Andrii Zvorygin Peak Oil Meeting Transcript — June 4, 2026

00:00:00 SPEAKER_755: In the light of the One Infinite Creator, I'm Andrei.

00:00:02 SPEAKER_755: Joined here today with Barbara and Dan and Ivor, and we're going to start with a presentation by Barbara about wind power, and then Dan on cold to liquids,

00:00:13 SPEAKER_755: and hopefully more panelists will join us as we go along, and we'll have a discussion thereafter.

00:00:19 SPEAKER_755: All right, Barbara, go ahead.

00:00:21 SPEAKER_755: Did you want to introduce yourself first?

00:00:23 SPEAKER_755: And sure, this is it.

00:00:25 SPEAKER_755: Go ahead.

00:00:27 SPEAKER_383: Yeah, I'm Barbara Brown.

00:00:45 SPEAKER_383: I worked in the IT side of the energy industry after I'd done some exploration and construction for about 40 years, and moved on retirement back to Wisconsin.

00:00:46 SPEAKER_383: And the first thing that happened was my dad got a call saying that they were going to put in a large windmill project, and I looked at it and said, "Oh,

00:00:54 SPEAKER_383: where's the environmental impact statement?"

00:00:58 SPEAKER_383: and had a rude awakening.

00:01:00 SPEAKER_383: So let's move to the slides.

00:01:18 SPEAKER_383: And okay, so we're on the slides now, right?

00:01:29 SPEAKER_383: Yep.

00:01:30 SPEAKER_383: So what I discovered is that Wisconsin, in its infinite wisdom, decided that they would automatically approve wind projects and also solar projects, in preference to any other kinds of energy,

00:01:44 SPEAKER_383: and that meant that they were also approving some huge interstate transmission lines to these areas that are now having wind and solar farms.

00:01:59 SPEAKER_383: Farms.

00:01:59 SPEAKER_383: So what was proposed was this, and I now live within a couple of miles of this.

00:02:02 SPEAKER_383: It was done as the pilot project in the state to see what the impact of approving wind was, and you can see it's small, it's compact, and that is what we got.

00:02:04 SPEAKER_383: And this is literally looking two miles in the other direction, and about the same scale, so you can see how much bigger these are.

00:02:18 SPEAKER_383: Okay.

00:02:33 SPEAKER_383: Is it?

00:02:39 SPEAKER_383: You're trying to get to progress.

00:02:45 SPEAKER_383: Okay.

00:02:48 SPEAKER_383: Yeah, I got it.

00:02:52 SPEAKER_383: So, this is literally from my back porch, and so you can see that these things are everywhere, up against the small villages.

00:03:04 SPEAKER_383: So this is called the Red Barn Wind Farm.

00:03:07 SPEAKER_383: It went into operation in two thousand and three.

00:03:13 SPEAKER_383: This is the old Montfort Wind Farm that was the original model for automatic approval of wind.

00:03:22 SPEAKER_383: Now you can see immediately, just looking at it, a scale problem.

00:03:24 SPEAKER_383: And if you looked at it from here, it looks flat, right?

00:03:34 SPEAKER_383: But this is actually the Driftless Area, which means it's the unglaciated part where Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Iowa come together.

00:03:39 SPEAKER_383: There's a large area that the glaciers did not flatten, and so as a result, it has karst topography: lots of limestone, and heavily dissected.

00:03:50 SPEAKER_383: So the ridge tops are flat, but the land itself is not.

00:03:52 SPEAKER_383: And as you can see, these things are huge.

00:03:59 SPEAKER_383: You can indeed see them for thirty to forty miles on the ridge tops.

00:04:06 SPEAKER_383: So this is the new project.

00:04:24 SPEAKER_383: You can see what they look like.

00:04:24 SPEAKER_383: This is what the old ones look like, and it occurred to me that they look flat from here.

00:04:26 SPEAKER_383: But actually, those are just the edges of the fields; you're looking at the ridges behind me in the field, and then there's the edges of the flat ridges.

00:04:32 SPEAKER_383: Now there's also massive infrastructure.

00:04:40 SPEAKER_383: This is the same one coming from east and west because you can't see it all from one spot unless you get up in a helicopter or something.

00:04:43 SPEAKER_383: Huge infrastructures.

00:04:46 SPEAKER_383: And to my surprise, they're not even required to tell you which turbines they're going to use when they're permitted.

00:04:49 SPEAKER_383: They just buy whatever happens to be cheapest and quickest when they're ready for that stage of construction.

00:05:05 SPEAKER_383: So this was taken 18 months after the Red Barn project actually went into operation, and on a clear day—no storms, no lightning—it just dropped a blade.

00:05:08 SPEAKER_383: Wow.

00:05:11 SPEAKER_383: Yeah, wow.

00:05:18 SPEAKER_383: I mean, it just... yeah.

00:05:33 SPEAKER_383: I mean, people just went, "What the heck?"

00:05:36 SPEAKER_383: And we have yet to be able to get any copies of any kind of assessment as to what is happening.

00:05:44 SPEAKER_383: They've had to replace another one; it didn't drop, but it bent or started peeling, so they've had to replace the blade on another one since then as well.

00:05:47 SPEAKER_383: So the problem with this is... yeah, for those of you in Europe, this probably doesn't surprise you: village, village, village, village.

00:05:49 SPEAKER_383: And these are oh, you know, 500 to seven or eight hundred people in these villages.

00:05:50 SPEAKER_383: They're coming right up to the village line.

00:05:51 SPEAKER_383: By state regulation, they can be up to a quarter mile from the village boundary.

00:06:00 SPEAKER_383: So you can see what is happening to these rural villages.

00:06:07 SPEAKER_383: So if you look... if I drive west into Iowa and Kansas, there's one little farm in this area; the villages are way farther apart.

00:06:19 SPEAKER_383: But here, so these are impacting five or six hundred people in the village, and just because of the way the local infrastructure works, the village doesn't have any say about it?

00:06:40 SPEAKER_383: The townships outside the village are the only ones that can do any sort of control, and they have very little.

00:06:49 SPEAKER_383: So this is now what's happened since two thousand and nineteen.

00:06:55 SPEAKER_383: This is the one we were just looking at; it's called Red Barn.

00:07:07 SPEAKER_382: There's another one that's under construction.

00:07:16 SPEAKER_382: Oh, Dan has a question.

00:07:28 SPEAKER_383: Sure.

00:07:33 SPEAKER_383: Go ahead, Barbara.

00:07:39 SPEAKER_383: You wouldn't happen to know what the average size per megawatt per each turbine is?

00:07:41 SPEAKER_383: I'll show you in a bit.

00:07:47 SPEAKER_383: Okay.

00:07:50 SPEAKER_383: Yeah.

00:07:56 SPEAKER_383: I'll show you.

00:08:00 SPEAKER_383: So these are under construction; they're in final permitting.

00:08:11 SPEAKER_383: And one of the things we discovered is that these are not utilities building these.

00:08:25 SPEAKER_383: They're what they call in the U.S., merchant power companies, and so often there will be two or three different entities leasing the land, making promises to farmers which then get sold off,

00:08:28 SPEAKER_383: and those promises are not necessarily kept because the leases are very much in the company's favor.

00:08:29 SPEAKER_383: And then once they get into permitting—this one actually was partially permitted, then it got sold off—and they couldn't use the same permit.

00:08:29 SPEAKER_383: But it looks as if they're going to push it through fairly quickly.

00:08:33 SPEAKER_383: So this is the next one that's coming; they're about ready to permit.

00:08:43 SPEAKER_383: This is an extremely sensitive state park: lots of wetlands, lots of wildlife.

00:08:45 SPEAKER_383: They're trying to bring them up within a quarter mile because of the park boundaries.

00:08:50 SPEAKER_383: Because that's what the state allows them to do.

00:08:58 SPEAKER_383: And if that's what you're allowed to do, then they're going to do it.

00:09:07 SPEAKER_383: And this set is up now.

00:09:09 SPEAKER_383: Up next: this happens to be a larger community of over a thousand; actually over ten thousand,

00:09:14 SPEAKER_383: so they've been a little reluctant to start with this because there are lots more people in the area that are going to notice.

00:09:14 SPEAKER_383: But these things also buy leases with secrecy agreements, and they don't have to announce them until they go in for a permit, which is automatically approved within a year.

00:09:18 SPEAKER_383: They don't have to do environmental impact statements; they're doing a minimal assessment but not much.

00:09:29 SPEAKER_383: So this is the situation.

00:09:38 SPEAKER_383: Yes.

00:09:45 SPEAKER_383: So someone asked, "What do these look like?"

00:09:47 SPEAKER_383: The old ones were 30 megawatts with 20 turbines: GE 1.5s is what they say they were—very old technology.

00:09:48 SPEAKER_383: This was from two thousand and one, right?

00:09:50 SPEAKER_383: So this one has only 28 of them for 92 megawatts total; that's 3.4 on a turbine.

00:09:53 SPEAKER_383: So if you look at the size, this covers parts of three sections so it's less than a thousand acres.

00:09:58 SPEAKER_383: But according to them, depending on how they want it, the company says it's up to 10,000 acres of impact, and I'm not kidding; it goes over a huge area.

00:10:04 SPEAKER_383: So the old turbines were 325 feet at the top.

00:10:11 SPEAKER_383: These new ones are 525 feet at the top—rotor diameters.

00:10:13 SPEAKER_383: Look at that difference in blade length.

00:10:17 SPEAKER_383: And the next set that's been permitted is actually bigger than this by quite a bit; the ones going to permit are almost 700 feet.

00:10:31 SPEAKER_383: I believe some of them are five or six megawatts that they're proposing.

00:10:42 SPEAKER_383: And again, they're not required to tell us what actual turbines they're going to put in to get a permit.

00:10:46 SPEAKER_383: Dan has a question.

00:10:48 SPEAKER_383: Go ahead, Dan.

00:10:48 SPEAKER_383: Yeah, does this include the battery?

00:10:50 SPEAKER_383: I don't understand.

00:11:01 SPEAKER_383: Beg pardon, Dan.

00:11:05 SPEAKER_383: Does this include facility... is all of that not including the battery storage?

00:11:10 SPEAKER_382: Is what I'm saying.

00:11:13 SPEAKER_382: No battery storage.

00:11:21 SPEAKER_382: Oh no, no, no, no battery storage.

00:11:23 SPEAKER_382: Yeah.

00:11:24 SPEAKER_382: So what you're saying is basically when you reach the maximum amount of load on the power grid, they just curtail power.

00:11:32 SPEAKER_382: Okay, I get it.

00:11:45 SPEAKER_382: Ah... ah.

00:11:49 SPEAKER_382: No battery storage.

00:11:56 SPEAKER_382: Yeah.

00:12:01 SPEAKER_382: There are— I'm going to put a sales point for kind of the stuff I push out, so everybody understands that a 100 meg stands at a 100-megawatt geothermal power plant.

00:12:02 SPEAKER_382: You would fit on one acre, and maximum height is two stories.

00:12:03 SPEAKER_382: Exactly, huge difference you know between different types of energies.

00:12:11 SPEAKER_383: Exactly, and of course this is also a high population density area.

00:12:21 SPEAKER_383: Yeah, and I'm not saying that any energy source is going to have impact but you have to weigh which is based: intermittent power versus baseload power.

00:12:22 SPEAKER_383: Which was more intrusive than not, and that's it.

00:12:25 SPEAKER_383: But this district describes just this huge difference between the geothermal stuff that I push and the wind turbines.

00:12:26 SPEAKER_383: And Barbara thank you for bringing this up because I have a hard time trying to explain to people you know the choices that people make and how important they are for your community.

00:12:33 SPEAKER_383: Yeah, and so this has become a real problem for people.

00:12:39 SPEAKER_383: So something interesting happened here, and we did what I would call an non-academic engineering inquiry,

00:12:49 SPEAKER_383: and it's kind of like what citizen science did back in the 1700s and 1800s when they went out and just as individual citizens getting whatever they could as far as equipment made observations about things.

00:12:59 SPEAKER_383: This Montfort wind farm has been operating for 20 years, and I have not heard anybody making any complaints about it.

00:13:24 SPEAKER_383: No problem.

00:13:26 SPEAKER_383: Any complaints about it?

00:13:27 SPEAKER_383: No problems.

00:13:43 SPEAKER_383: But Red Barn becomes operational in two thousand and three, and immediately we get local people saying they are sick.

00:13:50 SPEAKER_383: And this is not you know the percentage depending on where you are from: these things one to two percent.

00:13:52 SPEAKER_383: Simon you're muted.

00:13:56 SPEAKER_383: Simon hello Barbara.

00:13:58 SPEAKER_383: Sorry I probably should have waited till you were at the end.

00:13:59 SPEAKER_383: But the slide you've got up at the moment—this is something I'm only just seeing now.

00:14:11 SPEAKER_383: Have you come across any papers that incidents of wind turbines operating and cancer in large vertebrate mammals, people and cattle?

00:14:14 SPEAKER_383: We've got some of those.

00:14:28 SPEAKER_383: That's not what we're looking at today but yes there are.

00:14:38 SPEAKER_383: And so what is happening with all of this Simon is that the wind companies have basically been funding academics to a really nice lifestyle to come in and design studies that will prove you couldn't

00:14:43 SPEAKER_383: possibly be harmed by a wind turbine if a blade fell on you.

00:14:50 SPEAKER_383: So yeah I mean this is literally what happens here.

00:15:00 SPEAKER_383: So we could tell you stories of some of this nonsense but so we started out and we said I don't care what a paid spokesperson has to say about this.

00:15:08 SPEAKER_383: You know as somebody who's done science and engineering for forty years I can ask the questions right?

00:15:21 SPEAKER_383: So this is what happened.

00:15:24 SPEAKER_383: People said they were dizzy, they were nauseous, they couldn't sleep, brain fog.

00:15:26 SPEAKER_383: And the one that seems to be almost universal you know: this may be one or two percent of the people in the area will notice something like this.

00:15:31 SPEAKER_383: And it's not a lot of people but on the other hand if you're the one who can't live in your own house because you get so sick, it's very significant.

00:15:36 SPEAKER_383: And the tinnitus looks as if it's an universal long-term issue and of course the response to that would be well you know you're all old people because this certainly is an aging area and it's

00:15:43 SPEAKER_383: just coincidence that you're getting tinnitus now because you're just old fogies you know.

00:15:45 SPEAKER_383: It has nothing to do with the wind turbines; it's everything to do with you.

00:15:48 SPEAKER_383: You know people here have been around farm equipment, they've been around industrial machinery right?

00:15:57 SPEAKER_383: And so it's your lifestyle and it's your age has nothing to do with these new wind turbines and that's one that's going to be hard to prove right?

00:16:02 SPEAKER_383: So the industry response has been: it is psychosomatic; it cannot be physical.

00:16:06 SPEAKER_383: And that's what we're getting from the people they pay to give expert testimony.

00:16:14 SPEAKER_383: So my question is I don't you know if here we have an obvious place where we can look at the old ones and the new ones right?

00:16:18 SPEAKER_383: So my question is what the heck is different with these new turbines that wasn't there with these tiny little ones in a compact area?

00:16:29 SPEAKER_383: And the hypothesis at first was that it was infrasound.

00:16:33 SPEAKER_382: Dan has a comment well not a question I'm just making same observation as Barbara:

00:16:38 SPEAKER_382: that there seems to be something we have to do more study on you know something to do with the size and more likely has to do with interfering with natural biological processes.

