Hi Bill.
My name is Susan, aka primordial soup, and
I have a question about fracking.
Are you for it or against it and why?
And on the subject of energies what’s the
holdup with the green energies?
Is it that there’s not enough investment
money, not enough profits, not enough public
interest, other, all of the above?
Thank you for answering my question.
Are you primal or primordial?
If it’s a primordial soup I love you.
So let’s talk about fracking.
I left Boeing because they wanted me to work
on the 767 airplane which wasn’t going to
fly for 15 years.
And when you’re a young guy that just seems
like a really long time.
So I took a job as an engineer in a shipyard
at the place where they skim oil slicks.
They made at that time the best or the most
popular oil slick skimming boat.
And then that led to a job for me in the oil
field.
I worked in the oil patch for a while where
they frack.
Now my uncle, my beloved mother’s younger
brother really was this guy.
He was a geologist, graduated from Johns Hopkins
and he got a job with – then he was in the
army during the Korean War as an engineer.
And then he worked for DuPont Dynamite going
all over the world blowing stuff up.
He loved to blow stuff up.
It was big fun for him.
He was – you’re not supposed to say your
favorite but he was my beloved uncle.
Anyway I have his books on this business and
I have – he’s not living anymore.
And I have a torpedo – and a torpedo is
something that they used to use in the oil
field and in mining.
It’s a tube.
In English units it’s two and a half inches
in diameter and four and a half feet long.
And it has a crude funnel soldered on the
top or brazed on the top.
And according to him – now look I wasn’t
there and the guy was a storyteller.
He’s a raconteur.
They would usually stuff the torpedo with
dynamite but sometimes they would pour liquid
nitroglycerine into this thing, this tube.
I mean if it blew up that’s it.
You wouldn’t even know it.
You wouldn’t even know what happened.
You’d just be powder or liquid powder, droplets.
All right you’ve just got to keep it cold
Bill.
You just keep it cold, 54 degrees Fahrenheit.
Just keep it cold.
You’ll be able to – what?
So anyway they would lower it into the oil
well and then apparently in his day they would
have wired electricity and they would set
it off – boom – dynamite or nitroglycerine.
But in the old, old days – I’ve seen his
book – they had something like a shotgun
shell and a rope and they would yank it – boom.
So that would be fracturing or fracking right
at the bottom of the well straight down.
That was the state of the art.
But what’s happened now we can steer drill
bits in just three meters, in just ten feet
from the floor to the ceiling in this room
I’m sitting in.
So now you can drill down like this and go
sideways.
And this has led to irresponsible fracturing
or fracking.
And this is where it’s not inherently a
bad idea, it just can’t be unregulated.
And apparently that’s been the problem where
people – oil companies especially are not
– or the foreman on the job, the tool push
as he’s called, are able to get away with
this irresponsible practice.
And so the thing about it, you know, usually
these gas bearing shales, this rock real down
deep is a layer formed from an ancient sea
or what have you.
So I like to describe it this way.
I don’t’ know if you’ve ever been around
an obnoxious kid at a sandwich shop.
But he or she may take the straw – it’s
usually a boy – take the straw and poke
it into the sandwich and then suck sandwich
out of the end of the straw.
Now when you do that you’re going to get
a little pastrami but you’re going to get
a lot of bread.
But imagine if you could go into the sandwich
sideways.
Then you can get all the pastrami or tuna
salad or chicken salad or cheese or whatever
vegan meal, whatever it is.
You could get it all that way.
And that’s the principle behind modern – it’s
called hydraulic fracturing, fracking.
You drill sideways and then you pump fracking
fluid – it’s incompressible stuff and
give it a pow and then it cracks everything
and the gas comes up.
The gas doesn’t always come out the tube
that you put it in or the opening you put
it in.
Sometimes it comes out in somebody’s sink.
So fracturing is not inherently bad.
The problem with renewable energy right now
is multipronged as you might imagine.
The first thing is oil and coal are so cheap.
Nobody pays for putting the carbon in the
atmosphere.
That’s the drag right now.
We are all – and I did it my whole life.
I mean hey man.
We were all able to drive cars, burn gasoline,
make carbon dioxide, make a greenhouse gas,
leave open containers of gasoline around making
– that’s also those volatiles are also
are greenhouse.
