Doty Energy sent out a press release concerning windfuels - our honest, viable, competitive, carbon-neutral solution to the energy crisis.

www.dotyenergy.com

(no BS, no hype, just really good chemical engineering, physics, and attention to detail)

I was wondering if anyone knew what to expect now...

We've never sent out a press release, and I've never worked on that portion of a campaign... So I really haven't got a clue what to expect.

I was wondering if anyone here had some experience they'd be willing to share.

If not, I was also wondering if anyone would do me the favor of letting me know (by responding here or in one of my re-posts in the green room or the bottom line) if you run across an article or commentary concerning WindFuels.

Thanks. :)

Tundaryeti (Glenn) --

Having sent out press releases before, the short answer is, it depends. First of all, most journalism types aren't scientifically savvy and if your release is laden with a lot of technical jargon, they will look at you as if you've grown another head. So, don't expect much of anything, at first. Second, it also depends on what is deemed newsworthy. Britney Spears' antics will trump your cutting-edge technology. Third, you're entering into a world of denial. Peak oil??? Nah, all we have to do is drill, drill, drill and all will be back to normal. Fourth, few who receive your release will be competent to evaluate it. Is this some crackpot scheme? Fifth, even sympathetic editors may be hard put to make this accessible to the general interest or business reader. Sixth, remember that the business of newspapers is to sell papers, so the sports score of a local team or a gruesome ax murder may crowd out your submission.

Good luck!

I will be taking the time to look over your Website very intensively over the next few days, Tundra. Any luck contacting T. Boone Pickens?

By the way, what do you think of Al Gore's challenge to get all our electricity from renewable sources within the next ten years? Doable? My local paper (The Rocky Mountain News) has been savagely critical of Gore the past few days. Vincent Carroll, the editor of the editorial pages, had a full-length column today titled "Gore's Nutty Idea". Here is a sample paragraph:

"Stanley Lewandowski, the general manager of the Intermountain Rural Electric Association, is one of the few utility officials willing to suggest that the prophet of global warming is strutting about like an emperor without his clothes. 'Al Gore's statement of obtaining 100 percent of our power from renewables in 10 years has as much a chance of happening as the sun shining 24 hours a day," Lewandowski quipped. "It's nonsense."

I was thinking of contacting Mr. Carroll to remind him that the sun actually does shine 24 hours a day. It does not turn off at night and then back on again in the morning.

But maybe he already knows that. It is possible that he just forgot.

You are synchronizing nicely with T. Boone Pickens new commercials which promote wind power to generate electricity into the grid, liberating natural gas for vehicles. Part of his message is to criticize the pollution-generating aspects of coal, so that's a positive thing. I saw him being interviewed on CNBC today and he has clarified that a bit, indicating that he is targeting fleet trucks, both government and private for the natural gas conversion, which is the only practical way to sell the idea.

You might want to watch CNBC during the hours when the stock markets are open to get an idea of how they approach people with new products - and energy products do get their attention. They have many hours to fill, including business programming in the evening so you might find you can get a slot.

Good luck.

Maybe Mr. Lewandowski doesn't shine.

The little blurb I put down was not a part of our release, I just added that so those who looked at this post who had NOT seen my post last week explaining windfuels would have some clue as to what we had issued a press release FOR.

Though it applies to my parents more than everyone else, we've literally been working ourselves night and day to get to this point... and now we can't do anything but wait... and it's irritating.

We've put the info out there in some investment communities, and we're trying to catch the attention of the news organizations... It's wierd, but we've actually got a viable solution for the energy crisis (which is only a year and a half deep, this is going to get MUCH worse), and as Leroy mentions... it's Starbucks that is important...

I know its the same as always, but now it doesn't actually have to be... and that makes it all more frustrating again.

:)

into it... which is probably boilerplate, but it's all we've gotten so far.

As for Gore, I think this was actually more politics than environment... and it kind of disappoints me. There is, in my opinion, exactly zero chance of us producing 100% renewable energy within ten years in America.

I think he wanted to draw the republicans into a situation where he's offering hope and they have to be completely negative and pooh-pooh the idea of progress... But you know the economics better than I do.

Right now wind accounts for ~1% of our nation's electricity profile, and biofuels account for ~2% of our transportation energy... landfill-produced gas is less than 1% of our natural gas. The only substantial renewable energy source is hydropower, and most of the good damable sites have been dammed. In-situ damless hydro has yet to even be proven, much less scaled up... So that leaves wind for electricity... and without windfuels that leaves you with biofuels for liquid fuels. We'll start with wind.

Wind has been growing at a phenomenol rate of ~28%/year for the past 18 years... That is AWESOME growth, and to assume that industry will scale-up even faster when most of the good wind-zones are becoming saturated (note Gore did not know about WindFuels when he prepared his challenge) is downright folly. He would have had to assume the installation of a supergrid, and assume wind power would ramp-up from 1% to 80% (hydropower is the other 20%) in 10 years... That's an industry growth of ~55%/year! (plus the additional aspect of variability - which would require another 8% wind power to balance, and it would absolutely require a supergrid, which would cost several trillion by itself).

