still inclined to education were teachers, or first nurses and then later nurse practitioners, or they leaned towards the biological sciences. The need for local food production had brought that, but Replanting drove it to the sort of fever pitch we displayed during the great wars of the 20th century.
The 20th century was the age of the airplane but by mid-century it was obvious the 21st belong to the dirigible. As oil became far too dear for fueling anything other than military craft and then simply unobtainable for any transport job the airship of the early 20th century was reborn, sleek, semi-rigid, and serving in any role from a nearly silent scout to a floating gun platform for troop protection. As a species we eventually caught on that fighting was making things worse, but it took an avian/swine flu hybrid the survivors called The Flying Pig to put an end to transoceanic wars and snuff out most of the regional conflicts. Europe saw things that hadn’t happened since the Black Plague of the 1340s and large swaths of Africa and Asia simply went dark, descending into chaos.
The dirigibles call on the area often. The power that could be produced exceeded the local need and the nearest grid connection large enough to bear the peak output was many miles away. The stable hydroelectric flow meant the area was perfect for a Haber Bosch ammonia plant, complete with dozens of high performance electrolysis systems. There wasn’t hydrogen storage at first, but as the dirigibles which floated with hydrogen and powered themselves with ammonia became more common arrangements were made to draw that trade to the community.
Stitching together the islands of sanity that maintained what we had left, the dirigibles passed over decaying roads and lands rendered unsafe by decay, disease, and disillusioned inhabitants. Millions of automobiles, rusting by the side of the road, had been promptly stripped of their catalytic converters. The platinum and palladium in them was too valuable for the construction of electrolysis units to be left in the otherwise irreversible investment we’d made in cars, roads, and urban sprawl. The dirigibles brought them in for recycling, and the fleet slowly grew.
At first they just passed, but the world had caught on to the idea that carbon dioxide needed to be brought back to a level of 350 parts per million, which had last been seen in the 1970s. Passing dirigibles became the vehicle for biological sequestration, fostering the growth of new forests.
The right forest was a problem. Hotter, drier, and wilder: some species retreated to higher elevations, but there was just so much space between the hot line and the tree line. Many were gone but for rare patches of survivors tracked and tended by the legions of new foresters; this was now an answer from the mouths of third graders when asked what they wanted to be when they grew up. It wasn’t native to the U.S., but bamboo proved to be a tremendous success in the endeavor to replace fading native tree species.
Bamboo normally produces seeds only very rarely, but a clever bit of manipulation got some varieties producing regularly. One of the potential outputs from the renewable ammonia facilities was urea, needing only the demon carbon dioxide to complete the formula, and this solid fertilizer could be packed with a mix of seeds inside a bamboo tube of a certain size. The right tube, dropped from the right height, would yield an invisible impact when dropped ... but flying over the drop zone a year later would reveal a significant number of them in the form of new stands of bamboo.
This was only the first step. We’d learned our lessons on monocropping and the foresters were relentless in their pursuit of survivors. Every place that burned had some plants that came through just a bit better. Every place that dried had some that were more tolerant of it than others. They were collected, planted, observed, and then packaged and distributed much as the bamboo had been. Humans, once the bane of diversity, became its mindful guardian.
The Replanting was everywhere humans had more than the bare means for survival and the green fingers radiating from the valley where the dirigibles came was widely admired for it’s efficient, integrated approach. Growth, in the sense that humans had used the word for so long, had died at the dawn of the 21st century, but development – accomplishing more with less, fitting in with nature as opposed to mastering it, this had become the new watchword. It was still too early to tell if that 350 ppm goal would be reached within centuries or millennia, or if it would happen in some future age with homo sapiens long extinct. Those who’d survived the long night of The Flying Pig and the grinding crash that followed believed they’d be the ones to get the job done, and that was enough in that moment.