Methane – yes you can talk about cows but
natural gas being flared or just leaked is
another greenhouse gas.
All that stuff we’ve been able to do for
centuries and nobody said anything.
There’s no tax on it.
Renewables are not – it’s hard to make
them compete when these other energy sources
are so heavily subsidized.
Just think about this.
Having a military on the other side of the
world protecting oil fields.
That is essentially a subsidy for oil and
gas.
But then in the next bigger picture the problem
we have technically or from a physics standpoint
is the sun doesn’t shine all the time.
We have – you’re probably familiar with
it, a phenomenon called night.
And then the wind doesn’t blow strongly
all the time.
It blows strongest in the evening and the
morning.
So what we need is the better battery.
And when I say battery I mean writ large.
We need better energy storage systems or new
or just enhanced or amazing.
Now the Tesla Motor Company is now selling
batteries for your garage wall that have 10
kilowatt hours I think which is a lot that
can run your refrigerator for a day and a
half, you know, two days.
It’s pretty cool.
But we need energy storage in a much – like
on the scale of Hoover Dam, or Grand Coulee
Dam on the Columbia River.
Enormous energy storage capability.
And there’s an idea that I am just thoroughly
charmed by.
And that is you would make a huge hole in
the ground on purpose and we are really good
at this.
I mentioned – we talked about fracking a
moment ago.
We, it was me doing the talking about fracking.
We are really good at explosives, you know.
We use almost half a billion pounds which
in old unit it’s like a quarter billion
kilos of explosives every year just in the
U.S. Imagine trying to dig all that stuff
up without explosives.
Put it out of your mind.
It ain’t going to happen.
That’s how Nobel got so crazy rich that
he could just give away a million dollars
five or six times a year and not think about
it.
The same with DuPont inventing explosives.
Good idea.
All right.
Blow a big hole in the ground and use the
tailings or the leftover rock to create a
giant piston, a giant thing that you would
lift up every day with solar or wind energy
let’s say – or even – I mean I’m not
trying to get carried away.
Even a nuclear power plant.
A smaller one than you would have to build
otherwise.
And you would pump water under this piston,
lift it up and then at night or when the power
is not running or just to deal with a peak
load at a power plant you let that piston
fall down, squeeze the water back up, run
it through a nice Francis turbine is a very
popular style – by popular I mean they’re
very efficient way to make – to run an electric
generator.
That’s what they use at dams and stuff.
It’s a style where the water comes through
the inside instead of running like a paddle
wheel.
Anyway, we would do that and you might have
like a giant gravity weight cylinder water
pump farm.
You might have ten of these things.
And then you start getting into being able
to store megawatt hours of electricity.
You’d be on an industrial scale.
And the thing is it wouldn’t cost that much.
We have the technology.
We have explosives.
We have guys that people that love to make
concrete things.
You take the broken up the rip rap rock and
make it into a giant piston.
We have turbines.
We have pumps.
We’re good at all this stuff.
No nuclear waste.
No having to dam a river and screw up an ecosystem.
And we have places around the country where
we have power plants which have a big environmental
impact already.
And we could build these things.
And if you want to get crazy you could have
a forest on top of them.
I mean that’s a lot to ask but this technology
really charms me.
What we need is energy storage.
And the other thing we need primordial soup
is better electrical transmission.
We’re pretty good at it but I had the rare
opportunity and this is one thing that happens
to you and I’m just some guy.
I interviewed Rick Smalley who unlike many
of us here in the studio had a Nobel Prize.
Anybody?
I guess nobody here at Big Think has a Nobel
Prize either.
Anyway, he got a Nobel Prize for discovering
buckeyballs.
The buckminsterfullerenes.
These are spheres of carbon.
And his dream as a chemist was to stir it
up soup woman and they would – this tube
like you cut the sphere in half and a tube
grows with the same pattern of interstices
and network where you get this nanotube that
not be a few nanometers or billionths of a
meter long but be meters long or kilometers
long.
And then the electrons would flow through
these things with hardly any electrical resistance.
If we could develop those things and run let’s
say direct current power lines around.
It would, dare I say it, change the world.
That’s a great question primordial soup.
Thank you for asking.
