www.dotyenergy.com

We really are in an energy crisis, and none of the other options out there can solve the energy crisis without destroying the environment , most cannot be scaled up to a level that will actually help over the next 4 decades of oil supply contraction, regardless of environmental impact. This problem is bigger than anything society has ever faced.

It is not a panacea. It will make you slimmer or cure cancer, and it will certainly not drop the price of oil back into the 30.00/bbl range (or whatever other BS promises are thrown around by other alternative-energy venues). Our process will generate ethanol, easily scalable into the multi TW range, and would be competitive if oil is selling ~80/bbl on average.

But it is a real answer, and will keep the price of oil under 500.00/bbl if it is aggressively pursued. This is a genuine answer. It also reduces carbon emissions at a rate that is greater than any other means or method currently proposed or imagined.

We can use wind energy (or any other renewable carbon neutral energy, but wind is the cheapest), water, and waste CO2; and create virtually any hydrocarbon you want.

The process is called Fischer-Tropsch Synthesis, or “FTS”; and it’s been around for a while (the Germans used it to produce their fuel in WWII).

This is not something that nobody has thought of.

Madai, on this board, specifically mentioned it in a reply to me over a year ago (I didn’t respond because we were working on the project at the time, and we were keeping our work confidential to assure a stronger patent position, so I had to keep quiet).

When we started work on WindFuels, the DOE was projecting oil to cost ~45.00/bbl this year and 35.00/bbl in 2020. With the standard processes, oil would have to cost over 120-220/bbl for wind generated FTS to compete… so few people were thinking along these lines.

Starting as outsiders, and assuming very high-priced energy, we’ve made dozens of innovations to the process resulting in several patents and an overall doubling of the economic competitiveness of the process.

Armed with a cost-effective recuperator (heat exchanger), a radical new heat engine, a new separations process, and over 30 other more minor innovations, we can now assert with confidence that WindFuels will be profitable as long as oil remains about 60.00/bbl in the best cases (class 6 winds, government subsidies of 0.60/gallon of ethanol, a healthy local oxygen market), and WindFuels will still be profitable as long as oil remains over 110.00/bbl in the worst cases (class 4 winds, no government subsidies, saturated local oxygen market).

To learn more, go to www.dotyenergy.com and look around. If you want to help, spread the word.

Slate is sort of my home in the blogsphere. I’ve been blogging here for ~5 years now, so I’d be interested in what you guys think, and I’ll continue to blog here and answer questions.

I'm still picking through your website, but I have a question:

If all of the carbon expelled from the coal-burning plant is converted to liquid fuel which is subsequently burned, then wouldn't the amount of carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere be exactly equal to the amount that would have been released by the coal-burning plant if it hadn't been captured? The additional energy which is produced downstream of the windmills has to, by the second law of thermodynamics, not exceed or even equal the energy introduced into the process (i.e., that captured by the windmills). Thus, the second part of my question is this: Given that electric power is available early in the process, can you claim that producing a liquid fuel and burning it in an IC engine or fuel cell to propel a car is more efficient than using the same electric power to recharge an all-electric car of equal size, weight, and drag coefficient? If not, then what does the overall process offer besides familiarity?

I hate to sound negative at this point, but I would hate to see a repeat of the ethanol-from-corn debacle.

That is everything.

There is no way - at all, that we will see fully electric cars being produced in anywhere near the scale or rate that it would take to lower oil demand, or even slow the growth rate of oil demand. Due to the fact that batteries contain a lot of metals, any attempt to ramp up production of batteries beyond the supply of that metal will result in the cost of batteries hyper-inflating. There is not a competitive fully-electric car on the market yet.

At an average longevity of 17 years/vehicle, we are only replacing ~6% of our fleet/year, so if every car sold starting tommorow was a hybrid that had double the average efficiency, we'd only see our total demand shrink by ~3%/year (which is what we're seeing this year). That is easily offset by growth in the third world.