00:16:48 SPEAKER_382: I mean all of us live on some type of clock.

00:16:51 SPEAKER_382: I mean most people don't realize that from birds to lizards to whatever right?

00:16:55 SPEAKER_382: And if you interfere with that system it affects your immune system which then affects a lot of other things.

00:17:00 SPEAKER_382: So but we probably need a lot more study.

00:17:04 SPEAKER_383: But yeah there's something there and has to do with scale.

00:17:11 SPEAKER_383: And also talking about this:

00:17:18 SPEAKER_383: these local people actually got down on their knees and begged them to require putting in automatic sensors because we're not in airport areas but we get small planes that will detect the planes and turn

00:17:28 SPEAKER_383: the lights on only when there's a need to have the lights on.

00:17:31 SPEAKER_383: Now that costs a few bucks per turbine.

00:17:35 SPEAKER_383: We're not doing that.

00:17:39 SPEAKER_383: We're not required to do it so we don't require ourselves to do it, so we're not doing it.

00:17:40 SPEAKER_383: But what you have is if you looked at that first picture right?

00:17:48 SPEAKER_383: Imagine red flashing lights all the way across the horizon because that's what we're seeing.

00:17:57 SPEAKER_383: So you're right; that could be causing some disturbances.

00:18:00 SPEAKER_383: And there was a really good article and I think this is 100% true done in Poland called "Should limit values be set for infrasound caused by wind turbines?"

00:18:15 SPEAKER_383: It was in the International Journal of Occupational Medicine and Environmental Health.

00:18:21 SPEAKER_383: These are the people who did it, I mailed out copies on request too.

00:18:33 SPEAKER_383: So the current consensus from the abstract appears to be: I don't think this is all that wrong so they looked at outdoor exposure limits for infrasound frequencies and nobody has any particular limits on it.

00:18:55 SPEAKER_383: They've done some studies and according to literature it's defined by a hearing threshold.

00:19:02 SPEAKER_383: so if you can't hear it it doesn't bother you.

00:19:06 SPEAKER_383: And this was the one: all of the studies are over one hertz because you can't study lower than one hertz with acoustics.

00:19:17 SPEAKER_383: So that struck me as not quite rational.

00:19:25 SPEAKER_383: Infrasound that can't be heard or felt is not annoying and doesn't cause other adverse health effects.

00:19:29 SPEAKER_383: You know I'm sorry we kind of know that: you don't have to be able to hear it for it to cause some problems.

00:19:42 SPEAKER_383: Of course they're below hearing thresholds right?

00:19:56 SPEAKER_383: It's infrasound, it's not something most humans can hear so there are no limits on that.

00:20:23 SPEAKER_383: So we started looking at this and noticed something really interesting.

00:20:30 SPEAKER_383: This study cuts off at four or five hertz; this study has a little bit down below but completely cuts off at one hertz.

00:20:39 SPEAKER_383: Again an evaluation: these from the study, nothing below four hertz right?

00:20:45 SPEAKER_383: So we started looking at this and these are not sound waves in sinusoidal form.

00:20:47 SPEAKER_383: It's called blade tower interference.

00:20:47 SPEAKER_383: As the blades pass a turbine tower you get a pressure pulse.

00:20:55 SPEAKER_383: You know when the blade on the tower and when the space between the blades is in front of the tower, you get pressure pulses about a million a day.

00:21:07 SPEAKER_383: And so it's not a sound wave; it's not sinusoidal.

00:21:24 SPEAKER_383: It's spike pressure pulses as a term for it makes a little more sense.

00:21:30 SPEAKER_383: So below one hertz every play we could find nobody made with acoustical equipment measures below one hertz and obviously you can't detect it,

00:21:40 SPEAKER_383: human ears don't detect it as something that you can hear so we started looking at how we could monitor low frequency pulses.

00:21:56 SPEAKER_383: And what happened was a local farmer whose wife got very sick to the point where they actually had to move to an apartment in the city; they couldn't stay on their farm.

00:22:08 SPEAKER_383: So he found some folks working at another location in Wisconsin where farmers have also moved out of their homes and we're looking at using microbarometers to measure these pressure pulses.

00:22:17 SPEAKER_383: So they're trying to measure below five hertz which makes perfect sense right?

00:22:25 SPEAKER_383: So all of the other studies you know above five hertz, you can't prove that it's doing anything;

00:22:33 SPEAKER_383: doesn't mean it's not doing anything but you can't prove it and people don't notice it enough to say yeah when I'm in the house underneath these small wind turbines it bothers me.

00:22:46 SPEAKER_383: For over 20 years, nobody ever said that, and suddenly we have these big ones, and people are saying that.

00:22:55 SPEAKER_383: So we put four microbarometers, two to four miles from the nearest Red Barn turbines, and as you saw, the view from my backyard, even outside the edge.

00:22:57 SPEAKER_383: Even outside the edges of this, the turbines, these pulses are coming from different directions, depending on where you are from the wind,

00:23:02 SPEAKER_383: and so it's not as if I have one turbine and I'm sitting directly upwind or downwind from it.

00:23:08 SPEAKER_383: I have 15 turbines within two or three miles that are putting off pressure pulses and keeping putting them out,

00:23:20 SPEAKER_383: and so what we found that was very interesting is that these Red Barn turbines show pulses between 0.35 and 0.7 hertz.

00:23:31 SPEAKER_383: Below 1 hertz, interestingly enough, the Montfort Wind Energy Center has pulses that are a little over 1 hertz, and that one hasn't had an impact.

00:23:44 SPEAKER_383: So my immediate thought is we found a difference, and this is where we're at right now.

00:23:54 SPEAKER_383: So this happened.

00:24:07 SPEAKER_383: This is just a picture of the ones I decided not to go into any of the technology of how he's converting these because these are pressure pulses on top of the wind and on top.

00:24:10 SPEAKER_383: I mean, I can even see when my HVAC in the house goes on.

00:24:15 SPEAKER_383: I can see changes, but they have worked hard to do transformations to see the little bitty pulses.

00:24:24 SPEAKER_383: These are not huge, right?

00:24:26 SPEAKER_383: They're small.

00:24:40 SPEAKER_383: And notice what we see.

00:24:45 SPEAKER_383: There's a lot of noise because you're getting a little bit different frequencies because of the angle and difference.

00:24:47 SPEAKER_383: So it's kind of weird that way, but here's what I'm getting from the nearest ones and depends on the wind direction, right?

00:24:59 SPEAKER_383: So the wind direction changes a little and this changes.

00:25:03 SPEAKER_383: But look at this, just a little above one.

00:25:13 SPEAKER_383: Here are the pulses from the old Montrachet.

00:25:16 SPEAKER_383: So this is where we've gotten to.

00:25:18 SPEAKER_383: We have seen a difference.

00:25:25 SPEAKER_383: There's just no question that we found something that's different between the ones that people don't complain about and the ones that do, so that's kind of where we're at right now.

00:25:37 SPEAKER_383: That's good.

00:25:42 SPEAKER_383: I just had to do this for Charlie and you, uh, so you know we've lost 11 million acres in the U.S. to all of the development, right?

00:25:51 SPEAKER_383: But here's what Wisconsin plans for green energy, green, right?

00:25:56 SPEAKER_383: So for net zero, 2.4 percent of cropland is going to be converted to solar farms, wind turbines.

00:26:08 SPEAKER_383: Well, they only take up two acres per turbine, but you saw that big infrastructure.

00:26:19 SPEAKER_383: That was a heck of a lot more than two acres.

00:26:25 SPEAKER_383: And this I thought was really interesting.

00:26:31 SPEAKER_383: About 1.5 million acres of the cornland in Wisconsin is used for ethanol.

00:26:42 SPEAKER_383: It's people can't eat it, and so the literature always says, well, you know, because we get half a gallon of diesel to produce one gallon of ethanol, this is a good deal, right?

00:26:44 SPEAKER_383: Well, if you look up the BTUs, not so much, right?

00:26:50 SPEAKER_383: So this is kind of what's going on, and we're now having data centers invading because now that we have this energy source.

00:26:51 SPEAKER_383: I don't understand how that works unless they bring them in with batteries.

00:26:52 SPEAKER_383: As you said, Dan, and they are not bringing them in with batteries, as near as I can tell.

00:26:52 SPEAKER_383: But they're going to put data centers along this energy source, and we'll have to see how that works.

00:26:56 SPEAKER_383: I think what's going to happen is they're simply going to brown out all the homes and businesses to keep their data centers running when the wind and solar aren't working.

00:27:07 SPEAKER_383: So these are the questions that I kind of had for feedback on you guys: Does the theory that the low frequency pressure pulses might be a problem make sense?

00:27:14 SPEAKER_383: And we're looking for somebody who might want to do some studies on this that isn't a paid mouthpiece for wind energy companies, which is darn hard to find in the states.

00:27:30 SPEAKER_383: Thank you, guys.

00:27:37 SPEAKER_383: All right, thanks Barbara.

00:27:42 SPEAKER_383: Are there some questions from the panel?

00:27:51 SPEAKER_383: Simon, go ahead.

00:27:52 SPEAKER_383: You just have to unmute first.

00:27:54 SPEAKER_383: I get busted, Barbara.

00:27:58 SPEAKER_383: This is expert work.

00:28:01 SPEAKER_383: You are at the tip of the spear.

00:28:03 SPEAKER_383: The reason I say this is, I was presenting in North Macedonia at the UN conference, and I actually put up that wind turbines have an instance with cancer.

00:28:06 SPEAKER_383: Yeah, what I was saying, like that.

00:28:14 SPEAKER_383: There's a few medical studies now coming out.

00:28:15 SPEAKER_383: I'm talking with people in Australia that are actually measuring this.

00:28:15 SPEAKER_383: They went for me; people came from either side of me on there and they shut me down off the knees.

00:28:18 SPEAKER_383: Okay, that's out of scope.

00:28:24 SPEAKER_383: Shut your mouth.

00:28:27 SPEAKER_383: No, no, no, la la la la la.

00:28:35 SPEAKER_383: And we're getting it from both sides because the liberals here...

00:28:39 SPEAKER_383: Oh no, we have to be completely for green energy.

00:28:49 SPEAKER_383: Well, there's alternatives to this, right?

00:28:51 SPEAKER_383: As you were saying, Dan, but we don't want to hear the alternatives.

00:28:52 SPEAKER_383: And then the conservatives are saying that oh no, it's a business for the local areas.

00:28:53 SPEAKER_383: You know yeah, that's true.

00:28:58 SPEAKER_383: Some of the biggest red states in the United States have more wind power than all the other blue states.

00:29:01 SPEAKER_383: That's true.

00:29:12 SPEAKER_381: It's a big yes, big Republican because it's actually a rental business.

00:29:20 SPEAKER_381: The farmers are renting out their land and they're farming at the same time.

00:29:28 SPEAKER_381: So well yeah, they're not doing; they're farming a whole lot less than they used to.

00:29:39 SPEAKER_383: Believe it or not, rental prices for cropland have gone up because the availability of the cropland is going down.

00:29:45 SPEAKER_383: We also have a huge solar one right in the same area.

00:29:55 SPEAKER_383: I know the farmers are talking about they have huge problems with especially cattle and other types of animals that are incompatible with wind turbines.

00:29:59 SPEAKER_382: So it has to do with that low frequency; it has to do with that low-frequency sound affecting the animals because they can hear sounds that we can't.

00:30:09 SPEAKER_382: Yes, so yeah basically if you're into any type of herding or husbandry, you can't have wind farms on your land because it can affect your production.

00:30:10 SPEAKER_382: So there is an effect there.

00:30:13 SPEAKER_382: You can see it in the numbers for cattle, ostrich, buffalo; you name it.

00:30:16 SPEAKER_382: So we actually came across a really interesting study on badgers and this was done in the UK.

00:30:17 SPEAKER_382: The question was well can you prove just stress right?

00:30:21 SPEAKER_382: And so cortisol I think is what they measured,

00:30:29 SPEAKER_382: and they just grabbed badger burrows coming out from the wind turbines and looked to see if the badgers appeared to be more stressed the closer they were, and found higher cortisol levels.

00:30:33 SPEAKER_383: Now you know Dan you were saying even if you don't think you can hear it or even if you don't think it's bothering you these higher stress levels may be there.

00:30:38 SPEAKER_383: And I don't think it's psychosomatic.

00:30:38 SPEAKER_383: I'm surprised that Fish and Game hasn't done a study because I talked to my cousin who owns ranch land out in Wyoming,

00:30:43 SPEAKER_382: and out there where they have wind farms there are no prairie dog cities out there near the wind farms; they completely wipe them clean out all around the wind farms so it is happening.

00:30:56 SPEAKER_382: In fact Wisconsin state law says they don't have to do environmental impact statements.

00:31:01 SPEAKER_382: So we did Bishop; it's private land like farmland.

00:31:04 SPEAKER_382: You know that's a different animal.

00:31:06 SPEAKER_382: That's not wildlife.

00:31:13 SPEAKER_382: It but we've got this.

00:31:22 SPEAKER_382: This is a heavy hiking and hunting area, very recreation, and so a lot of the folks in that industry think it's going to kill their business.

00:31:27 SPEAKER_382: Yeah yeah especially the ones they're putting up right next to state parks.

00:31:32 SPEAKER_382: I mean needs to be really helpful.

00:31:36 SPEAKER_382: Right yeah definitely going to impact the deer population in an adverse way.

00:31:41 SPEAKER_383: Simon has a question go ahead Simon no no actually what I was saying before;

00:31:45 SPEAKER_383: it's continuation when I was presenting in Macedonia and I presented this up on all of this up on the wall there says "Officials came up with travel directions to shut down the discussion."

00:32:00 SPEAKER_383: No no no no no no no What?

00:32:01 SPEAKER_383: What told me you know the smell of fear.

00:32:03 SPEAKER_383: That little thank you You know what that told me in no uncertain terms is that what you're presenting Barbara is known these astounds and it's an insurance problem,

00:32:12 SPEAKER_383: and they're avoiding being I think they're worried about it being sued.

00:32:18 SPEAKER_383: But I've come to conclusion that they know come to the conclusion that they know that the green transition is shot through with problems like this,

00:32:23 SPEAKER_383: and they know but they're pushing it anyway because I believe they never intended to do it at scale so they're pushing forward regardless Right So what I was going to say Barbara this work you're

00:32:36 SPEAKER_383: doing is absolutely top-notch stuff and it has the potential to really start a fire so large and hot it can't be put out.

00:32:47 SPEAKER_382: So you must keep going and publish the damn thing in as many places as possible.

00:33:00 SPEAKER_382: Yeah, right.

00:33:13 SPEAKER_382: Maybe.

00:33:25 SPEAKER_382: You know, one of the problems we run into is... we're not academics.

00:33:27 SPEAKER_383: We're engineers, right?

00:33:39 SPEAKER_383: And we're farmers, and we're people who take common sense and ask questions, right?

00:33:44 SPEAKER_383: And we're not getting paid by industry to tell a story that jives with their economic interest, and you know we get the same thing you do, Simon, from both sides.

00:33:47 SPEAKER_383: Although interestingly, the Republicans have now, to my surprise, been willing to push back,

00:33:52 SPEAKER_383: and I think it's because a few thousand dollars a year in a Republican district doesn't offset all of these other unintended consequences.

