Does your Congressional district grow corn, soy, wheat, or canola? Do you have greenhouses in the area that have gone idle due to fuel costs? Do you have a now shuttered paper mill with a nearby dam that was built to support its operation?
If this sounds like where you live we might have an answer as to how you can bring home some of the 2.5 million jobs Obama says he'll help create to your district.
If you've got six square miles of abandoned factories you've got a treasure chest that needs just a little TLC – instead of empty lots envision a new fertilizer plant, some wood pellet manufacturing, and lots of greenhouses to soak up the waste heat from the plant.
If you can find over thirty acres of greenhouses right next to a large electric substation with a railroad spur a thousand yards away you've got the makings of an ammonia production facility that will fertilize a thousand square miles of corn.
Maybe you've got a two mile long dam holding back almost six hundred square miles of water with nothing but corn and wheat fields as far as the eye can see – an instant market for ammonia.
Maybe there's a recently shuttered papermill with a sizeable hydroelectric facility nearby that now has no purpose. There aren't any crops to fertilize here but ammonia is a valuable, transportable commodity and the railhead is not so far from this site.
This is a time of great financial upheaval in America. While it is sad to see people losing their livelihoods and plants closing there are many cases where what has been left behind can be recycled and those who've been left behind can be retrained.
If your city or Congressional district is hurting, if you've got shut down plants and out of work people, if you're in an agricultural area and you know farmers are unable to afford or perhaps even find fertilizer, then we'd like to talk with you.
We're working on getting more focused on where we go. Someone sent me a link to National Atlas, a site full of databases of all sorts of things. One of them, the National Inventory of Dams yielded much fruit; the 8,121 largest of the nation's almost 75,000 dams. I filtered it further, looking for riverine facilities or ones with more than a square mile behind them. This Google Earth KML file serves as a good starting point for locating the cheap hydroelectric power which is a power source we already know how to handle for ammonia synthesis. Do you see a nice, juicy hydroelectric facility in your district? Don't be shy ... we can check out your area in just a few hours and determine if it's suitable for development. My email is in my profile.
We've not let up on wind. Every week we do something to further Dr. John Holbrook's work on solid state ammonia synthesis. We've got a methanol synthesis patent for a process that'll behave with variable power from wind courtesy of Stranded Wind Initiative volunteer Dave Bradley. He and I are working on some modifications to the traditional ammonia synthesis method dating back ninety eight years, again aimed at coming up with something that'll behave with the variable input of wind.
We've come a long way from our first abortive presentation last spring aimed at getting an ammonia plant project moving. We have stuff in the works in four states and two Canadian provinces. We're still a little malnourished but the work is starting to flow for us ... and I hope we'll be coming soon to a location near you :-)