OK, after months of shouting in the wilderness I now see that pretty much everyone gets it – the hopeful are saying 'deep recession' while most are seeing the news about this or that being 'worse than the Great Depression' and adding it all up – the Greater Depression has arrived just in time for Christmas of 2008.
I knew something grim was going to come out of the August 2007 crash of those Bear Stearns funds and I was already wide awake and paying careful attention to the concept of peak oil, so much so that I settled on a career change from telecom to renewable energy.
Due to my skills, my location in northwest Iowa at the time I began my change, and my rural background I settled on stranded wind and renewable ammonia as being the things to do. It has been slow but now, in early November of 2008, we've got some air under our wings. I thought I'd share some of the secrets of our impending success, as many of you community organizer types are going to be looking for something to create jobs for your town before too long.
Ammonia is a pungent, caustic chemical (but not poisonous!) with many uses - it is the world's most common industrial chemical with an annual production of about a hundred and fifty million tons. The vast majority of it gets turned into ammonium nitrate, ammonium phosphate, ammonium carbonate, and urea; all soil enriching fertilizers. Fully half of all protein consumed by humans gets its start with ammonia. We currently make about three quarters of our global supply with natural gas and the rest is created using coal. Carbon dioxide emissions are plentiful.
The state of Iowa has about a quarter of the nation's corn crop. The whole state is thirty six million acres, twenty seven million are under cultivation, and about 80% of that is dedicated to corn – just over twenty one million acres. Farmers use one ton per every twenty acres and other crops get nitrogen fertilizer, too, so the total usage in the state is roughly a million and a half tons.
A typical wind turbine, say an Iowa built Clipper Liberty, will have a nameplate capacity of 2.5 megawatts and with an average Iowa wind site capacity factor of 40% it'll make a megawatt continuously through the year. Putting a megawatt into a Haber Bosch type ammonia plant will yield a thousand tons a year. The turbines cost about four million each and the market on ammonia is currently $1,000 per ton. Ammonia plants aren't free, obviously, but the economics work – put up renewable energy sources, route them into ammonia plants, and instead of dirty foreign natural gas based ammonia we get clean domestic production with many attendant benefits.
Freeing the Iowa corn crop will require 1,500 wind turbines and will add six billion dollars in property to the tax roles of rural areas. Every ten turbines requires a pair of technicians for maintenance at the going rate is fifteen to seventeen dollars and hour, which is counted as a very good living in a place where a sturdy three bedroom home will sell for fifty to seventy thousand dollars. Let's keep in mind these three hundred jobs are just the wind turbine techs and having production locally will keep a billion and a half dollars in the state that would have been transferred to places like Trinidad or Canada ... or Iran.
We sized our first renewable ammonia plant at the fifty thousand ton a year mark. This would be thirty plants in Iowa, each employing an estimated thirty to forty plant operators and professional staff – another nine to twelve hundred of those 'good' jobs and over a hundred million in taxable property at each location.
Ammonia plants kick out a lot of low grade waste heat. The best use for that which we've found so far is greenhouse operations. A fifty thousand ton a year plant produces enough heat to keep twenty acres of greenhouses warm in the depth of a plains winter. Thirty greenhouses of that size would add roughly fifty million dollars in taxable property, a hundred production jobs, and twenty or thirty professional jobs per location – three thousand jobs in the eight to ten dollar an hour range, which are counted as livable, and perhaps another thousand professional jobs, and a billion and a half dollars in taxable property.
Six hundred acres of greenhouses would do much to limit food miles for the state and our two large local owned grocery chains, Hy-Vee and Fareway, would be a good outlet for the produce, as each has about a hundred stores to stock statewide. These greenhouses would be hydroponic and would not qualify as organic due to the need to control root fungus but they would be pesticide and herbicide free, which is a big step forward in food safety. Another area that makes sense but which we've yet to explore is aquaculture. There is a lot of wet distiller's grain available from ethanol plants in the area and some types of fish would thrive on this as their primary food source – and being able to take the ethanol byproduct wet would double the energy efficiency of ethanol production, bringing it close to what the Brazilians achieve with their sugarcane based efforts.
Besides being a fertilizer, ammonia is also a pretty good fuel. Farm vehicles have stringent new emissions standards coming into effect in 2011. A hybrid diesel/ammonia combine or tractor would have a much easier time meeting particulates rules than a pure diesel. If we like the economic effect of wind turbines, ammonia plants, and greenhouses there is no need for us to stop when we cover the whole market for fertilizer, we just need a few minor changes at the DoE so that ammonia can be treated as a fuel, too. This isn't an idle theory – the Ammonia Fuel Network packed a hundred and fifty scientists, engineers, and entrepreneurs into a conference room at the University of Minnesota campus a few months back for their fifth annual meeting.
If we're going to be developing these wind farms the turbines have to be transported and installed. They're big and they tear up roads and bridges, then they need transmission corridors. Meshing wind expansion with rail electrification seems a natural synergy. I am very much interested in the work Alan Drake has done with the Millennium Institute – the Association for the Study of Peak Oil funded the work, and it's an advanced economic model of the United States that presume we're going to charge full steam ahead into rail electrification. Not only does this direction cut our oil consumptionour economy would actually grow.
I am not so sure we should expand grain based ethanol production much more but we ought to keep what we have. The plants are in place, they create good paying jobs, and no matter how far we get away from our oil dependency we're still going to need some liquid fuel. Ethanol is one choice, methanol another, and Set America Free is working to educate Congress on this. Only $100 per new vehicle would ensure that our fleet could switch between gasoline, ethanol, and methanol with no troubles. I have some ideological differences with some of the members of this group but we can certainly make common cause regarding our oil addiction as we go about influencing policy in the 111th Congress.
My previous diary on Detroit's Epic Fail garnered 500+ comments. I think things are perhaps worse than we know, but that is good in one sense – old, dysfunctional things are going to be swept away and we can put something new in place. Yesterday I heard from a very longtime friend – laid off. Today another longtime friend called – laid off. One of them is helping with some of our web work and the other, the son of a Nebraska farmer, might just be getting interested in renewable energy project management. I hope that all of you find a sensible path through this mess ... and maybe some of you will end up working on something conceived by the Stranded Wind crew.