00:34:05 SPEAKER_383: We're already having so many medical problems.

00:34:16 SPEAKER_383: We're losing our hospitals.

00:34:30 SPEAKER_383: People are getting sick from the chemicals that they use for farming.

00:34:33 SPEAKER_381: You know, just all of those problems.

00:34:36 SPEAKER_381: And we have land use issues.

00:34:42 SPEAKER_381: The townships and counties have worked really hard on some development plans, but these things just overrode all the development plans.

00:34:50 SPEAKER_381: So, you know, you want to hear a weird one?

00:34:55 SPEAKER_381: We had three-inch rains this year in the spring, and all those beautiful solar panels tilt so the rains were hitting them in the middle of the day.

00:35:01 SPEAKER_381: They were tilting kind of like this, and can you think about how much runoff you get from concrete,

00:35:06 SPEAKER_381: but then think about five or six sections of solar panels capturing that water and running it down the gullies, which is basically what they did, and ended up washing out a township road completely.

00:35:13 SPEAKER_381: I mean, so these are now bought when they're in production; they're bought by a utility.

00:35:23 SPEAKER_381: So the utility came out and fixed it the first time.

00:35:31 SPEAKER_381: A week later, washes it out again because all they did was just grade gravel back in.

00:35:37 SPEAKER_381: And they said, "Well, they didn't have time to fix it.

00:35:45 SPEAKER_381: The township could just fix it."

00:35:48 SPEAKER_381: So they did, and that was six weeks ago.

00:35:50 SPEAKER_381: They still haven't had the bill sent to the utility paid.

00:36:00 SPEAKER_383: You know, just all these unintended consequences.

00:36:04 SPEAKER_383: These are small communities without a lot of funds available to do things like fix roads when they break up.

00:36:06 SPEAKER_383: Dan, then Simon...

00:36:08 SPEAKER_383: One of the things we've had here in Indiana: we used to have quite a number of what were forty-acre farms that turned into solar farms.

00:36:11 SPEAKER_383: What they found out is if you have too much density of that, it creates a heat island.

00:36:14 SPEAKER_383: So we've had them quite literally take out the solar farms, and we're actually encouraging planting more orchards.

00:36:17 SPEAKER_383: Mainly has to do with regulating the temperature of the land.

00:36:21 SPEAKER_383: Having all the solar panels isn't necessarily positive when you consider it's creating a heat island and drying out the land itself; so that alters the humidity level.

00:36:28 SPEAKER_383: So yeah,

00:36:30 SPEAKER_383: it also goes back to like the regulations we have in cities where we require so much green space per so many people because when you have concentrations of people and cement and so forth,

00:36:39 SPEAKER_383: you get the heat island, which isn't necessarily good for the environment.

00:36:43 SPEAKER_383: Unfortunately, we're learning a lot of these lessons the hard way.

00:36:46 SPEAKER_383: The wind has negatives too, like solar farms do with the whole issue of the heat island.

00:36:52 SPEAKER_383: Who would ever think that would be an issue?

00:36:53 SPEAKER_383: But yes, and actually there's been... it looks as if large concentrations of turbines may be causing some changes in our weather patterns too.

00:37:07 SPEAKER_383: Oh, that's quite possible because I know even trees can change weather patterns.

00:37:12 SPEAKER_383: Charlie seems to have something on point.

00:37:14 SPEAKER_383: Charlie, go ahead.

00:37:27 SPEAKER_383: Oh, I don't know what you're talking about.

00:37:48 SPEAKER_383: Are you calling on me?

00:37:51 SPEAKER_383: Yes, yes.

00:38:00 SPEAKER_383: Charlie, go ahead.

00:38:01 SPEAKER_383: Hi, Charlie.

00:38:03 SPEAKER_383: I want to know if we gave Dan as much money for that solar farm... it's a deal.

00:38:05 SPEAKER_383: I'm camping in the...

00:38:07 SPEAKER_383: That is a great question there, Charlie.

00:38:08 SPEAKER_383: One of the things I was thinking about, Barbara, had to do with the size of the turbines.

00:38:09 SPEAKER_383: Those 3.6 megawatt turbines; I could put in a 100-megawatt geothermal power plant on an acre and shut down thirty of those turbines by doing precisely that.

00:38:11 SPEAKER_383: Yeah, yeah.

00:38:12 SPEAKER_383: And so geothermal produces a lot less impact on the environment.

00:38:17 SPEAKER_383: As like I said, if you put a two-foot fence around the place, you don't even know it's there.

00:38:17 SPEAKER_383: I've got good pictures, Barbara, out in Nevada where there's cattle grazing all the way up to the fence right next to the geothermal power plant.

00:38:24 SPEAKER_383: So well, that's great; seems not to have an effect on them.

00:38:27 SPEAKER_383: Cows don't mind it.

00:38:29 SPEAKER_383: Okay, no, Simon.

00:38:30 SPEAKER_383: Okay, I know Simon has something... and then there's also relevant stuff.

00:38:41 SPEAKER_383: Did anybody hear my question?

00:38:44 SPEAKER_383: Yes.

00:38:46 SPEAKER_383: No. Oh, what?

00:38:48 SPEAKER_383: Charlie was asking.

00:38:53 SPEAKER_383: I thought we did hear it.

00:38:55 SPEAKER_383: It was that if they had given the money for the solar farms to Dan...

00:38:58 SPEAKER_383: Oh yeah.

00:39:00 SPEAKER_383: Yeah.

00:39:01 SPEAKER_383: You know, Dan: could you produce as much electricity with that money from wind turbines?

00:39:03 SPEAKER_383: Yes; more electricity actually.

00:39:08 SPEAKER_383: From geothermal, be a lot cheaper too, and it would have a much longer lifespan than what the wind turbines have.

00:39:10 SPEAKER_383: Right now, the blades only last about twenty years... or maybe eighteen months, Dan.

00:39:17 SPEAKER_383: Or maybe the blades only last eighteen months.

00:39:21 SPEAKER_382: I've seen that too.

00:39:25 SPEAKER_382: In tornado country they don't last for very long.

00:39:28 SPEAKER_382: Ask the guys down there; it doesn't take a tornado to break them.

00:39:29 SPEAKER_382: We've got quality control issues here though.

00:39:30 SPEAKER_382: This isn't there yet.

00:39:34 SPEAKER_382: Yeah.

00:39:39 SPEAKER_382: All right.

00:39:45 SPEAKER_382: So yeah, I understand geothermal stuff is just all steel and water, with copper bars in the generators and graphite.

00:39:56 SPEAKER_382: It isn't anything that's of short supply, you know, not like some of the other technologies.

00:39:59 SPEAKER_382: All right.

00:40:07 SPEAKER_382: So Simon, there's also a YouTube-related comment here: "Batteries are the only way to make renewables work."

00:40:11 SPEAKER_382: And I know you've shown that we can't really make many batteries.

00:40:15 SPEAKER_382: Do you have another thing you wanted to comment on?

00:40:15 SPEAKER_382: Me?

00:40:16 SPEAKER_382: Yes.

00:40:20 SPEAKER_382: Yeah.

00:40:23 SPEAKER_382: So Barbara, this is for you.

00:40:23 SPEAKER_382: As a card-carrying member of academia, that's been busting my nuts for the last twenty years trying to publish papers.

00:40:25 SPEAKER_382: I would tell you that if you're in academia and you're actually publishing within the window of accepted thought... the peer review process is just fine.

00:40:30 SPEAKER_382: But if you are outside the window of accepted thought and you are promoting something difficult, they will go to extraordinary lengths.

00:40:37 SPEAKER_383: And "they" is the knowledge filter of what's considered acceptable; gatekeeping behavior where they'll invent reasons—the most amazing, asinine reasons—to shut you down and railroad you somewhere else.

00:40:53 SPEAKER_307: You may well be representing small operations and farms.

00:40:57 SPEAKER_307: That doesn't mean that you cannot publish.

00:41:01 SPEAKER_307: I have noticed that anger gets shit done.

00:41:15 SPEAKER_382: Proving it: do not let them stop you.

00:41:22 SPEAKER_382: If they knock you down, get up again.

00:41:30 SPEAKER_382: And that is how you get through this.

00:41:37 SPEAKER_382: One day, you'll be proven right from another sector.

00:41:38 SPEAKER_382: Good luck.

00:41:38 SPEAKER_382: Thanks, Simon.

00:41:38 SPEAKER_382: And we need to exchange some of our stuff; you've got some on cancer and I've got some too that we've been gathering.

00:41:40 SPEAKER_382: Maybe we need to see if we can find a way to get all of that exchanged so we have it at our fingertips.

00:41:46 SPEAKER_382: It won't make any difference at this point, I'm afraid, but we're trying also to make a fuss about it.

00:41:50 SPEAKER_382: The state parks turned out to be a good deal for us because I went out Memorial Day weekend and just handed out flyers to all the city people who were out there enjoying them, saying:

00:42:02 SPEAKER_382: "Gosh, I'm glad you're enjoying this beautiful weekend.

00:42:04 SPEAKER_382: Maybe in 18 months when they put up a 10,000-acre wind farm between here and the other state park, it won't be so nice."

00:42:11 SPEAKER_382: And only one person, who just happened to be a local family, had ever heard that this was going on.

00:42:18 SPEAKER_382: Yeah; keep keeping going, Barbara.

00:42:21 SPEAKER_382: Keep going.

00:42:25 SPEAKER_382: Thanks.

00:42:30 SPEAKER_382: All right.

00:42:32 SPEAKER_382: Well we also have to do Dan's presentation today.

00:42:32 SPEAKER_382: No, all good stuff.

00:42:36 SPEAKER_382: Yeah, yeah but it was all very good and... thank you guys.

00:42:40 SPEAKER_307: Okay so Dan did you want to start?

00:42:44 SPEAKER_307: Yeah I can do that.

00:42:49 SPEAKER_307: I'm sharing out; you should be able to see a picture of a heat exchanger loading right now.

00:43:01 SPEAKER_307: Okay there I see it.

00:43:09 SPEAKER_307: So I'm gonna go ahead with the slide.

00:43:11 SPEAKER_382: Just to introduce myself, my name is Dan Goen.

00:43:21 SPEAKER_382: I'm actually a product of United States Navy Labs.

00:43:29 SPEAKER_382: About 26 years ago I got out of government labs and went to work in public utilities; I worked for Indianapolis Power & Light.

00:43:33 SPEAKER_382: My instructions from Mr. Humke, the Vice President, was: "Automate everything that wasn't bolted down."

00:43:35 SPEAKER_382: My next project after IPL was a place called Midcontinent ISO.

00:43:38 SPEAKER_382: I'm the guy that designed the computer system that controls the power grids for 26 states and parts of Canada.

00:43:40 SPEAKER_382: After that project, after the great East Coast power outage, which I know all of you have heard about, I was at the keyboards when all that happened.

00:43:41 SPEAKER_382: I went to work at General Electric.

00:43:44 SPEAKER_382: I'm the guy that wrote the fuel control software for the LM6000 gas turbine.

00:43:45 SPEAKER_382: Went to work at Lilly for a number of years, working from a couple of their different systems, and have been working in the energy sphere since then.

00:43:49 SPEAKER_307: A lot of us have basically known that the energy crisis would be coming upon us, mainly because it's just in the math.

00:43:56 SPEAKER_307: I'm an engineer, I'm an engineer, and that's my disclaimer.

00:44:01 SPEAKER_307: Anyway, so we'll go ahead and get started with the presentation.

00:44:05 SPEAKER_307: It's for Spill Company.

00:44:12 SPEAKER_381: You see the next one there, the notice.

00:44:19 SPEAKER_381: Yeah, notice.

00:44:24 SPEAKER_381: Yep.

00:44:28 SPEAKER_381: So this is simply for educational purposes only.

00:44:28 SPEAKER_381: Understand this is considered to be reliable.

00:44:31 SPEAKER_381: Any statements or opinions are subject to change without notice.

00:44:33 SPEAKER_381: Information presented is for educational purposes only.

00:44:39 SPEAKER_381: So the next one here.

00:44:44 SPEAKER_381: So this plant here is called Perry K. It's in downtown Indianapolis.

00:44:57 SPEAKER_381: It's actually behind the Convention Center.

00:45:03 SPEAKER_381: Perry K is a syngas plant.

00:45:13 SPEAKER_381: It was built in 1870 when the Indianapolis Power and Light Company provided the necessary public service, which was street gas lighting.

00:45:21 SPEAKER_383: Today, this plant's primary customer is Eli Lilly, one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world.

00:45:30 SPEAKER_383: Eli Lilly is located three blocks away, east of the plant.

00:45:42 SPEAKER_383: Eli Lilly polymerizes the syngas into plastic-coated examples; it's a starting place for making many of the drugs that we use today.

00:45:43 SPEAKER_383: Right, syngas is a mixture of carbon monoxide and hydrogen mainly.

00:45:44 SPEAKER_383: Next one here.

00:45:46 SPEAKER_383: So the process.

00:45:49 SPEAKER_383: Let's review the process.

00:45:55 SPEAKER_383: So gasification is a reaction between hot carbon and water to form carbon monoxide and hydrogen.

00:46:01 SPEAKER_383: Syngas or water gas is what is known as a process that's over 400 years old.

00:46:08 SPEAKER_383: There are catalysts that can reduce initial react temperature of the reaction, but the reaction is exothermic.

00:46:13 SPEAKER_383: The gas produces at least 50% hydrogen, and the remaining share is made up of carbon monoxide, ammonia, and other aromatic compounds which are moved through a device called a bubbler.

00:46:15 SPEAKER_383: Eli Lilly has other processes where they use molecular sieves to purify the gas even that much more.

00:46:20 SPEAKER_383: And what we're going to talk about today is coal gasification, and that uses that syngas process.

00:46:25 SPEAKER_307: If you can see what that is there, and syngas can be polymerized into a lot of different things.

00:46:27 SPEAKER_307: What we're going to focus on today is what's called the Fischer-Tropsch process, where the syngas, basically syngas is passed through metal tubes.

00:46:31 SPEAKER_307: The syngas is passed through metal tubes full of iron oxide, which turns it into a type of gasoline, diesel, and different types of wax.

00:46:34 SPEAKER_307: So basically, I know Charlie had asked me said Dan, if we were going to convert like all the coal in the United States into these synthetic fuels, you know what would that look like?

00:46:37 SPEAKER_307: What would be the logistics of what this would look like?

00:46:45 SPEAKER_307: That's what he had asked.

00:46:52 SPEAKER_382: Right.

00:46:56 SPEAKER_382: So that's what we're looking at here.

00:47:02 SPEAKER_382: Now, first of all, we gotta—we're looking at coal.

00:47:04 SPEAKER_382: All the things about coal that you have to be worried about putting into this process.

00:47:06 SPEAKER_382: Now, I'm not going to go into how efficient the process is or isn't.

00:47:09 SPEAKER_382: What we're just going to talk about: what the logistics going into the process, and it goes syngas from coal.

00:47:10 SPEAKER_382: So, the first thing you have to worry about is actual quality of the coal because there's just no simple coal.

00:47:11 SPEAKER_382: There are actually three different grades of coal.

00:47:16 SPEAKER_382: At the top, you've got anthracite, which is greater than 80% carbon content.