We cannot ignore market realities. The fuels for our current fleet must be made carbon neutral. If someone comes out with a cost-effective fully-electric solution I'll buy it myself... but the battery market is pretty mature... I'm not going to risk the planet hoping someone comes out with something completely new and ground-breaking when we can create fuels that work with the existing 220 million cars on the road for a very small additional loss.

A really good wind site is in Wyoming, near a lot of coal mines that are belching out CO2 by the megaton... so an interprising entrepenuer licenses our process and sets up a WindFuels site.

A great deal of fuels are produced, and that much LESS fuel is produced from the tar sands or coal-to-liquids.

Or... that same entrepenuer sets up a wind farm. He has to wait at least 5 years and spend tens or even hundreds of millions for an insufficient grid to pipe his 250 MW of power to Vegas - the closest market that is unsaturated... so he loses 15% in cleaning the power for grid-quality and another ~30% in transmission...

Now since he's losing ~30% of the power right off of the transmission, the cost of that energy is ~43/MW; and power is selling in Vegas for ~100.00/MWh. So he makes ~ 57/MWh.

With a WindFuels plant, the energy would cost ~15% less because it doesn't have to be grid quality, so it's only costing him ~26.00/MWh. WindFuels plant will cost him ~ 200 million in capital beyond the windfarm costs... With 60% efficiency in conversion, he'd get ~72/MWh if ethanol is selling at 3.00/gallon, plus an addional 14.4/MWh if there is a 0.60/gallon subsidy for ethanol.

In the case of the electricity, there is always a chance someone will get a grant for another power station near Vegas, so the market could saturate in an instant and leave the entrepeneur completely screwed...

In the case of WindFuels, the price of ethanol is only going up, almost daily... so there is almost no chance of any problems.

Which would you choose, if you were the entrepeneur?

If the market doesn't drive your solution, then you don't have a solution. Electric cars simply aren't selling, and every decent wind locale is saturated or will be VERY soon...

Some things to think about.

"He has to wait at least 5 years and spend tens or even hundreds of millions for an insufficient grid to pipe his 250 MW of power to Vegas"

But, if the power plant is already there, then the grid is also there, and feeding the wind-generated power in reduces the amount of coal which needs to be burned for the same total power. I will grant that it doesn't sequester what carbon dioxide is still produced, but as I pointed out above, it is released by your system upon the fuel being burned in the car. This whole energy thing makes me think of the Tar Baby - everybody that touches it gets stuck in something.

I do grant your replacement rate argument as far as the cars go, but I am concerned about putting off the inevitable. Tata is building $2500 cars in India. I suspect they could build $6000 plug-chargeable cars too. A $6000 electric Jaguar roadster would really turn me on!

Besides, in India they use coal and nuclear. That's it. So it's basically a wash between using oil vs. using the grid as to what will do more environmental damage.

Offsets work.

If I spent 40,000 I could offset all of the carbon dioxide of my home electricity by putting PV solar panels on the roof... or I could contribute ~5000 towards a new wind generation facility and offset the exact same amount of carbon dioxide... which would free up 35,000 dollars for me to theoretically either free up much more CO2 or just live better.

The same thing can be said about WindFuels vs Wind electricity/electric cars.

Society could spend trillions upgrading the infrastructure to handle the electricity, and spend trillions in mass upgrading the individual cars (simultaneously creating the largest industry bubble cycle in the history of time), or... Society can spent a little in a highly profitable way to offset the same amount of carbon emissions... the only difference would be you are emitting CO2 from coal power plants one way while you eliminate oil and alternative petrofuels and natural gas... and the other way you eliminate a very small amount of carbon at a time as you slowly upgrade all of the system at once.

In the end, I guarantee you that WindFuels will get a 60% reduction in CO2 emissions a hell of a lot faster then the mass infrastructure replacement... at which point there is a lot more money (since everything thus far has been massively profitable), to take on the rest. There is also the reasonable chance someone could find a way to inexpensively extract CO2 from the atmosphere in that 40 year span.

If I had 40,000 (which I most certainly don't), I'd prefer to make 8 times the impact with a wind-generation system in a class 6 wind-zone (which would not generate power for me), then spending the same amount on 1/8th the benefit just to say I myself am completely emissions-free.

