[Intro music] Welcome to World Ocean Radio… I’m Peter Neill, Director of the World Ocean Observatory. Recently, during a trip to Greenland to investigate a newly designated UNESCO World Heritage site – Kunjataa, located in the southernmost fjords where archaeological evidences suggests the first place Norse explorers came ashore in the Americas, where the first Christian church was purportedly built – a threat was revealed in the form of possible water and air pollution resulting from an adjacent open pit mine. The justification for the mine was income derived from natural resource extraction of rare metals and uranium, required to meet our ever-expanding need for electrical generation to power our grids and handheld devices with ever-increasing efficiency to meet an ever-increasing demand. As we move to amplified reliance on such energy, the requirement for STORAGE increases exponentially for batteries, large and small, to drive electric vehicles, computers and systems, phones and handheld devices, and every other new utility that demands instant energy in any place at any time. Sitting in the airport en route to Greenland, I marveled at the near ubiquity of travelers using and charging their smart phones, tablets, and portable computers – a voracious new energy draw, dictating myriad outlets and new wiring, all concentrated and retro-fitted into one physical space, that somehow must be enabled and paid for through ticket sales, landing fees, and airport overheads in support of an assumed public access to charge and re-charge at will and for free. It made me wonder what Erik the Red did for energy storage or those hardy believers who built stone churches on grassy outcrops surrounded by granite and ice. Storage -- uranium and rare metals to generate and contain energy for exponential demand. What’s new about this? Actually nothing – it is the same old story of mineral extraction in an otherwise undeveloped place financed by industrial corporations – in this case, an Australian company allegedly with Chinese investment -- mined by foreign workers, exporting the resource and most of the profit, leaving environmental and social distress behind. It is a regressive response to a progressive need, inefficiency in the service of efficiency, destruct in the name of construct, with all the deleterious after-effects already demonstrated worldwide. Where is the invention? Where are the novel ways to generate energy and store it? We are all familiar with the progress of alternatives – wind and solar primarily, which have already proven their value as production and protection from the negative externalities of the old oil and gas generation economy. In many countries, at many levels of scale, these newer technologies have provided cleaner, cheaper power, have created new employment and new skills, and have shown another way without the externality cost and social negativity of the past. But can’t we do better? Here is a new idea passed along to me by a forward-looking investor: cryogenic energy storage, a process that turns air to liquid when cooled down to -196°C (-320˚F), that can be stored efficiently in insulated, low pressure vessels that, when exposed to ambient temperatures, causes rapid re-gasification, a 700-fold expansion in volume, which can used to drive a turbine and create electricity without combustion. Of course there are many questions: how much energy is required to drive the process? How is that cost accounted for in the overall calculation of value? But certain immediate aspects of the technology catch the attention: the source, air, ostensibly supplied for free without social cost and applied to existing turbine technology retrofitted in place? Would not the investment in rare metal mining on land or from the ocean floor be better placed in a technology potentially transformative through invention? Which brings me to the ocean, Seventy percent of the sun’s energy lands on the ocean covering 70% of the earth’s surface. Most is captured in the surface layers of the water column as heat. The difference in temperature between warm surface waters and the colder deep water, usually at least 20˚C, can generate electricity. How? Ammonia, with a low boiling point, is fed into one heat exchanger, warm seawater into one adjacent, boiling the ammonia to create pressurized vapor to run a turbine connected to a generator to produce electricity. As the ammonia vapor leaves the turbine, it descends into a chamber surrounded by tubes of cold seawater to be cooled to become a liquid again so it can continue the cycle: a process called OTEC, ocean thermal energy conversion. So think about it: air and ocean: Nature as stored capacity for energy and for social regeneration. We will discuss these issues, and more, in future editions of World Ocean Radio. [Outro music]
