I would hate for you guys to think I’m a total screw off. Sure we’ve had a good time exploring Pennsylvania, checking out the forest, and talking about life on the road, but I’m on a serious mission here.
This entire trip is a quest, and I mean quest with a capital Q; I find myself the leader of a ragged band of visionaries engaged in a grim rear guard action, attempting to free the United States from its oil dependency before the time and fossil fuels required to achieve this are gone.
Does that sound too dramatic? Too self important? I cringe when I read that second paragraph, but they (that nebulous, unknowable they) tell me that it is right and good for those that leads to increase their visibility and promote the works of them and those whom they represent. I’m not doing anything out here I’ve not done for years and years: farm work for thirty, picking up hitch hikers for twenty five, roaming the country for twenty, entrepreneurial business development for just a single decade. Oh, and I’ve been a bit of a storyteller for as long as I’ve been stopping for those by the side of the road. The only difference now is I’ve stirred them all together and the documentary film maker who was already interested in the Stranded Wind Initiative is now positively fascinated.
Some of us have a brand all our own. My name means something in the small scale carrier networking arena. My first stop last week was work on a neutral exchange point for the Champaign/Urbana region, the second a VoIP system installation for a large church, and there are bits and pieces of additional work coming my way. I am very grateful for my skilled trade which commands 17x minimum wage when I feel well enough to take the time to find work. This is all well and good, but when the writings of Jerome a Paris lead me to http://theoildrum.com last summer it only took a few days for the message to sink in; everything we know will be swept away by what is coming.
I set out last July to retrain myself for a role in a world where we have a lot less oil and this winding path lead me to founding the Stranded Wind Initiative last December. Today SWI took another giant step forward: I have a fairly large check in my wallet made out to the organization. This doesn’t do anything for me personally, but it takes care of the cost of the infrastructure we’ve put up so far, both the public face seen on the web site and our backend workgroup software. People find SWI because they’re passionate about solving our fossil fuel dependency problem but they stay because in the background there are whip cracking project managers, a legal team, and the sort of administration appropriate for a growing consulting business; being involved with this group feels like a real job.
This group has already cooked up one commercial venture – Freedom Fertilizer, LLC. This Iowa based company has grant applications out to the tune of $100k from the USDA and $300k from the Iowa Power Fund on its way to raising perhaps a quarter billion dollars for wind driven ammonia production. Hot on the heels of this is a simple commercialization grant to bring Solid State Ammonia Synthesis (SSAS) to production status, which will result in a 75% reduction in capital cost for the ammonia production portion of the plant. Give us $25,000,000,000 and we can completely free Iowa’s corn crop from fossil fuel dependence. Quadruple that and we’re talking no more natural gas based nitrogen fertilizer or crude oil based fuels being involved in our agriculture at all.
Many other things are in the works. Wouldn’t it be great if we dramatically cut our oil usage by electrifying all of our rail? The country’s premier expert in this is Alan Drake, and he recently began turning up at our weekly engineering call, joining other notables such as John Holbrook of the Ammonia Fuel Network and Homer Wang, a geoengineering visionary who’s work on correcting arctic ice cover loss and while simultaneously producing ammonia.
Some other stuff happened on my trip to Washington, D.C., besides receiving funding for the Stranded Wind Initiative. Freedom Fertilizer is just the first of many green collar job creating things that are in the works and I’m driving away from the city after a handshake on an agreement to work on something that is actually a little bit bigger than merely freeing our corn crop from fossil fuel inputs. This one will be the subject of more grant writing very soon but its path is different: big funding, not very far in the future, and a redrawing of another big slice of industry currently dominated by fossil fuel inputs today.
Part of this diary series is just a peek into the things I like to do and the way I like to travel, but there is a message here: Business as usual is not getting the job done. I hope revealing a bit of my unorthodox approach gets others thinking outside of the little boxes into which our socioeconomic system places them.
The thinking required to dramatically change things is flowing out of blogs, conference calls among far flung collaborators, one on one visits, and midnight forest strolls. Home lab and garage tinkerers are dusting off decades old patents and worried professionals, mostly with small children, are working where and when they can to do their part, hoping to see one portion or another of these various efforts funded to the point where they can work on it full time. Notice what isn’t here: board rooms, bureaucracy, and bullshit. This is straight slash and burn problem solving with little respect for tradition, vested interests, or any of those other words favored by those who've failed to act as things got worse.
I’ve been whittling on this one for the last thirty six hours and I’m quite sick of looking at it. Today I’ve done a really cool themed photoshoot and I had another amazing face to face meeting that just ended moments ago. Both of those deserve diaries in and of themselves and the photoshoot is coming first, even though the meeting has some quite large implications near and dear to my heart. I guess this is a good sign ... so many positive things in such a short time that I'm backlogged in getting them out ... may paying work flow for all of us in the same fashion :-)