00:47:25 SPEAKER_382: That was a good coal we used to get out of Pennsylvania, less than 20% ash.

00:47:29 SPEAKER_382: The power plants have not seen that type of coal in 60 years, right?

00:47:30 SPEAKER_382: Today they usually call that coal metallurgical coal.

00:47:33 SPEAKER_382: But most the plants that use coke, which is used in steel manufacturing, they wouldn't use coke from a coal source.

00:47:36 SPEAKER_382: They rather use coke from a refinery because that's a much higher quality of carbon.

00:47:42 SPEAKER_382: Anybody knows anything about steel knows about the inputs or what's important.

00:47:44 SPEAKER_382: The next grade is what a lot of the power plants these days use, which is called bitumen, and bitumen is between 40 to 80 percent carbon content.

00:47:51 SPEAKER_382: Basically, roughly half of it is ash or not carbon, and you can't turn into syngas.

00:47:57 SPEAKER_382: It's also noted that for all practical purposes commercially, all the bitumen in the United States will be out by twenty thirty two.

00:48:05 SPEAKER_382: In other words, so if you're hoping to start up—and I hate to tell you this—but the fuel is probably not there to do that.

00:48:06 SPEAKER_382: The last one is lignite.

00:48:11 SPEAKER_382: Lignite is less than 40 percent carbon content.

00:48:12 SPEAKER_382: You got to remember that less than forty percent.

00:48:14 SPEAKER_382: If you've ever seen this stuff, it's brown in color.

00:48:19 SPEAKER_382: It's crumbly.

00:48:24 SPEAKER_382: It has a high water content.

00:48:28 SPEAKER_382: So you have to understand that two thirds of this is ash or non-carbon.

00:48:36 SPEAKER_382: If you're going to try to use this as a source going into this.

00:48:45 SPEAKER_382: Now the experts out there will say that the United States has something like three hundred years worth of coal reserves.

00:48:54 SPEAKER_382: The truth is, it's 300 years' worth of lignite in reserve?

00:48:58 SPEAKER_382: Any questions so far?

00:49:02 SPEAKER_382: Um, no. Well, I had—there was a YouTube comment—it said, "How many data centers are interested in Dan's coal projects?"

00:49:08 SPEAKER_382: Well, I'm not here to talk about coal.

00:49:20 SPEAKER_382: I'm talking about turning coal into a liquid fuel like diesel or gasoline or something like that.

00:49:29 SPEAKER_382: That's what we're okay discussing.

00:49:37 SPEAKER_382: And then so did I understand correctly?

00:49:42 SPEAKER_382: You were saying that we're going to run out of bitumen for using coal plants by twenty thirty two.

00:49:46 SPEAKER_382: By 2032, yes, all the commercial quantities of bitumen will have been mined out.

00:49:51 SPEAKER_382: It doesn't mean there won't be any bitumen out there; it's just that the levels will have fallen to the point where it's not commercially viable to mine.

00:49:51 SPEAKER_382: Okay, I see.

00:49:54 SPEAKER_382: So so does that mean that they'll—we have to shut down?

00:49:55 SPEAKER_382: That means a lot of those coal plants will be forced into shutting down once they've expended their coal contracts.

00:49:57 SPEAKER_382: They won't be renewing the contract.

00:49:59 SPEAKER_382: The other thing you have to remember is that whenever power plants, especially coal-fired power plants, become 50 years old, it's time to remodel.

00:49:59 SPEAKER_382: Which means you've already paid off your mortgage with the bank.

00:50:02 SPEAKER_382: Which means you have to go to the banker to get financing to rebuild your plant into a new plant.

00:50:02 SPEAKER_382: And the banker is not going to refinance you because of the coal issue.

00:50:03 SPEAKER_382: So if you're going to build something else, they'll do it.

00:50:04 SPEAKER_382: But if it's going to be coal, he's going to say, "Show me you've got 30 years worth of coal out there."

00:50:08 SPEAKER_382: You're going to have a hard time proving that since all the commercial quantities of bitumen have been mined, the economics of coal production are gone.

00:50:10 SPEAKER_382: So this is—if I was going to build a syngas plant and I was going to put it on top of a coal deposit—put a syngas plant on top of a coal deposit.

00:50:16 SPEAKER_382: So let's say for example I've got an anthracite deposit.

00:50:22 SPEAKER_382: So you're going to consume 1.2 parts diesel just moving around this material, and what I mean by that from actually mining the anthracite to disposing of the ash would be 1.2 parts diesel.

00:50:25 SPEAKER_382: Let's say, for example, you switch over to bituminous coal.

00:50:27 SPEAKER_382: You're going to be consuming three times as much diesel as what you would be if you had put the plant on top of an anthracite mine,

00:50:34 SPEAKER_382: simply because remember half this material is going to be ash, and on top of that, two tons of bitumen will have to be consumed to equal the carbon content of one ton of anthracite.

00:50:44 SPEAKER_382: And the last one is if I magically picked up my syngas plant and I put it on top of a lignite mine, right?

00:50:50 SPEAKER_382: I'd be consuming five times as much diesel because remember, two thirds of what I'm using is not carbon and isn't going to be turned into syngas.

00:50:59 SPEAKER_382: Okay?

00:51:07 SPEAKER_382: Can't you burn some of the coal and move things around in electric trucks?

00:51:09 SPEAKER_382: Yeah, you probably can, but you got to look at what's the source.

00:51:18 SPEAKER_382: I mean, if you're turning syngas into diesel, you're going to be burning five times as much diesel compared to let's say converting anthracite into diesel.

00:51:34 SPEAKER_382: Okay.

00:51:37 SPEAKER_382: Yeah, you could have electric, but what's the source?

00:51:37 SPEAKER_382: Is it...

00:51:38 SPEAKER_382: Yeah, I'm wondering how coal—huh?

00:51:47 SPEAKER_382: I'm sorry.

00:51:48 SPEAKER_382: The coal.

00:51:52 SPEAKER_382: Yeah, you could turn some of that anthracite, some of that coal into diesel.

00:52:04 SPEAKER_382: That's true.

00:52:10 SPEAKER_382: You could do that.

00:52:14 SPEAKER_382: In fact, that's the idea.

00:52:19 SPEAKER_382: You're turning coal into liquid fuel, like diesel or gasoline or something like that.

00:52:20 SPEAKER_382: Okay.

00:52:29 SPEAKER_382: Barbara has a question: "Hey Dan, when you say parts, are you just talking about a BTU trade-off?"

00:52:34 SPEAKER_382: I'm saying you're going to be burning five times the amount of diesel compared to if you were...

00:52:35 SPEAKER_382: What I'm saying is, if I was turning anthracite into diesel...

00:52:42 SPEAKER_382: Oh no, but at the very first one.

00:52:44 SPEAKER_382: I'm sorry.

00:52:56 SPEAKER_382: For one ton of anthracite: 1.2 parts?

00:52:59 SPEAKER_382: Uh, what are "parts"?

00:53:07 SPEAKER_382: Is it a comparison of BTUs?

00:53:13 SPEAKER_382: One metric ton.

00:53:18 SPEAKER_382: If I take here's an amount of diesel for me to move one metric ton—a metric ton of diesel for a ton of anthracite—I'm saying... [unclear] anthracite will require so much diesel to move.

00:53:24 SPEAKER_382: If I pick up my syngas plant and move it and put it on top of lignite, I'm going to be increasing my diesel consumption by five times.

00:53:24 SPEAKER_382: I'm increasing my diesel consumption five times because I have to mine three tons of lignite to equal one ton of anthracite, and remember, two-thirds of this is ash.

00:53:24 SPEAKER_382: So there's two tons of ash I've got to get rid of.

00:53:32 SPEAKER_382: Yep.

00:53:41 SPEAKER_382: Does that make sense?

00:53:45 SPEAKER_382: Oh yeah.

00:53:51 SPEAKER_382: Because I went from a form of carbon that's high quality to a form of carbon that's low quality.

00:53:51 SPEAKER_382: Okay.

00:53:59 SPEAKER_382: So the amount of diesel...

00:54:00 SPEAKER_382: So are you saying that we would use a ton of diesel to?

00:54:04 SPEAKER_382: I'm not saying anything about the diesel.

00:54:10 SPEAKER_382: All I'm saying is, if I'm using lignite, I have to consume three tons of lignite to equal one ton of anthracite when I'm converting into diesel,

00:54:16 SPEAKER_382: and that process will consume five times more diesel than if I was trying to convert anthracite into diesel.

00:54:22 SPEAKER_382: Okay, Dan?

00:54:28 SPEAKER_382: Also, we were just talking about the size of these projects, right?

00:54:34 SPEAKER_382: Lignites are usually open-pit mines, and they literally cover a county.

00:54:36 SPEAKER_382: Yeah, yeah.

00:54:41 SPEAKER_382: You know, and if you haven't seen the big ones, the amount of material you have to move to keep your economics down—you would have to have giant pit mines to even make this work.

00:54:47 SPEAKER_382: What if your lignite was a bunch of these small little deposits scattered all over the place?

00:54:54 SPEAKER_382: It could quickly become uneconomical from the simple...

00:55:03 SPEAKER_382: Yeah, you can't transport it.

00:55:08 SPEAKER_382: Yeah, you know; you have to do it right on top of the lignite.

00:55:13 SPEAKER_382: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:55:19 SPEAKER_382: That's what I'm trying to describe: the difference between using a high-quality source of carbon versus going over basically to a low-quality form of carbon.

00:55:20 SPEAKER_382: Remember—they say that we in the United States have three hundred years' worth of coal.

00:55:24 SPEAKER_382: What they're not selling you is this late-night stuff, right?

00:55:35 SPEAKER_382: That is very uneconomic when you actually do it because of what I'm talking about.

00:55:38 SPEAKER_382: Yeah; I mean, it seems to me we'll use it for plastics maybe, but—not for transportation.

00:55:43 SPEAKER_382: We could probably put a lot of other forms of carbon in the process to make it work.

00:55:46 SPEAKER_382: Actually, plastic is a higher-quality source of carbon than lignite would be.

00:55:54 SPEAKER_382: So we're going to mine our old dumps that are full of plastic, right?

00:55:59 SPEAKER_382: Yeah; yeah.

00:56:01 SPEAKER_382: If you did this process... there's another way of doing this without going through this headache.

00:56:02 SPEAKER_382: The reason why I put this presentation together is because I have some folks at the Department of Energy who are thinking about using this process to supplement the diesel supply in the United States.

00:56:07 SPEAKER_382: So what I have to do is go back and retrain people to say, "Here's how we worked on it; here's why we didn't."

00:56:10 SPEAKER_382: Issues?

00:56:16 SPEAKER_382: So I'm gonna have to do a lot of training because people forgot why we didn't do [it].

00:56:22 SPEAKER_382: Okay, fine.

00:56:33 SPEAKER_382: Go to the next page here.

00:56:42 SPEAKER_382: So what I did: The above scenario is taken from a calculator from the Petroleum Institute, and providing internet data, current reserve levels are as of 2020; levels are now as of 2025.

00:56:45 SPEAKER_382: The U.S. would consume all of its coal in 9.2 years using this process.

00:56:48 SPEAKER_382: So, the United States: when the economy is good, we consume about 21 million barrels per day of transportation fuel; when the economy is not doing well,

00:56:49 SPEAKER_382: it's about 19 million barrels per day of transportation fuel.

00:56:51 SPEAKER_382: If we were using a syngas process, it would require roughly 2,094,657 metric tons of carbon per day—we'd need to produce that much liquid fuel for the United States.

00:56:52 SPEAKER_382: If you were using anthracite, it would be two million five hundred thirteen thousand five hundred eighty-eight metric tons per day;

00:56:54 SPEAKER_382: we would have to basically mine and deliver [it] to the syngas plant to make liquid fuels to supply the United States with transportation fuel.

00:57:06 SPEAKER_382: And down at the bottom...

00:57:11 SPEAKER_382: So I've got lignite: It would be six million two hundred eighty-three thousand nine hundred seventy-one metric tons per day of lignite;

00:57:25 SPEAKER_382: you would have to deliver it to the syngas plant to make enough transportation fuel for the United States, right?

00:57:44 SPEAKER_382: So the point being is, according to those calculations, the United States would exhaust its reserves of coal within 9.2 years.

00:57:49 SPEAKER_383: So this is not... a scenario that...

00:58:02 SPEAKER_383: And on top of that: when you did that—remember when they removed all that carbon, all the things that were in the coal before—from mercury, cadmium, and so forth;

00:58:15 SPEAKER_382: removing the carbon actually concentrates how toxic the ash is.

00:58:22 SPEAKER_382: So it ends up being one of the largest hazardous material problems that would probably plague the United States going into the future.

00:58:26 SPEAKER_382: Because what would you do with all this spent ash and all the toxic aspects of the ash?

00:58:30 SPEAKER_382: And how would you ameliorate it?

00:58:34 SPEAKER_382: Questions so far; I'll let this sink in a little bit.

00:58:35 SPEAKER_382: So I was just investigating about the previous one, and it was saying that according to these calculations, it needs about ten liters of diesel for one ton of coal—but but it's for bitumen,

00:58:37 SPEAKER_382: it's closer to twenty to forty liters.

00:58:46 SPEAKER_382: But yeah; anyways, when you went to like that—it'd be five times...

00:58:50 SPEAKER_382: Yeah, yeah.

00:58:55 SPEAKER_382: Well, especially when you're doing the equivalent energy because that—that—that's just based on one ton.

00:59:03 SPEAKER_382: It's just that bitumen is harder to get.

00:59:10 SPEAKER_382: German lignite is just harder to get on its own, so but you need more of it; so that increases it proportionally.

00:59:18 SPEAKER_382: On top of that: I just had a question—did the Germans and the South Africans use anthracite when they did coal-to-liquid?

00:59:26 SPEAKER_382: Were they using anthracite?

00:59:33 SPEAKER_382: Well, during World War II, the Germans were using lignite—you know, lignite.

00:59:36 SPEAKER_382: Yeah; and obviously after World War II, they ceased using that process.

00:59:42 SPEAKER_382: In fact, a lot of the coal they're burning in Germany today is lignite.

00:59:44 SPEAKER_382: In fact, when the Germans shut off natural gas coming out of Russia,

00:59:49 SPEAKER_382: they actually dug up a wind farm to get at the lignite to burn in a coal-fired power plant to supplement their power grid today.

00:59:56 SPEAKER_382: So but the thing about it is: you have to remember that even though they're doing it, it's a mercy case for producing power in their power grid.

01:00:03 SPEAKER_382: The question is: how many acres do they have left before they're back to square one—basically in an energy deficit?

01:00:06 SPEAKER_382: But Ivor—you talked about Sasol; and I've got this right here: gas-to-liquids, so Sasol.

01:00:09 SPEAKER_382: That's a company out of South Africa; it's just a South African synthetic oil company—that's what that means.

01:00:14 SPEAKER_382: Sasol has built a Lake Charles facility there in Louisiana.

01:00:15 SPEAKER_382: That facility was announced in 2011;

01:00:22 SPEAKER_382: it cost $12.9 billion—twelve point nine billion dollars—and the process they were doing was gas-to-liquids because the theory was we had so much extra natural gas we could use it to make all these synthetic fuels.

01:00:25 SPEAKER_382: And whenever oil prices dropped out in 2014, it pretty much put this plant out of business.

