Windfuels — A Real Approach to the World Energy Picture
I’m proud to call Dr. David Doty a friend; he’s a man with a great heart, as well as an even greater intellect — and I eagerly learn like a sponge when I’m around him. But I also try to supply advice where I think I can add value, which is on the business side.
Windfuels, Dr. Doty’s concept of synthesizing high-quality gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel from off-peak wind energy, is his primary focus at this point in his career. This is an enterprise for which he’ll need investors to come on board to support the construction of pilot plants of increasing sizes, along the way to scaling Windfuels to massive proportions. But what sort of people should these investors be?
I suggest that a key characteristic is that they actually care about the impact of a carbon-neutral approach to fuel. This is especially important here, because this will definitely NOT be a quick buck. The beauty of Windfuels isn’t that it’s a feel-good, silver bullet short-cut to a green future, but rather that it’s real; it’s not a delusion.
The truth is that no easy solution to the world energy picture exists. Indeed, the vast majority of the things we discuss in the day-to-day world of cleantech have huge deal-breaker characteristics that lie under the surface, unseen by most people whose understanding of physics and chemistry is fairly surface-level. For instance, look at the fact that the world is consuming 80 million barrels of crude oil per day. Then look at the consumption of resources in terms of land, water, fertilizer, etc. (each of which competes against the production of the world food supply) that would be necessary to get biofuels to the point that it would be making a meaningful dent in that 80 million gallons. It’s pretty far-fetched.
When you look at the actual hard science associated with a great deal of what we’re doing here in supplying power to a rapidly expanding population of energy-hungry consumers, most of these ideas really don’t hold water. Windfuels is complex, and it’s working at only laboratory scale. Investors need to understand and come to terms with that. It’s not a quick buck, but it has one rare and beautiful characteristic: it’s real.
I have been reading your blogs about Doty Wind Fuels with great interest. Mr.Doty was one of the people I was talking about when I asked if people’s websites should show up as well as their names when they post. There was a vigorous discussion about electric cars and I was trying to figure out why he was taking the position he was. When I clicked on his name and found his website and read into it I learned my answer and understood why he was taking the position he was. That little bit of information was very helpful in understanding his mindset. I think he has a good idea going there and I hope he is successful with it.
I have mostly completed a simple hydrogen generator made out of mostly common parts that is expandable as required. I also have a collection system based on the inverse of technology I used at a company I worked at and a way pretty much figured out to automatically add makeup water as needed. I intended to use it as a dumpload of last resort for my system when all other needs were fulfilled. I stopped working on it because I was not generating anywhere near enough power with my system to need it yet and decided I should concentrate on the generating part first. I was going to store it by compressing it into tanks and of course that is energy intensive all by itself but since it would have been a dumpload I was willing to do that. I was going to use it by either burning it for heat for something or using it in the gas engine of my homemade battery charger on cloudy days or during power outages when I needed more power than the batteries could provide or in my lawn mower. I came real close to getting a fuel cell one time from a construction company that had one on one of those portable road signs instead of a diesel generator or solar panels. Needless to say, being able to convert the hydrogen into a far more energy dense liquid fuel would be preferable. I wish Mr. Doty good luck and hope he is successful. This looks like a good solution to the “how do we store hydrogen” problem.
Brian McGowan
http://home.comcast.net/~bigvid
I’ve met Mr. Doty in Montana at a ‘Montana Means Energy’ conference. At the time, I was impressed that anyone would be marketing this advanced ‘NASA Mars Mission’ type technology. I have been to the Wind Fuels website and believe it is a viable option for storing excess wind power. Excess solar power can also be stored with ‘wind fuel’.
I would suggest that investors be those that can make money right away from a Wind Fuels project. By that I mean ‘save’ money in fuel costs… I think that the perfect synergy between investor and customer would be the American Farmer! They use lots of diesel fuel. They have land to build on. I would ignore the electrical utilities, because it is not advantageous to the utility’s bottom line. I would focus on off-grid wind and solar near pivot irrigation systems, owned by farmers. Farmers need the electrical power to run the irrigation pumps and fuel for their vehicles. The irrigators only run part of the year, but they buy diesel all year long.
When reducing the 80 million barrels of oil per day, remember; ‘A penney saved, is a penney earned’.
I also have been following Windfuels for some time and wish Dr Doty the best of luck. However, I also believe that he is going about promoting his business the wrong way. Instead of promoting Windfuels as a solution to excess off peak wind power, he should be promoting it as a solution to excess CO2 production. No one in the renewable world wants to be reminded of the problem of excess off peak wind as it casts a negative light on all renewables. Instead focus on taking a bite out of the amount of waste CO2 that the nation produces. For instance, why not locate Windfuel plants next to coal or natural gas plants, capture the CO2, and convert it to fuel. If future fossil fuel plants are required to sequester CO2, they could mitigate this requirement by partnering with Windfuels to sequester their CO2 emissions in exchange for providing free power, off peak or otherwise, to the co-located Windfuels plant. It’ gotta be cheaper than sequestration.
As a society, it is obviously beneficial in the long term to reduce our CO2 emissions and fossil fuel usage, but why not tackle the problem from the other direction and find new and creative uses for excess CO2. Hypersolar has done this and has made a big splash by using waste CO2 and sunlight to produce natural gas (www.hypersolar.com). Solidia has done this by using waste CO2 to revolutionize the process for curing concrete and construction materials (www.solidiatech.com). The University of Toronto is conducting research on using pressurized waste CO2 in the fracking of natural gas wells.
In a perfect world we wouldn’t have any fossil fuel power generating plants, but until we do, let’s use the latest technology to mitigate their negative effects,
Excellent point. In fact, the plan IS to locate at a coal or cement plant, to enable high concentrations of CO2. You’re absolutely right about the positioning; I’ll call their attention to this.
Thanks Craig
This approach is not the same as sequestration.
Sequestration stores the CO2 permanently thus removing it from the system/atmosphere.
The wind fuel approach reuses the CO2 for fuel.
If this fuel is then reused in the process that produced the CO2 in the first place it provides a zero carbon closed cycle, better than sequestration.
However it the windfuel is used for transport the CO2 is released on the carbon’s second use, effectively only halving the emissions, from a climate position worse than sequestration.