The liquid fuels and natural gas for home heating would either require conversion of the fleet to electric autos (which would make Phil happy) and electric home heating, or a ramp-up of biofuels production from 2% to 100% in 10 years. Aside from the 45%/year assumed growth rate here, you also have to contend with the fact that biofuels use HUGE amounts of petroleum-based fertilizers that you'd have to ween yourself off of while scaling up production, and the fact that with 2% biofuels production we're seeing 960 million people starving to death world-wide... Ramping up to 50 times that amount of biofuels production should effectively cause WWIII.

We were pretty proud when we calculated out that aggressive development and expansion (~25%/year) of our processes could concievably reduce the U.S. CO2 emissions by half in a little over 2 decades... We were quite proud of the fact that this timeline would accomodate profitable and market-competitive deployment, and would achieve CO2 emissions faster than any viable solution that has ever been proposed...

Then Gore pulls 10 years, 100% CO2 reduction, 3 trillion dollars out of his ass...

I'd love to hear the specifics on that plan. :)

For a second there, I thought you were swearing at me...;)

I am highly skeptical of the practicality of Gore's challenge, too...but, on reading your post, I was wondering if you were aware that he was simply advocating getting all of our electricity from renewable sources within a decade...he was not saying anything about transportation fuels, so the whole biofuels issue doesn't even enter into it, as far as I can tell. I also noticed you made no mention of solar-generated electricity. We have probably discussed this issue at least tangentially in the past, but I am expecting continued improvements in photovoltaic technology. A lot of Silicon Valley venture capital going into that right now...

Even limiting the discussion to just electricity production, though, I am still skeptical that Gore's challenge could be successfully met, even with an all-out effort. But I do think we should be working towards a super-grid, even if the cost is in the trillions. The Great Plains are the area for really collecting wind energy, and there's not a lot of people who live there anymore. [The region seems to be de-populating.] We will need the super-grid to move the electricity to where it is needed. But your Windfuels program may mean that we will be using the wind energy to manufacture transportation fuels rather than electricity---do I have that right?

I think you are right that Gore's speech was primarily a political photo-op kind of event, more than a serious economic proposal. Hence all the criticism it has gotten, and perhaps even rightfully so.

Do you think so little of solar that you don't even take the time to attack it? You know that it is the sun which causes wind - without the sun, there would be no wind; although, since there would be no people either, probably nobody would complain.

But right now Solar is generating ~0.01% of our electricity. If wind scale-up in 10 years is implausible for simple industrial scale-up limitations, then solar scale up to a point where it would make a difference is many times more implausible.

With our heat engine, we hope geo-CSP would be genuinely competitive within a decade, but it won't be a significant portion of our energy profile in a decade.

gotta go.

:)

Sorry I didn't respond earlier, I was going down the list and ran out of time.

I think we inadvertantly timed this very well. We were planning to get everything ready for release by autumn of this year because we needed time to be sure our patent position was secure, but at the time we filed our first provisional patent we thought oil would hit ~110.00/bbl in the autumn of this year, and we thought we'd be competitive in that market. :)

It's amazing what a difference 18 months can make.

We overshot our projections and we are certain we'd be competitive in most cases with oil as low as 80.00/bbl... and of course oil hit 140 and will absolutely never see a number as low as 100/bbl again.

But the timing is far more perfect than anything that could ever have been planned for.

We're just trying to take advantage of the hype now, but hype is a double-edged sword. There are so many bullshit schemes out there promising panaceas that we now are facing some difficulty sounding legit - since we're basically offering a real solution and no-one believes a real solution exists anymore...

We'll take it though, and eventually Picken's people will realize they'll make more money with WindFuels being developed then they would without it...

It is just going to take getting noticed now.

:)

But it's portion of the profile is so small right now that there is simply no way it can make an impact in 10 years. We were discussing the feasibility of Gore's plan... which requires 10 years.

I went ahead and looked up the numbers for you and Phil:

Solar PV generated a total of 507 GWhs in 2006... total electrical generation in 2006 was 4062702 GWhs....

That's ~0.0125% of the total electrical output,

In order for Solar to make up even 1% of our total electrical output, it would have to grow by 55%/year for the next decade.

I focused on wind because adding all the other non-hydro renewables together, you get the impact of wind energy and a very small rounding error... The other renewables will grow, and it still won't make Gore's challenge doable. :)

I agree with you concerning the supergrid, but there are problems with getting the thing started. This is a tremendous expense that won't really benefit anyone unless the power facilities are already up and running... so you're asking people to pay in to a project which will help them in the future, but won't benefit them in the short term...

The wind towers will absolutely not be built without a market... which means you might see another 20 towers (total ~50MW) go up across all of Wyoming's class 6 and class 7 wind-zones, but that's all you get before saturating the market and eliminating most of the profit from the sale of electricity... No-one will pay to put up a tower in a saturated market, so the excess power will never be there to entice a major grid upgrade...