01:00:32 SPEAKER_382: Currently, they're dismantling it; and the reason why is: when you start scaling this plant,

01:00:42 SPEAKER_382: the size of the plant takes on its own life—where the size of the plant can literally make this uneconomical because you're turning gas into liquid.

01:00:44 SPEAKER_382: Giving an example: they made an engineering change in the plant that cost $430 million and 18 months to make it happen; had to do just playing with the size of the plant.

01:00:46 SPEAKER_382: So the point is: it's not like this hasn't been done—it has been—and the only reason why it works there in South Africa is because it's subsidized by the South African government.

01:00:50 SPEAKER_382: If it wasn't for that, it wouldn't be a viable operation.

01:01:00 SPEAKER_382: But the reason why they did it is because at that time, the theory is back in the 50s when they built the sawdust South Africa that had all this, all this coal.

01:01:01 SPEAKER_382: But according to the reports I've seen, depending on the rate of consumption there in South Africa, in the next 10 years,

01:01:02 SPEAKER_382: we'll have mined out all the commercial quantities of coal that they have there in South Africa.

01:01:03 SPEAKER_382: And it goes back to you know these fossil fuel resources are finite.

01:01:14 SPEAKER_382: You know they have a finite life time, and we're going to consume them quite, quite, quite quickly.

01:01:20 SPEAKER_382: And here's a good example of how that's playing out.

01:01:23 SPEAKER_382: Okay.

01:01:25 SPEAKER_382: Yeah, and I got here in this here.

01:01:33 SPEAKER_382: I just go back to that my regular energy chart comparison between the batteries and all those different fuels and the lower the heating value in the joules per kilogram.

01:01:42 SPEAKER_307: And it still goes back to you know when you're talking about energy content and storing energy, we have like I said, we have some infinite power sources out there.

01:01:54 SPEAKER_307: One of them happens to be that geothermal because the planet is molten.

01:01:58 SPEAKER_307: One of the sources of energy we have out there, I haven't talked a lot about, is actually nuclear power.

01:02:06 SPEAKER_307: And the reason why, and this isn't true for every country in the world, but it is true for the United States.

01:02:08 SPEAKER_307: The United States, one of the bigger problems we have is we're not recycling our spent fuel.

01:02:09 SPEAKER_307: If we simply recycle if we simply recycled our spent nuclear fuel, we could power the United States for 500 years just on the plutonium that's in our spent fuel.

01:02:11 SPEAKER_389: And there's a way of taking all the depleted uranium that we have in storage and turning it into nuclear fuel.

01:02:13 SPEAKER_389: And if we did that, we could power the United States for 5,000 years just on nuclear fuel.

01:02:20 SPEAKER_389: And as far as I'm concerned, one of the best uses for weapons-grade plutonium is to simply blend it down into nuclear fuel and turn electricity.

01:02:25 SPEAKER_382: Electricity—that's actually the best way of getting at it.

01:02:35 SPEAKER_382: But but the key here is recycling it.

01:02:38 SPEAKER_382: If you can recycle your spent fuel, you can drastically reduce the radioactivity and the toxicity of fuel.

01:02:41 SPEAKER_382: Most toxic element in that spent fuel is plutonium.

01:02:41 SPEAKER_382: If you turn that fuel and use it, that be an excellent way of doing it.

01:02:42 SPEAKER_382: And just as a word of note, the largest deposit of uranium and thorium in the solar system is actually on the planet Mars.

01:02:52 SPEAKER_382: The size of state of Texas.

01:03:00 SPEAKER_382: Any powdered sand six kilometers deep, and there's enough fuel there that could power humankind for millions and millions of years.

01:03:05 SPEAKER_382: So that's why I've come down to those places where geothermal is inappropriate.

01:03:07 SPEAKER_382: Probably one of the better solutions would be nuclear power.

01:03:14 SPEAKER_382: And the United States Navy has an excellent track record when it comes to nuclear power.

01:03:20 SPEAKER_382: I wish they would ask us how to do it because we actually have an idea.

01:03:24 SPEAKER_382: And I think Simon knows.

01:03:31 SPEAKER_382: Think Simon noted that the United States Navy is funding the Chinese to do molten salt reactor testing.

01:03:34 SPEAKER_382: That's true, Simon, and we're looking forward to how that's going to work out.

01:03:42 SPEAKER_382: But but anyway, this chart here, when you're talking about transportation fuel, the most practical thing you can come with is an inexpensive source of electricity.

01:03:52 SPEAKER_382: Seventy percent of the planet is covered by water, and when it comes to bang for the buck or joules per kilogram,

01:03:53 SPEAKER_382: one of the cleanest fuels we have on that list right there is hydrogen at a hundred twenty million two thousand ten joules per kilogram.

01:04:05 SPEAKER_382: You burn hydrogen, you simply get water.

01:04:28 SPEAKER_382: Most so it has the highest energy content.

01:04:30 SPEAKER_382: It's also the greenest fuel we actually have out there.

01:04:51 SPEAKER_382: Yeah, and that's simply you know basically the penalty of a failure to adapt.

01:05:02 SPEAKER_382: And of course, I've got those carbon fiber tanks there on the left hand side.

01:05:07 SPEAKER_382: Any questions?

01:05:08 SPEAKER_382: Any questions from the panel?

01:05:10 SPEAKER_382: Everybody's quiet.

01:05:12 SPEAKER_382: So I was just looking up about Germany.

01:05:16 SPEAKER_382: It says they produced ninety-one million tons of lignite in twenty twenty-four, and their plants are about thirty-five percent efficient, and so they have enough for thirteen years,

01:05:20 SPEAKER_382: based on the one point two billion tons that's currently developed.

01:05:29 SPEAKER_382: But I don't know what percentage of their electricity that is.

01:05:29 SPEAKER_382: And I would like to go ahead.

01:05:32 SPEAKER_382: The biggest issue there is base load.

01:05:37 SPEAKER_382: You need to have a certain amount of base load to keep your power grid stable, and that's one of the issues with wind power.

01:05:37 SPEAKER_382: Is that you know the wind doesn't blow all the time, the sun doesn't shine all the time, and so you need a certain amount of base load just to keep your power grid stable.

01:05:38 SPEAKER_382: I mean, right now we're everybody's watching Spain right now because they're on the edge of a heat wave, and everybody's watching their frequency, the power grid there in Spain and Portugal,

01:05:41 SPEAKER_382: and we're wondering if we're going to have another rolling blackouts coming at the end of this month, going into July.

01:05:48 SPEAKER_382: Imagine Simon can probably talk to you more about that, about Spain's power grid, and grid stability.

01:05:52 SPEAKER_382: So, but that's the reason why the Germans are burning lignite on these old coal-fired power plants to keep their power grid stable.

01:06:00 SPEAKER_382: Yeah, Simon, did you want to speak to that?

01:06:03 SPEAKER_382: Just got unmute.

01:06:17 SPEAKER_382: Of course, I've got it unmute.

01:06:24 SPEAKER_382: I get busted so many times, eh?

01:06:33 SPEAKER_382: I get busted so many times.

01:06:41 SPEAKER_382: So the Spain power grid, it was a very serious event that the financial world at large saw, and within a couple of days,

01:06:57 SPEAKER_382: they bank side of the equation had withdrawn from renewable energy as a direct consequence.

01:07:00 SPEAKER_382: When you hear the speakers for solar and wind discuss what went wrong, it's like watching a game of pass the parcel in an 1980s Irish post office.

01:07:04 SPEAKER_382: Yeah, it's a brutal, fast and furious game of pass the buck.

01:07:15 SPEAKER_382: The problem is with wind and solar when they actually run just got back in.

01:07:18 SPEAKER_382: Yep.

01:07:23 SPEAKER_382: G'day, Charlie.

01:07:30 SPEAKER_382: The problem is with wind and solar.

01:07:33 SPEAKER_382: If you don't have some sort of buffering or balancing system, you know power engineers have to move heaven and earth to keep this thing stable,

01:07:36 SPEAKER_382: and my understanding is looking at the Chinese systems is wind and solar.

01:07:37 SPEAKER_382: If it gets to more than 12% of the energy mix, the whole grid becomes unstable and very difficult to manage.

01:07:39 SPEAKER_382: So there is a cap here.

01:07:44 SPEAKER_382: It's understood.

01:07:51 SPEAKER_382: The commercial world has quietly stepped back from wind and solar as a direct problem of instability, and I think there are several technologies now coming into line that are not politically correct to talk about,

01:07:52 SPEAKER_382: but they've been commercialized.

01:07:54 SPEAKER_382: And Dan, your geothermal—you know, deep drilling—fits into that category.

01:07:55 SPEAKER_382: What it is is having somebody who built grid systems before: what keeps voltage stability is inverters.

01:07:58 SPEAKER_382: Whether you're using wind, those are variable AC devices; we turn that into DC and then back into 60 or 50 hertz AC.

01:08:03 SPEAKER_382: Those inverters have a hard time maintaining voltage stability.

01:08:04 SPEAKER_382: The reason why turbines are able to do that—and it doesn't matter whether it's coal or nuclear or geothermal or gas—is the turbine weighs tons and is spinning.

01:08:10 SPEAKER_382: And there's something called inertia: anything in motion wants to keep in motion.

01:08:15 SPEAKER_382: That spinning motion, that giant 30-, 10-, 20-, or 30-ton worth of metal is basically resisting instability in the grid and keeping it stable because that piece of metal doesn't want to slow down;

01:08:28 SPEAKER_382: that's how you maintain frequency stability.

01:08:31 SPEAKER_382: Another way of doing it: if you don't want to use a turbine, gas turbine, steam, or something like that,

01:08:37 SPEAKER_382: you can use basically a centrifuge—a great big huge spinning wheel that's really heavy and do something similar.

01:08:42 SPEAKER_382: But this is one of the limitations: inverters are not able to maintain frequency because they're electronics; it's not a piece of big metal that can resist instability.

01:08:56 SPEAKER_382: So what about batteries?

01:08:57 SPEAKER_382: Large battery banks?

01:09:00 SPEAKER_382: Batteries are DC; they feed inverters.

01:09:03 SPEAKER_382: That was where my head was going.

01:09:05 SPEAKER_382: Here's where this started, Barbara, and this probably goes into your area: MISO.

01:09:08 SPEAKER_382: How we measure it—I've got the charts I think I showed before—we curtail seven terawatts of wind every year.

01:09:18 SPEAKER_382: What that is is a wind turbine where they apply the brakes and the blades aren't moving.

01:09:21 SPEAKER_382: Yep, not moving.

01:09:22 SPEAKER_382: You look at the wind farm; other turbines are spinning, but there's a couple where the blades aren't moving.

01:09:27 SPEAKER_382: That's curtailment.

01:09:28 SPEAKER_382: The wind's blowing; we're not using the power.

01:09:30 SPEAKER_382: The problem with applying the brakes is that the wind is still pushing on the blade and it wears out bearings.

01:09:37 SPEAKER_382: Eventually, it wears them out enough to start slipping.

01:09:41 SPEAKER_382: You got to break applied [brakes], but this thing's slipping and generates enough heat—it'll get red hot—and the wind turbine will catch fire.

01:09:49 SPEAKER_382: What we would rather do is allow the turbine to free spin all the time; you put that extra energy into a battery to store it.

01:10:00 SPEAKER_307: But here's the problem: when I went back and looked at this using British construction techniques,

01:10:14 SPEAKER_307: building a battery 200 miles by 300 miles by 75 yards tall—if ever hit by lightning—it'd be the largest chemical fire in history.

01:10:23 SPEAKER_307: Second part is according to Simon's calculations: there's not enough lithium on the planet to build that battery to begin with.

01:10:27 SPEAKER_307: Okay?

01:10:32 SPEAKER_382: How I came up with the solution was simply this: on the power grid, we have all these what-we-call peaker units—gas turbines located in certain parts of the power grid to maintain stability.

01:10:42 SPEAKER_382: What I propose is you drill a well, build an electrolyzer that turns water and electricity into hydrogen gas; one of my compressors stores massive amounts—I mean thousands of metric tons of hydrogen underground.

01:10:55 SPEAKER_382: In fact, I already know what the figure is: it's 143,000 metric tons of hydrogen in the ground.

01:11:01 SPEAKER_382: Take those seven terawatts of energy, turn them into hydrogen gas stored underground, and when you need power, bring that gas back up, burn it in a gas turbine,

01:11:09 SPEAKER_382: and put the power back on the grid.

01:11:15 SPEAKER_382: Now, efficiency isn't all that great because I'm turning seven trillion watts—terawatts—of power into 1.5 terawatts worth of usable power; so efficiency is not great.

01:11:19 SPEAKER_382: The advantage is the solution is scalable and environmentally friendly.

01:11:21 SPEAKER_382: But of course, oil and gas guys hate my guts.

01:11:30 SPEAKER_382: So here's where we are: it makes too much sense.

01:11:34 SPEAKER_382: Well, they hate my guts—I would stop burning their gas, therefore they're not going to make money selling me gas because I'd be able to make up in hydrogen; yeah,

01:11:41 SPEAKER_382: be able to make it all up in hydrogen by burning it.

01:11:45 SPEAKER_382: Oh, by the way, when I talk to EPA guys about it, they loved it—you know why?

01:11:51 SPEAKER_381: Because it's environmentally free and green: when you burn hydrogen, all you get is steam.

01:12:03 SPEAKER_381: But what do you think about storing it in home batteries?

01:12:05 SPEAKER_381: Same problem: you can't make enough batteries; also, the inverter is too slow.

01:12:08 SPEAKER_381: Battery is a DC device; you got to turn it to AC with the power grid.

01:12:12 SPEAKER_381: That inverter turns DC into 60-hertz AC and has that voltage stability problem turbines solve because they're just pieces of metal spinning.

01:12:24 SPEAKER_381: The simple solution: I have this little chart I made just seconds ago, just to extend what we were talking about.

01:12:41 SPEAKER_381: So—this is—I don't know if you can see it—but it talks...

01:12:46 SPEAKER_381: Can you make it a little bigger?

01:12:48 SPEAKER_381: A little better?

01:12:49 SPEAKER_381: Okay.

01:12:53 SPEAKER_381: Yeah, here's that; better?

01:12:54 SPEAKER_381: That's a little better.

01:12:56 SPEAKER_381: Thank you.

01:13:00 SPEAKER_381: Yeah, yeah—that's even good.

01:13:02 SPEAKER_381: Oh no, it's back.

01:13:11 SPEAKER_381: Okay, hold on.

01:13:15 SPEAKER_381: Are you back?

01:13:24 SPEAKER_381: I'm just trying to get to the top here.

01:13:33 SPEAKER_381: Okay: lignite-to-liquids is 0.4 to 0.7 barrels per ton; bituminous or subbituminous coal-to-liquids is 1.3 to 2 barrels per ton for liquid fuel output.

01:13:38 SPEAKER_381: So if Germany produced 91 megatons of lignite in 2024, has 1.2 billion tons accessible and currently available—if they decided to use coal-to-liquids—they would have about a year's worth of plausible mineable path;

01:13:46 SPEAKER_381: using the entire 35.4 billion tons of coal they have available gives them an extension to 20 years.

01:13:59 SPEAKER_381: Now United States: if it were to do this, it has 249 billion tons—or 200 or 229—and that wouldn't be enough for 39 to 60 years; but at currently producing mines,

01:14:18 SPEAKER_381: it would be about three years of liquid fuel.