Something to think about.

It really HAS to be profitable and market driven to work.

I have a much weaker backgrounf in science and engineering than you and Phil do, but I wonder if wind energy could be the best solution. Two things occur to me: the real estate that windfarms would take up, and the cost of replacing worn out windmills and turbines. You're still hooking the windfarms into the electricty grid--which has inevitable losses as it transmits electricity downstream, while solar could provide electricity on site and with perhaps a longer useful life of the panels.

Actually, I don't think the real estate usage is a real issue since there should be little in the way of growing crops below them. One can probably think of many dual use stratagems, actually: solar farms, cemetaries, reservoirs, fish farms, sewage treatment plants, etc.

And solar is MUCH more expensive, both in capital costs and land.

You don't need grid power to fuel the novel RFTS process that we've developed, the variable DC energy from the turbine will be fine, so that reduces the wind power costs significantly... You don't actually need wind for our patents to be relevent - they involve the process of converting the energy to fuel. We just assume wind will be used because it is so very much more cost effective than any other renewable energy (except hydro, and most useful hydro sites have been exploited... though the in-situ damless hydro might have an impact... too early to tell. We'd call that "WaterFuels").

But for now solar is MUCH more expensive. Our heat engine - which we will disclose at a later date (that patent was applied for a bit later than the RFTS patent) - should make CSP solar more cost-effective, so some wind-dead countries might use the Geo-CSP hybrid to generate the energy(SunFuels), wind will still be cheaper though...

We expect the market to rule the energy selection. Profit is another word for "God" in the free market, so whatever is cheapest wins... for now that is wind by a long shot. (see the markets page at www.dotyenergy.com for more perspectives on the alternative energy options... we briefly cover solar, we haven't gotten around to everything yet though).

I forgot that in my response... but we need to know what is and what is not self-evident. We've sort of been in a bubble of extraordinary efforts of researching energy. Though we've worked pretty hard at making the site easier to understand... there are a lot of things that are self evident if you spend 20+ hours/week looking into energy issues that are simply NOT self-evident.

:)

BTW, you probably aren't weaker in science and engineering then me... I've just spent a long time focusing on this one project (mostly editorial work and extreme grunt-level research).

Thanks for considering this.

If you like what you see, please let others know.

:)

Thanks for the clarification. I'm sort of good at math, but not science; I have more of an accounting background.

As far as real estate, solar panels can go up on your roof, so there is no extended footprint. Glad to hear that wind is a more permanent option than I thought. I will look into some companies which produce turbines as investments now that solar is taking a breather in the market...

I don't know about the investment angle (they could be well hyped), but their permanent magnet system nearly halves the mass of the gearbox (to ~18 tons for the 2.5 MW tower)... which significantly lowers the cost. It also allows better overall generation in the face of varying wind speeds.

They're technology is also the best match for our system, since it produces DC energy that then has to be scrubbed and transformed for the grid - but won't have to be altered for a variable-rate electrolyzer. :)

http://www.clipperwind.com/

And no, we haven't corresponded with them. We just have kept our eye on all the alternative energy technology out there.

:)

Thanks for the recommendation. Looks like an Over The Counter stock, which is near its 52-week low, and is still reporting a loss. Would be risky, but maybe a good bet for the future. I've taken more than a few losses this year, and sold, so I'm sitting on some cash in my pension account--earning less than 2%. Might be worth a gamble.

Of course, if you invest in Clipper then you would have a vested interest in promoting us. :)

I wish I could just tell you to invest in us, but we're a private company and there's all kinds of regulations regarding investment... which I don't know.

We're stuck self-funding this off of the NMR, MRI, and detailed design book sales for a while. :)

I've always felt that people should put their money where their mouths are when it comes to investments. Having lost on Canadian oil trusts (their prices are about where they were when oil was selling for $50), and feeling that oil isn't the answer, then buying a company like Clipper could be the trick. Of course it's bound to be a volatile stock. Suntech (a solar company I own shares in) is bad enough.