Obviously I'm exagerating, but every grid addition will be slow and cautious, and will be adamently resisted by very strong local power lobbies (who would rather put up a local natural gas or coal plant then just let the Dakotas wire in all the energy)... and it will take decades - which will significantly increase the total cost over an organized and central planned supergrid implimentation. Rather than waiting decades for wind-towers to be built to power NYC and LA... we can begin putting up wind towers now, and convert that energy and waste CO2 into liquid fuels... the extra 30 years head start is a pretty big deal.

:)

So by all means build up as much renewable electricity generation as rapidly as possible (probably ~25%/year expansion), and use whatever cannot be used on our crappy grid to make liquid fuels... That's what we are actually proposing.

It is obvious to me that the grid should be nationalized. It is no different in concept than the Interstate Highway System. It is also obvious to me that, with a well-functioning grid, the emphasis should be to operate everything electrically - excepting, for a very long time, aircraft and ships (which have already demonstrated they can be nuclear powered) - including cars, trucks, and railroads. The great advantage of this is that power from a great variety of sources may be fed into the grid.

Incidentally, I don't think that a 55%/year growth in solar cell production is unrealistic. I would guess that the growth in (non-solar) semiconductor production was at least that high for many years.

Are you familiar with a wind-power ETF (symbol FAN) which has been available for about a month? It goes by the name of: "FT GLBL WIND ENERGY ETF" if you wan't to search for info on-line. I haven't yet done that.

I wanted to start a back-channel with you via email. I intended to send a message to your "info" address and ask that "the man who blogs as tundra-yeti" be made aware of it. Will that work?

Or you could send it too:

My first name (glenn)

dot (.)

my last name (doty)

at (@)

dotyenergy.com

I'm not shy, I just worry about the bots sweeping this site and hitting me with more spam.

I actually check the info address, but others do as well, so e-mailing me directly will probably be easier.

I'll google FAN and see what I can find out.

As far as the 55%/year growth, solar has actually seen 40%/year for the last 2 years... but the industry backlog is rising and the cost of polysilicon (made from sand - it's not limited) has increased 5fold due to demand... and it's growth is slowing down sharply for a while... Even still, that only gets us 1%, which is far shy of Gore's 100%. The semiconductors had a profitable market with insatiable demand... if we increase electricity generation by more than ~2%/year, then the market is saturated... and without a supergrid then that has to be region-by-region.

As far as fully electric cars go, they have a great one... it costs 100,000.

I'm trying like mad to balance my budget to get a Prius in 2 years, but I'll probably have to settle for a Yaris instead. The cost difference of 12,000 simply does not justify saving an extra 150 gallons in gas...

How high do gas prices have to rise to justify spending 80,000 more for a fully electric car that reduces gas consumption by another 300 gallons/year over the usage of the Prius?

Tundra: I agree with you concerning the supergrid, but there are problems with getting the thing started. This is a tremendous expense that won't really benefit anyone unless the power facilities are already up and running... so you're asking people to pay in to a project which will help them in the future, but won't benefit them in the short term...

LeRoy: I think Americans in the past may have been more willing to make those kind of long-run investments. [Such as in the 19th century, when we made a huge investment in all the land-grant universities, where the benefits, especially in the short run, probably seemed rather nebulous to the average American.] To my mind, this is the kind of short-term thinking that absolutely has to change. I hate to see us move toward an upgraded grid in such a piece-meal fashion; while I am an opponent of centralized planning for many economic activities, this is an exception---this is something that is simply screaming to be well-thought-out, at the national (or even international!) level. I would recommend that Obama should make this an issue in the Presidential campaign, except for the fact that the overwhelming majority of voters would react by saying: "Huh?!?"

My new issue of Scientific American has a thought-provoking article concerning the risk of a cosmic Katrina from a solar super-storm, the last of which occurred at the end of August 1859. The resulting auroras were so bright that "gold miners in the Rocky Mountains woke up and ate breakfast at 1 AM, thinking the sun had risen on a cloudy day."

The article goes on to note: "The impact of the 1859 storm was muted only by the infancy of our technological civilization at that time. Were it to happen today, it could severely damage satellites, disable radio communications and cause continent-wide electrical blackouts that would require weeks or longer to recover from. Although a storm of that magnitude is a comfortably rare once-in-500-years event, those with half its intensity hit every 50 years or so. The last one, which occurred on November 13, 1960, led to worldwide geomagnetic disturbances and radio outages. If we make no preparations, by some calculations the direct and indirect costs of another superstorm could equal that of a major hurricane or earthquake."

[That last major solar storm occurred on the day before my 5th birthday, and it jogged a memory that I had long forgotten: our TV was not working on my 5th birthday!]

This article caused me to wonder if there would be any way to make a 21st-century super-grid less susceptible to blackouts caused by intense solar storms. [Would a super-conducting super-grid be more immune? I confess I do not remember enough of my physics to answer this question...]

Just imagine how bad it could get if the continental grid went down for a week!