01:14:22 SPEAKER_381: Canada would have about 16 to 25 years.

01:14:26 SPEAKER_381: But I don't think we do: oh, it says Canada's coal is heavily metallurgical so it'd compete against steelmaking.

01:14:39 SPEAKER_381: So anyhow—you get the idea that if we were to go coal-to-liquids, our currently developed mines would only be good for two to three years of actual use;

01:14:51 SPEAKER_381: and so we'd have to expand our coal mines extremely rapidly.

01:14:55 SPEAKER_381: And even then, it would only be enough for a couple decades at most.

01:14:59 SPEAKER_381: Yeah.

01:15:00 SPEAKER_381: And if you think that my—you know—two percent of the farmlands is going to go to solar farms in Wisconsin.

01:15:06 SPEAKER_382: Twenty to thirty percent of the ranch and farmland in North Texas is going to get those lignite mines.

01:15:13 SPEAKER_382: Yeah, well, and the other thing too: we're going to be paying them.

01:15:17 SPEAKER_382: Think about the price because of overhead; the price is going to be three times.

01:15:22 SPEAKER_382: So if you're paying five dollars a gallon for diesel now, it'll be fifteen.

01:15:26 SPEAKER_382: And how practical is that?

01:15:27 SPEAKER_382: The truth is, Barbara, more likely what will happen—for example—you have companies like JCB over in England that build tractors powered by hydrogen, and that's a more practical solution, right?

01:15:37 SPEAKER_382: And on top of that, you can build scalable hydrogen systems big enough for your farming community.

01:15:42 SPEAKER_382: I can also make green ammonia with a much smaller plant, and you can supply the fuel locally rather than relying on huge transportation systems.

01:15:50 SPEAKER_382: You wouldn't believe how much energy is expended in pipelines and trucks just transporting fuel out to where you're at.

01:15:57 SPEAKER_382: Oh yes, yeah—versus if you have a local energy source, you can make it locally; it's more efficient.

01:16:06 SPEAKER_382: There's a lot better way of doing it.

01:16:07 SPEAKER_382: Just one again: it's a lot better fuel.

01:16:11 SPEAKER_382: Okay, Charlie has something.

01:16:19 SPEAKER_382: Was did you want a minute, Charlie?

01:16:19 SPEAKER_382: Or ah, go ahead.

01:16:35 SPEAKER_382: My email is intermittent; I'm camping.

01:16:38 SPEAKER_382: Um, I invite everybody—Barbara and Dan—to email me about continuing or contributing to our journal.

01:16:40 SPEAKER_382: Yeah, all this should be in one place.

01:16:42 SPEAKER_382: And Simon just said he was fairly treated in our review process—which involves good people but tough reviewers—and so send me everything we're talking about here.

01:16:52 SPEAKER_382: We can put it in short pieces if you don't like to write long ones; I can help.

01:16:59 SPEAKER_382: Let's have a forum because, I think, this place has the best conversations and there's so much bullshit out there.

01:17:11 SPEAKER_382: So send me your ideas and I'll help you formulate your articles.

01:17:19 SPEAKER_382: And we're in an existing well-run journal with a new section called Biophysical Economics.

01:17:29 SPEAKER_382: All right, I think Charlie—Andrew, if you can send me some of the stuff you've got on coal, Andrew, just send me that too;

01:17:39 SPEAKER_382: I'll include it along with what I have so we can merge our stuff together because you had okay—I'm gonna go now.

01:17:42 SPEAKER_382: Okay.

01:17:44 SPEAKER_382: So thanks, Charlie—but thanks again, Charlie.

01:17:52 SPEAKER_382: Please, let's try to get this all in one place.

01:17:56 SPEAKER_382: Okay.

01:17:56 SPEAKER_382: Sounds good.

01:17:58 SPEAKER_382: Okay.

01:18:03 SPEAKER_382: Bye.

01:18:03 SPEAKER_382: See you.

01:18:10 SPEAKER_382: So I can confirm: I've been working with Charlie's journals just recently, and they are indeed very good.

01:18:13 SPEAKER_382: They're actually—I would argue—the nicest and most professional journal to work with that I've worked with so far.

01:18:19 SPEAKER_382: So yeah—what's the name of the journal?

01:18:38 SPEAKER_382: Frontiers.

01:18:39 SPEAKER_382: Frontiersin.org.

01:18:40 SPEAKER_382: Does that come on?

01:18:44 SPEAKER_382: Yeah, I'm trying to load it right now: Frontiers in Sustainable Resource Management.

01:18:57 SPEAKER_382: Oh okay; yeah—they're good.

01:19:04 SPEAKER_382: They're well set up and they're new on the stage so far.

01:19:09 SPEAKER_382: I've had other problems with systems before, but yeah—I've got a comment here.

01:19:19 SPEAKER_382: Yeah.

01:19:24 SPEAKER_382: So just to add: it is Frontiers Science—the whole school of open access journals—and this one specifically is Sustainable Resource Management;

01:19:27 SPEAKER_382: then Charlie has very cleverly managed to get them to do a special issue on Biophysical Economics from the beginning, and the expectation is this will continue.

01:19:34 SPEAKER_382: Nice to hear from you, Roger.

01:19:47 SPEAKER_382: You got your microphone working?

01:19:47 SPEAKER_382: Yeah—yeah, for sure.

01:19:49 SPEAKER_382: Finally!

01:20:00 SPEAKER_382: Thanks, thank you.

01:20:02 SPEAKER_382: Been trying to tell Charlie to go buy a new laptop; it fixes problems.

01:20:02 SPEAKER_382: Not necessarily—I found that out too.

01:20:07 SPEAKER_382: This is the website: frontiersin.org (Frontiers in Sustainable Resource Management).

01:20:10 SPEAKER_382: Oh, I'll make it bigger for you guys.

01:20:14 SPEAKER_382: Here we go.

01:20:21 SPEAKER_382: And presumably there's somewhere to submit articles and things?

01:20:32 SPEAKER_382: All right—okay!

01:20:32 SPEAKER_382: Any other updates or things people wanted to share?

01:20:34 SPEAKER_382: Oh, go ahead, Clement.

01:20:38 SPEAKER_382: Yeah—so this one is for Peter Sternley, my friend in Hawaii; we wrote a report together called the Hawaii Report.

01:20:52 SPEAKER_382: So this is for him and all our co-authors.

01:20:58 SPEAKER_382: I was recently at a job somewhere in Europe (confidential—I can't tell you what it is),

01:21:03 SPEAKER_382: but I was meeting with some government ministers who told me they had multiple staff whose job was to go through my reports line by line.

01:21:04 SPEAKER_382: The Hawaii Report, in particular, had no less than four people going through it with a fine-tooth comb—wow!

01:21:04 SPEAKER_382: Every page—that's amazing.

01:21:13 SPEAKER_382: Yeah, that is amazing.

01:21:20 SPEAKER_382: When you actually look at it—it's a beast of a report—and it's not written particularly well, possibly on purpose now.

01:21:21 SPEAKER_382: Peter is one of the co-authors in that; he put a lot of work into it and he's a bit demoralized because he was expecting a better response from the Hawaiian Senate.

01:21:22 SPEAKER_382: So, Peter—if you're watching—I will send you an email directly to you and the other co-authors.

01:21:25 SPEAKER_382: But the report has gone into governments around the world and been studied in great detail.

01:21:33 SPEAKER_382: They made a point of telling me: "Is that report really the only one of its kind?"

01:21:38 SPEAKER_382: That is—it uses auditable numbers, numbers that can be audited; it tries to fix things; it actually attempts to meet future problems and solve them—and it's the only one in the world that does that.

01:21:50 SPEAKER_382: Peter—there you go!

01:21:56 SPEAKER_382: Awesome!

01:22:10 SPEAKER_382: Thank you for your contributions to humanity.

01:22:13 SPEAKER_382: Well—I can tell you this too: Simon—the Department of Energy has four engineers who basically comb through your stuff diligently.

01:22:19 SPEAKER_382: So yes, it's gotten around; good work, Raven.

01:22:23 SPEAKER_382: I'm in a cone of silence right now; I'm not allowed to know anything about the feedback.

01:22:25 SPEAKER_382: A lot of it doesn't get near me, and I'm routinely told my work isn't very good or that it doesn't have impact.

01:22:32 SPEAKER_382: Yeah—just oh my God!

01:22:40 SPEAKER_382: That's what happens when you tell the powers-that-be they are dead wrong and lying.

01:22:46 SPEAKER_382: Well—as far as why they haven't commented: understand a lot of them are chewing on a fire hose.

01:22:52 SPEAKER_382: The easiest way for me to describe this is actually to put it in notepad; I'm going to share it with you because it's easier to look at these things in numbers.

01:23:02 SPEAKER_383: So if we don't mind, Andrew—I'm going ahead and sharing it on the screen here?

01:23:07 SPEAKER_383: Yeah—so you guys have to be able to see a just-a-notepad, right?

01:23:13 SPEAKER_382: Okay!

01:23:21 SPEAKER_382: Okay—so according to the International Energy Agency—that guy right there—the easiest way to describe this is: by 2050, the world will consume or demand however you want to look at it—one thousand billion barrels of oil.

01:23:24 SPEAKER_382: What is it?

01:23:25 SPEAKER_382: One?

01:23:32 SPEAKER_382: No—it's one hundred...

01:23:44 SPEAKER_382: Yeah—is that one thousand?

01:23:48 SPEAKER_382: Yes; it's one thousand billion barrels—of what?

01:23:59 SPEAKER_382: Okay!

01:24:02 SPEAKER_382: Now according to the drillers—we're talking about Exxon, Chevron and those guys—the depletion of existing fields can't be written off by 2040.

01:24:21 SPEAKER_307: Twenty forty will see a shortfall: even if they use advanced oil recovery methods maybe they can get it—but let's say depletion is only thirty percent;

01:24:37 SPEAKER_307: okay—that means the short-term best-case scenario still leaves us with three hundred billion barrels of crude, right?

01:25:14 SPEAKER_307: And if you take three hundred billion barrels and divide that by twenty-five years—you get twelve billion barrels per year.

01:25:37 SPEAKER_307: That's a shortfall of 12 billion barrels a year!

01:25:46 SPEAKER_307: Yeah—come on—you stupid—or another way to look at it: so half...

01:25:50 SPEAKER_307: So be 12 or 12 billion divided by 365—that's thirty-six million barrels a day—a double-Hormuz-day scenario.

01:25:55 SPEAKER_307: And to give you an idea of what they've discovered over the last ten years: in the Gulf of America—or Gulf of Mexico however you want to look at it—that's about one million million barrels total?

01:26:34 SPEAKER_307: Guyana has a million barrels a day; maybe they can get higher than that but not yet.

01:26:48 SPEAKER_307: Then Brazil is three million barrels a day—probably could go up to four, right?

01:26:55 SPEAKER_307: And then there's Midway—which I may have spelled wrong—I don't know—and that's also about one million barrels a day.

01:27:06 SPEAKER_307: So that's you-know—that's a total of six hundred billion barrels discovered in the last ten years from those places alone!

01:27:11 SPEAKER_307: Wow—the reserves—yeah; probably messed up my math on that part too...

01:27:33 SPEAKER_307: Reserves are thirty-six billion barrels from those sources.

01:27:38 SPEAKER_307: So, so the point is: if they don't discover 12 billion new barrels this year, understand this increases exponentially.

01:27:39 SPEAKER_307: The next year it's 24, and after that it's 36.

01:27:47 SPEAKER_307: So the deficit gets deeper and deeper and deeper.

01:27:49 SPEAKER_307: That's what Exxon, Chevron, Conoco... that's what they're talking about: deep drilling.

01:27:53 SPEAKER_307: Why are they doing deep drilling?

01:28:03 SPEAKER_307: Because the only oil that hasn't been discovered is deep, ultra-deep offshore because everything on land has been drilled and found.

01:28:04 SPEAKER_307: So the point being is our energy crisis is going to exponentially get worse and worse and worse.

01:28:04 SPEAKER_307: And that's just what all the governments of the world are actually chewing on right now.

01:28:10 SPEAKER_307: They're trying to find every reason to say that's not true, but it's kind of hard to argue with Exxon, Conoco, and those governments because they know there's a shortfall.

01:28:18 SPEAKER_307: Like I said: best case is three hundred billion barrels shortfall; more likely it's going to be you know 400 billion barrels shortfall, and that's because we haven't found a new major oil field since 1985.

01:28:31 SPEAKER_383: You know, so that's what we're going to be living with.

01:28:34 SPEAKER_383: Iver has a question: "Yeah, I was wondering..."

01:28:42 SPEAKER_383: You know, you've heard that the oil majors are saying there's going to be a big problem in about two or three weeks?

01:28:49 SPEAKER_382: Tank bottoms and all that stuff, right?

01:29:01 SPEAKER_382: You're going to get a spike in July; yes.

01:29:04 SPEAKER_382: Yeah, I mean a real big, major problem.

01:29:13 SPEAKER_382: Like it'll hit 200 dollars, slap the economy, knock consumption down, and level out at about 120 dollars per barrel from here to the end of time.

01:29:14 SPEAKER_382: Yes.

01:29:16 SPEAKER_382: Right.

01:29:21 SPEAKER_382: So do you think this is sort of like practice for what's coming?

01:29:23 SPEAKER_382: Maybe...

01:29:32 SPEAKER_382: I don't know if there's a reason for things happening besides...

01:29:37 SPEAKER_382: Okay, so let's talk about it.

01:29:47 SPEAKER_382: I did a presentation on this a couple months ago and said: "If we don't get things solved by June, this thing will turn into a depression," and that was from the IMF.

01:29:48 SPEAKER_1350: Okay, here are some of the issues or practical things popping up—some things a lot of us knew about but it's hard to explain.

01:29:53 SPEAKER_1350: Well, right now if you've ever been to the Middle East they call it "The Great Sandbox."

01:29:59 SPEAKER_1351: The Persian Gulf on three sides is desert; temperatures average about 130 degrees Fahrenheit in summer—which we're entering into—so the Persian Gulf turns into basically a swamp.

01:30:02 SPEAKER_1351: One of the things happening: over two thousand, three hundred ships are trapped out there; more than twenty thousand soldiers are trapped out there.

01:30:08 SPEAKER_1351: In the middle of night because sailors haven't been paid they jump overboard, and these fishing boats take to shore while those guys make their way home.

01:30:12 SPEAKER_1351: So what does that mean?

01:30:23 SPEAKER_1351: That means by July you're not going to have crews to sail those ships out of there.

01:30:30 SPEAKER_382: Second part: this is basically water and it's really hot; it's a great place for barnacles.

01:30:33 SPEAKER_382: Barnacles collecting on all those ships get to the point where if you try to sail them out of the Persian Gulf right now,

01:30:42 SPEAKER_382: fuel consumption would increase by fifteen percent because of barnacles collecting on the ships.

01:30:44 SPEAKER_382: So we're going to reach a point maybe four or five months from now when you won't be able to sail ships there because barnacles will grow over propellers and rudders—you can't;

01:30:47 SPEAKER_382: they'd have to tow them out.

01:30:51 SPEAKER_382: Either way, two thousand three hundred ships are going to have to go into dry dock somewhere just to remove the barnacle buildup until they're sailed again.

01:30:57 SPEAKER_381: And then: maritime organizations already forecast losing half their workforce because when people who stayed on ships go home, a lot never return; trapped in the Persian Gulf for more than—four months,

01:31:01 SPEAKER_381: whatever it is—and those are all issues with shipping.

01:31:03 SPEAKER_381: I know GCC nations are talking about building oil pipelines to try ameliorate problems if straits shut down.

01:31:27 SPEAKER_381: Okay but that doesn't change risk profile because Iranians have already hit some of those pipes and pump houses in the past.

01:31:37 SPEAKER_381: So it doesn't change risk profile.

01:31:39 SPEAKER_381: What does that mean?

01:31:42 SPEAKER_381: It means Saudi Arabia, Qatar, all those countries—they're going to have a hard time borrowing 300 billion dollars to build a pipeline because bankers will look at it and say: "Okay your risk profile hasn't changed;

01:31:52 SPEAKER_381: just building a pipeline doesn't mean Iranians aren't going to blow it up."

01:31:56 SPEAKER_381: Because we haven't defeated these people—that's continuous risk from now until the end of time.

01:32:00 SPEAKER_381: None of that has changed, which also means insurance won't change because that risk is there as long as United States military and Israelis are there.

01:32:05 SPEAKER_381: That risk isn't changing.

01:32:13 SPEAKER_381: Does that make sense?

01:32:20 SPEAKER_381: Yeah definitely; yeah yeah.

01:32:26 SPEAKER_381: That was in where you go...

01:32:27 SPEAKER_381: And I talk specifically about those risks regarding oil refineries—none of it's going to get rebuilt because you won't get capital to rebuild them due to risk.

01:32:31 SPEAKER_1352: Oh, I was thinking we're down about twelve or thirteen million barrels a day and we have exactly...

01:32:39 SPEAKER_1352: It's actually worse than the deficit.

01:32:43 SPEAKER_1352: Let me let me talk about stuff they don't talk about; let me give an example: go over Red Sea where there is Yanbu.

01:32:46 SPEAKER_1352: Remember you have Bab el Mandeb?

01:32:51 SPEAKER_1352: Well one thing they don't talk about going ship finder, zooming up on ships anchored in Red Sea off at Yanbu and clicking registry—those are all Chinese ships.

01:33:01 SPEAKER_307: Think about what I just said.

01:33:04 SPEAKER_307: What does that mean?

01:33:05 SPEAKER_307: Means the Houthis only allow Chinese ships pass through Bab el Mandeb.

01:33:08 SPEAKER_307: Through Bab al-Mandab meaning for all practical purposes this is a blockage between us and BRICS nations.

01:33:14 SPEAKER_307: So it's not just one shutdown; it's really two—but they're not telling you because nobody bothers to zoom in on those ships and click registry—they're all Chinese ships.

01:33:20 SPEAKER_307: Wow!

01:33:25 SPEAKER_307: So that means more than twelve billion, twelve million barrels a day—more than that.

01:33:29 SPEAKER_307: Well I guess I'm wondering when was last time we used?

01:33:34 SPEAKER_381: You know, we use around a hundred million.

01:33:36 SPEAKER_381: We use around 100 million a day now, or something.

01:33:38 SPEAKER_381: Maybe 105 million a day.

01:33:39 SPEAKER_381: What was before?

01:33:40 SPEAKER_381: Now we're chopped down to like 93 million, something like that.

01:33:43 SPEAKER_381: Yeah.

01:33:45 SPEAKER_381: When was the last time we were at 93 million barrels per day?

01:33:47 SPEAKER_381: Was it back in... back in 2008?

01:33:52 SPEAKER_381: Okay, was a little chopped down in 2008.

01:33:53 SPEAKER_381: Yeah.

01:33:54 SPEAKER_381: Well, it was $147 dollars a barrel.

01:33:56 SPEAKER_381: That's when it was.

01:33:59 SPEAKER_381: Yep.

01:33:59 SPEAKER_381: So that means basically [we're at] 93 million barrels a day.

01:34:06 SPEAKER_381: Yep.

01:34:11 SPEAKER_381: We're going to 150... fifty?

01:34:12 SPEAKER_381: Probably now it's going to be hundred sixty, hundred eighty, or something.

01:34:14 SPEAKER_381: Oil doesn't exist.

01:34:14 SPEAKER_381: What do you mean?

01:34:15 SPEAKER_381: It doesn't exist.

01:34:17 SPEAKER_381: That chart I just showed you, there's a shortfall—a three-hundred-billion barrel shortfall at least.

01:34:41 SPEAKER_381: The oil doesn't exist.

01:34:43 SPEAKER_381: Yeah, yeah.

01:34:45 SPEAKER_381: You're saying if I offered you $1000 dollars a barrel, it wouldn't matter because you don't have a barrel to sell?

01:34:46 SPEAKER_381: So... does that mean it could go parabolic, kind of?

01:34:48 SPEAKER_381: Yeah.

01:34:48 SPEAKER_381: I mean... when does this happen?

01:34:53 SPEAKER_381: It'll kneecap economic activity.

01:34:55 SPEAKER_381: It'll kneecap.

01:34:59 SPEAKER_381: It—it'll be a depression.

01:35:02 SPEAKER_381: It'll affect all our economies in the entire world because the oil doesn't exist.

01:35:05 SPEAKER_381: Now, why are we talking about this?

01:35:16 SPEAKER_382: It's like freaking three weeks away.

01:35:18 SPEAKER_382: Why are we not talking about this?

01:35:19 SPEAKER_382: The rest of the world... some [people] do.

01:35:23 SPEAKER_382: There's Jeff Curry; they know about this on Bloomberg.

01:35:24 SPEAKER_381: Understand.

01:35:26 SPEAKER_381: A lot of this issue was an issue before—the Persian Gulf—they just didn't show it to the public.

01:35:36 SPEAKER_381: If you ever watched Bloomberg, it was initial[ly shown] on Bloomberg.

01:35:43 SPEAKER_381: Rystad Energy was talking about this shortfall of oil production years ago.

01:35:46 SPEAKER_381: I have charts from these people that show there's a shortfall.

01:35:54 SPEAKER_381: So... so the financial markets definitely know; the bankers know;

01:35:56 SPEAKER_382: the executives know—the CEO of ExxonMobil and all those oil companies came out here two weeks ago and told everybody that within X number of weeks we're going to have $200 oil,

01:36:05 SPEAKER_382: and it'll happen sometime in July.

01:36:09 SPEAKER_382: They've said it publicly.

01:36:12 SPEAKER_382: You go on YouTube, you'll find it.

01:36:12 SPEAKER_382: Yeah, yeah... this is being covered up on CNBC.

01:36:12 SPEAKER_382: I know, but I'm thinking Japanese news is covering it; they're covering the problem in Asia.

01:36:14 SPEAKER_382: They don't give a damn about the U.S.; they're exporting our SBR [synthetic crude], and we're shipping our well—our SBR—to Europe and into Japan, including diesel and gasoline.

01:36:18 SPEAKER_382: If I show you the levels of diesel and gasoline inside the United States, it's below the five-year average; we're going to go into critical stage.

01:36:24 SPEAKER_382: Diesel is going to hurt us really quickly come July... and then we're going to be starving because farmers won't be able to afford [it] to get crops in or out at that point.

01:36:27 SPEAKER_382: Yeah—barter the harvest?

01:36:32 SPEAKER_382: When you look at my little graphic, the hydrogen park—that specifically what I designed that system for was farmland specifically, because I knew that's where the energy transition has to happen.

01:36:40 SPEAKER_382: There... we have a lot of armies with horses around here.

01:36:44 SPEAKER_382: I have a feeling that we're going to be taking in crops—taken in crops this fall—with horses.

01:36:51 SPEAKER_382: Wow.

01:36:52 SPEAKER_382: Yeah.

01:36:56 SPEAKER_382: Well, it's very hard to take [in] a giant build like that with Amish horses; you can't—it's all set up for big, big agriculture.

01:36:59 SPEAKER_382: So... are we still on track for the SBR running out July, early July, at our current rate?

01:37:05 SPEAKER_382: Yeah.

01:37:12 SPEAKER_382: Okay.

01:37:13 SPEAKER_382: And so, what do we expect to happen after that?

01:37:15 SPEAKER_382: Is it still going to be like a slow thing?

01:37:15 SPEAKER_382: What they're—what the oil guys are talking about?

01:37:19 SPEAKER_382: If you look—if you go on YouTube and look for any video with Jeff Curry in it—that's G; you know, Jeff C-U-R-R-I-E, like...

01:37:25 SPEAKER_382: like "Madam Curry," right?

01:37:27 SPEAKER_382: Look for him.

01:37:37 SPEAKER_382: Jeff Curry came out of Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan Chase, right?

01:37:43 SPEAKER_382: What they're talking about is tank bottom—basically where you get down to the level where you have to shut refineries down because you can't suck out the sludge in the bottom of the tank.

01:37:45 SPEAKER_382: That's what they're talking about.

01:37:48 SPEAKER_382: So we're going to see oil refineries around the planet shut down because there's not enough medium crude to make diesel and jet fuel.

01:37:49 SPEAKER_382: Wow, that's so...

01:37:51 SPEAKER_382: So that's going to have a lot of knock-on effects.

01:37:53 SPEAKER_382: Yes—because yeah, I did read that they need a certain supply coming in order to keep those refineries open; otherwise remember there's oil in the pipes,

01:37:58 SPEAKER_382: sludge in the bottom of tanks—you can get down to the point where you can't run the refinery if you don't have enough medium grade; you might as well shut her [it] down.

01:38:03 SPEAKER_382: You can't refine white shell oil here because it's got to be a blend for the refiner to work correctly—excuse me, work correctly.

01:38:07 SPEAKER_382: I know Art Berman has also been talking about shortages coming up.

01:38:09 SPEAKER_382: Art Berman talked about this specifically.

01:38:13 SPEAKER_382: What I'm talking about... don't go out and look for [the] videos; look for Art—you'll find he said that to Nate.

01:38:15 SPEAKER_382: He was a Chris Martinson?

01:38:18 SPEAKER_382: I'm sure we're talking—talking about $180–$200 oil.

01:38:28 SPEAKER_382: Art Berman has, and he's not the only one: Jeff Curry, a lot of people, ExxonMobil—all the oil guys are telling you this; this is what's going to happen.

01:38:29 SPEAKER_382: And the interesting thing is...

01:38:39 SPEAKER_382: Art Berman was on this show—on this Peak Oil Chat a year or two ago—and remember, he kept saying "Don't worry, there's plenty of oil."

01:38:43 SPEAKER_382: But he—you know—he said that about oil that isn't plugged in; not stuck.

01:38:44 SPEAKER_382: Roger Bintley?

01:38:48 SPEAKER_382: Roger Bintley's on the line.

01:38:49 SPEAKER_382: Get him to...

01:38:59 SPEAKER_382: Yeah, yeah—Roger, go ahead.

01:38:59 SPEAKER_382: You had your hand up for a while.

01:39:00 SPEAKER_382: Thank you, thank you folks.

01:39:00 SPEAKER_382: You can hear me I guess—is that it?

01:39:04 SPEAKER_382: Yes, yes, sir.

01:39:06 SPEAKER_382: So Dan making a lot of good points.

01:39:08 SPEAKER_382: Yeah—Bart Berman [Art].

01:39:10 SPEAKER_382: I will go back briefly to Berman then we'll go forward.

01:39:18 SPEAKER_382: So Berman somehow used to think in... believe in peak oil and he got misled and mistracked.

01:39:27 SPEAKER_382: I wrote—I spent months writing a detailed response to him; sent it off but never had a reply—but one day he'll reply, perhaps—who knows?

01:39:31 SPEAKER_382: Anyway so the key: Dan summarized a lot very well.

01:39:41 SPEAKER_382: We mustn't mix up the near-term Straits of Hormuz problem with the longer-term decline problem.

01:39:49 SPEAKER_382: So the Straits of Hormuz is a situation—there's no question; Dan is bringing out lots of interest; Dan is bringing up lots of interesting sub-bits about it which I didn't know:

01:39:56 SPEAKER_382: some baron[ers] jumping off ships and barnacles on boats, and the bottom-of-the-barrel going to the refinery isn't like [it].

01:40:13 SPEAKER_382: All important stuff to do with this.

01:40:18 SPEAKER_382: If—of course—the Straits of Hormuz are solved immediately then that helps and things could move fairly quickly despite the crews and barnacles and all these...

01:40:28 SPEAKER_382: but as all experts are saying—and Dan will tell you—that because of all sorts of damage to pipelines and export terminals and all sorts of things it doesn't get back quickly;

01:40:30 SPEAKER_382: and all people point to that.

01:40:41 SPEAKER_389: But if [it] was solved tomorrow we would—the British phrase is "muddle through"—the world would probably muddle through, then after six months start refilling it.

01:40:54 SPEAKER_389: If the things drew down so heavily... it stops—and so on—but you know it probably won't be solved in a day and so we do face some quite serious issues—quite separately from that.

01:41:04 SPEAKER_389: Although somebody made the point: is this a learning lesson for going future?

01:41:11 SPEAKER_389: It probably is.

01:41:12 SPEAKER_389: Quite separately is the resource side, which Dan kind of pointed to but didn't actually pinpoint—a peak at mid-point crucial, crucial,

01:41:19 SPEAKER_382: crucial overlooked fact—and he's part of a journal paper we're trying to write at the moment that tries to make this point;

01:41:29 SPEAKER_382: it is always worth saying—it's always worth saying that the big boys are all looking at climate change action to reduce our demand for oil.

01:41:37 SPEAKER_389: And you can—you know—take different views.

01:41:41 SPEAKER_389: The near-term guys say: "Well, 2030 our demand for oil around the world will peak because of climate change actions."

01:41:48 SPEAKER_382: And it's certainly possible if we all pull together and do the right things; we could indeed [peak by then].

01:42:00 SPEAKER_382: It's a bit harder now with Trump not liking climate change, but we could do the right things and start pulling our global demand for oil down from 2030.

01:42:09 SPEAKER_382: But under other assumptions—the IEA, OPEC, and other people—under different assumptions, don't see demand coming down until 2050 or afterwards.

01:42:10 SPEAKER_382: And 2050?

01:42:16 SPEAKER_382: Of course, that's the date Dan had in his sums to do with them.

01:42:25 SPEAKER_382: So you know: if we all [follow] what they're forecasting, Roger—is that even with EV adoption and efficiency improvements, there's still going to be this trillion-barrel demand?

01:42:27 SPEAKER_382: Is is... is that what the argument is?

01:42:29 SPEAKER_382: But but they're wrong; they're wrong.

01:42:33 SPEAKER_382: And then again, Roger, with higher prices, that'll bring consumption down.

01:42:36 SPEAKER_382: But you're not going to have much economic growth if you do that.

01:42:42 SPEAKER_382: Yeah, yeah, I follow all that.

01:42:46 SPEAKER_382: And Barbara, when you asked about a thousand-dollar oil: if we did get to a thousand-dollar oil, well, the economies don't stand it.

01:42:51 SPEAKER_382: But there is a lot more oil that could be got out at a thousand dollars.

01:42:57 SPEAKER_382: But a thousand dollars destroys all our economies—left, right, and center.

01:43:04 SPEAKER_382: So the oil is there; we've only got a forty percent recovery rate—as Dan was talking about—for some of the fields and others rather.

01:43:10 SPEAKER_382: If you had a thousand-dollar barrel...

01:43:14 SPEAKER_382: I've said it for a long time: if oil was absolutely vital for the health of our British society—and you know,

01:43:17 SPEAKER_382: you had to have it in the morning to get through the day—we've got immense amounts of oil in the British North Sea, and we could get it.

01:43:29 SPEAKER_382: We would put in caissons; we pump the water out of the North Sea; we start digging down into the rocks in the North Sea, digging them out between caissons, pumping all the water out,

01:43:33 SPEAKER_382: and then crack the rocks and take every last drop out with a solvent.

01:43:34 SPEAKER_382: So you know... solvents.

01:43:42 SPEAKER_382: So you know: if you wanted to do it—and you had to do it at a thousand dollars a barrel or four thousand dollars a barrel—something we could do it;

01:43:54 SPEAKER_382: but it ain't there at two hundred dollars a barrel or two hundred and fifty dollars a barrel, the sort of price that destroys economies, as we know from previous recessions.

01:44:04 SPEAKER_382: But I'm more... not optimistic, but I can see the arguments of the climate change people saying: "We've got to stop burning this stuff."

01:44:12 SPEAKER_382: Twenty-five years ago, I went to a conference run by the British government and said oil will peak very soon.

01:44:18 SPEAKER_382: Another well-known expert in the field said oil will peak in 30 years;

01:44:29 SPEAKER_382: and some guy from—the science research side—said rather rudely... so I won't actually repeat his remark—but he got to leave it righty stuff in the ground for climate change reasons.

01:44:37 SPEAKER_382: He said: "I don't care whether the peak is, you know, a few years' time or 30 years ago—or whether it's in 50 years' time—we've got to leave it in the ground."

01:44:45 SPEAKER_382: And he, of course, is right.

01:44:47 SPEAKER_382: So we're in a very, very, very interesting world.

01:44:49 SPEAKER_382: Dan's quite right on the basic numbers; we've got to look at peak [at] mid-point.

01:44:58 SPEAKER_382: We've got to change how we deal with climate change—and all falls back to Andrew, your sort of expertise regarding Arctic changes and what we do, Charlie's expertise, and so on.

01:45:08 SPEAKER_382: Like I don't have the answers; I can see the problems.

01:45:10 SPEAKER_382: Next one of you guys can.

01:45:11 SPEAKER_382: But it is going to be fascinating whether we come back and muddle through—kind of World War Two Britain style,

01:45:21 SPEAKER_382: where it was one egg a week for a family—and my dad grew chickens at the bottom of his suburban garden to get the eggs—or whether we in fact have an absolute recession-type situation:

01:45:26 SPEAKER_382: 1930s or worse.

01:45:39 SPEAKER_382: There we go.

01:45:39 SPEAKER_382: That's my two pennies, folks.

01:45:39 SPEAKER_382: All right; thank you, Roger.

01:45:42 SPEAKER_382: I just...

01:45:43 SPEAKER_382: I just wanted to say that we're going to have a super El Niño.

01:45:46 SPEAKER_382: Now all of a sudden they're calling it "Godzilla" and El Niño.

01:45:50 SPEAKER_382: So what that's going to do is give us a little preview of what the world's going to be like in about ten or twelve years.

01:46:03 SPEAKER_389: Quite right; quite right; quite right.

01:46:04 SPEAKER_389: Yeah, so that's going to be some fun stuff coming up this Christmas—or yes, Christmas.

01:46:14 SPEAKER_389: In terms of solutions: I just wanted to get back to Simon because you had that Hawaii report—and which models ended up being the most successful that could support the Hawaiian situation and population?

01:46:17 SPEAKER_389: Well, it depends who you talk to, right?

01:46:27 SPEAKER_382: So like when you actually sort of put forward this... you hit a lot of ideas; you hit a lot of ideology.

01:46:39 SPEAKER_382: That's Bible—that's not going to work.

01:46:43 SPEAKER_382: We're never going to do geothermal in Hawaii.

01:46:52 SPEAKER_382: Geothermal is the only answer in Hawaii.

01:46:54 SPEAKER_382: "We don't need energy."

01:46:58 SPEAKER_382: "We can grow food," biofuels will save us—it became a dog's breakfast very quickly.

01:47:00 SPEAKER_382: So what I found was it depends on how open-minded you're prepared to be.

01:47:04 SPEAKER_382: Now, Scenario H was the one where... could Hawaii become an agricultural system?

01:47:06 SPEAKER_382: Why would you become an agricultural society and support itself with organic growing through the end?

01:47:12 SPEAKER_382: Yes; but it will require a radical rearrangement of that society which vast majority of smug bastards that live there now will not allow to happen.

01:47:16 SPEAKER_382: So it's a political will issue.

01:47:21 SPEAKER_382: I have...

01:47:26 SPEAKER_382: I have to agree, sorry John—I have to agree.

01:47:28 SPEAKER_382: It's a good project, Roger.

01:47:33 SPEAKER_382: Drew: "I must say it's very nice to hear the British accent; I'm surrounded by Finnish people here at the moment and yeah, I missed the British accent."

01:47:36 SPEAKER_382: Anyway, the purple scenario was to look at could we use a series of unconventional technologies?

01:47:38 SPEAKER_382: Was there a way through?

01:47:45 SPEAKER_382: Now, the purpose of that scenario was to look at that question—and the answer comes back: yes, there was.

01:47:51 SPEAKER_382: But there is a lot of other technologies that we could look at in addition to the purple scenario.

01:48:00 SPEAKER_382: What I'm saying is human innovation is a thing; if we did collectively get off the couch and do something about it—was there a way through?

01:48:03 SPEAKER_382: The answer is yes.

01:48:18 SPEAKER_382: Right now Dan you've got your thing—I've heard several other technologies.

01:48:23 SPEAKER_389: I'm looking at technologies that will eclipse Copenhagen atomic technology, I'm looking at them right now: human innovation.

01:48:25 SPEAKER_389: Well like I told you, the Navy is investing in molten salt technology and mainly we're interested in the metals;

01:48:31 SPEAKER_389: I mean that's a viable solution guys—we just got to solve this metal issue—but yes those are great solutions actually.

01:48:36 SPEAKER_382: So so but... can Hawaii navigate through these challenges?

01:48:43 SPEAKER_382: Yes—what what's the biggest risk in doing that, people?

01:48:49 SPEAKER_382: Yeah yeah yeah somebody asked me what was my biggest limitation: believe it or not it's not banking; it's politicians.

01:48:56 SPEAKER_382: What I need is a letter of credit signed by a governor—that's what I need.

01:49:00 SPEAKER_382: So Elon Musk still says you can't get this accomplished because the politics won't let you proceed.

01:49:05 SPEAKER_382: Right and they all taste like chicken—and that's the way it's going to go when things get difficult.

01:49:13 SPEAKER_382: All right Barbara, you've had your hand up for a while.

01:49:25 SPEAKER_382: You know: it occurs to me that in some ways what's going on in the Middle East now is actually a very good thing because it's going to give people a taste of the reality;

01:49:30 SPEAKER_382: otherwise we'll just run off the cliff like every other lemon.

01:49:52 SPEAKER_382: So I actually think letting it go into a depression is probably the best thing that can happen for the world, because this "growth at all costs" mindset cannot continue on a finite planet.

01:50:02 SPEAKER_382: So giving people a taste of what could come—with you know the promise: well maybe we'll get it back on track;

01:50:16 SPEAKER_382: maybe we'll get it back on track versus 10–12 years from now when there is no way to get it back on track—as we just went over—the rules, and high oil prices.

01:50:30 SPEAKER_382: I mean yeah it's going to be tough on normal human beings—you know the politicians don't care they at least in... they don't care to really get fired Barbara—but don't let you know Barbara I mean

01:50:43 SPEAKER_382: what our data says is that if this hadn't happened you were going to see ten-dollar diesel twenty thirty-four years from now anyway yeah anyway back to them not discovering enough of this cheap oil the

01:50:49 SPEAKER_382: costs are still going up.

01:50:57 SPEAKER_382: Yeah yeah so well just on this topic:

01:51:08 SPEAKER_382: I'm actually trying—I'm running for mayor of Owen Sound as you may have heard—and so I am trying that Scenario H and like because I found a route that is at least plausible we'd be able

01:51:16 SPEAKER_382: to do,

01:51:22 SPEAKER_382: and the idea is... that we could allow getting a farm and then upgrading the farmhouse to be an amenity building that has kitchen gathering space bathrooms and that kind of stuff.

01:51:35 SPEAKER_382: And then that would allow more people to go.

01:51:38 SPEAKER_382: And then they could start with as simple as a yurt or a tent as their residence, and then have an allocation of land and start growing food that way.

01:51:45 SPEAKER_383: And then they would also have the community.

01:51:50 SPEAKER_383: And this would also address the homelessness issue because the homeless would have somewhere to go where they would be productive members of society, and for the young generations.

01:51:55 SPEAKER_382: And I've been getting like I've been going door to door, and there's a lot of support.

01:52:07 SPEAKER_382: And so basically, if they vote me in, I'm going to do my best to get it done.

01:52:07 SPEAKER_383: How cold do you get in the winter?

01:52:12 SPEAKER_383: I understand how... what... how cold.

01:52:13 SPEAKER_383: What's the coldest that you get other than just like overnight down?

01:52:26 SPEAKER_383: It only goes down to negative twenty-five Celsius over here.

01:52:33 SPEAKER_382: Yeah, here too, right?

01:52:47 SPEAKER_382: And I'm thinking tents don't make it.

01:52:51 SPEAKER_382: Yurts, so a yurt.

01:52:56 SPEAKER_382: Yeah, that's true.

01:53:07 SPEAKER_389: They come from the steppes and people live there for years, right?

01:53:15 SPEAKER_307: An Alaskan yurt is well insulated and would make it just fine, and I know people that actually do make it in tents and sleeping bags, but be that as it may, yeah,

01:53:23 SPEAKER_307: yurts would be recommended for the winter, as a minimum, and they could be wood heated.

01:53:25 SPEAKER_307: Yeah, you have quite a bit of wood there, right?

01:53:29 SPEAKER_382: Yeah, well, we could also grow the wood, right?

01:53:33 SPEAKER_382: Because short rotation willow coppice.

01:53:36 SPEAKER_382: On one hectare...

01:53:38 SPEAKER_382: I mean, sorry, on one hectare, you can grow two cords of willow per year.

01:53:39 SPEAKER_382: I hadn't thought about willow.

01:53:43 SPEAKER_382: That's interesting.

01:53:56 SPEAKER_382: Yeah, that actually what they use in Sweden and the Nordic countries for their biomass heating.

01:53:59 SPEAKER_382: At least some of it.

01:54:05 SPEAKER_382: I'm used to the cottonwood quick growing in Texas and then blowing over in the next hurricane.

01:54:06 SPEAKER_382: Yeah, yeah, willow is fast growing and it's reliable.

01:54:14 SPEAKER_382: I'm also seeing from our YouTube comments; they're saying raise the value of living at the floor of poverty.

01:54:15 SPEAKER_382: I think they may have some English issues, but...

01:54:19 SPEAKER_307: Well, yeah.

01:54:20 SPEAKER_307: In the United States, there's been a lot of stuff from economics folks about well you know,

01:54:28 SPEAKER_382: it used to be that fifty thousand was and not all that long ago was a comfortable middle class earnings in every place except New York, probably, and now 150k and people can't pay their bills.

01:54:34 SPEAKER_382: Yeah.

01:54:39 SPEAKER_382: So yeah.

01:54:44 SPEAKER_382: Our central banks print money.

01:54:53 SPEAKER_382: Yeah.

01:54:54 SPEAKER_382: Kind of irrelevant.

01:54:55 SPEAKER_382: Yeah.

01:54:57 SPEAKER_382: Think about it.

01:54:57 SPEAKER_382: So yeah, that's kind of what I wanted to address: is there are some people who are like oh let's just give people more money or universal income?

01:54:59 SPEAKER_382: Right.

01:55:00 SPEAKER_382: But the thing is that that just causes inflation if people don't have the resources to produce their food.

01:55:04 SPEAKER_382: We still need physical resources to produce that food, and as long as we have a fossil fuel dependent system,

01:55:12 SPEAKER_382: the food prices will go up relative to people's income because oil prices are going to be three hundred when we print enough money.

01:55:15 SPEAKER_382: You can't print molecules guys.

01:55:17 SPEAKER_389: They can print money but you can't print molecules.

01:55:34 SPEAKER_389: Yeah, and so that's why... you have to get so fossil fuels allowed us to have fewer humans per hectare and now that we have less fossil fuels,

01:55:44 SPEAKER_389: we need to have more people per hectare in order to produce the food.

01:55:47 SPEAKER_389: And so that's kind of what I'm trying to achieve.

01:56:04 SPEAKER_389: Is this?

01:56:07 SPEAKER_1352: Whoa!

01:56:13 SPEAKER_1352: And then if we get the pilot going here, then the idea would be to grow across the province and across the country.

01:56:13 SPEAKER_1352: So maybe we should schedule our next meeting.

01:56:22 SPEAKER_1352: Um, maybe we should do it after the SPR is defeated.

01:56:26 SPEAKER_1352: So how about July ninth?

01:56:29 SPEAKER_1352: Yeah, might be just about perfect.

01:56:30 SPEAKER_1352: Yeah.

01:56:30 SPEAKER_1352: Okay.

01:56:31 SPEAKER_1352: Would that work for everybody?

01:56:32 SPEAKER_1352: Yeah, sounds good here.

01:56:33 SPEAKER_1352: What day was that again?

01:56:34 SPEAKER_1352: July ninth, Thursday, July ninth.

01:56:36 SPEAKER_1352: We'll actually see if some of our ideas are correct or not.

01:56:41 SPEAKER_1352: Yeah yeah.

01:56:42 SPEAKER_1352: Well okay.

01:56:53 SPEAKER_1352: You know it's gonna... it's gonna be very much like what you were just talking about.

01:56:58 SPEAKER_1352: It is like sort of a worst case scenario if this happens.

01:56:58 SPEAKER_1352: Could happen very quickly.

01:57:00 SPEAKER_1352: You know food prices could go up, gas prices oil prices could go up.

01:57:02 SPEAKER_1352: You know pretty quickly.

01:57:03 SPEAKER_1352: I'm of the opinion this is being arranged.

01:57:04 SPEAKER_1352: They know this.

01:57:06 SPEAKER_1352: It's by design.

01:57:06 SPEAKER_1352: Yeah well we've been paying six dollars and fifty cents a gallon on Swan's Island since we've been on the little island which you only get it down at the wharf,

01:57:06 SPEAKER_1352: and they have to deliver it and stuff you know so we're kind of getting ourselves ready for okay all right.

01:57:08 SPEAKER_1352: Well it looks like Dan's left already and so any final remarks before we close the meeting?

01:57:10 SPEAKER_1352: Nope.

01:57:10 SPEAKER_1352: Okay.

01:57:11 SPEAKER_1352: All right.

01:57:11 SPEAKER_1352: So as we found...

01:57:11 SPEAKER_1352: I leave you in the infinite love and infinite light of the infinite Creator within you and all around you, my friends go forth therefore rejoicing in the infinite power and infinite peace.

01:57:11 SPEAKER_1352: Goodbye.

01:57:11 SPEAKER_1352: All right.