My master’s from RPI in management was in new product development, and I have spent my entire engineering career in wildly different areas: attack submarines, health care, rotor dynamics, heat recovery, and energy efficiency. Chasing higher performance has been a recurring objective, but I quickly learned the laws of diminishing economic returns in real life.
Admiral Rickover singlehandedly drove the nuclear-powered dream for navy vessels. Economics was secondary or unimportant. We “pushed the envelope” in everything. After finishing my masters in new product development, I worked in the health care industry optimizing the cost and quality of patient outcomes in the largest most complex hospitals in the world … pushing for greater productivity while under huge constraints due to a lack of nurses.
I then worked for MTI in Latham, New York where we focused on low temperature heat recovery using advanced power systems and heat pump technology. I worked under some of the brightest minds in the world, assessing both technical and economic potential. It was a wild and crazy place because we literally could design and build almost anything you could imagine … and did.
That firm was the first to design high speed dental drills running up to 300,000 rpm using air bearings. We were the only firm in the world that could balance uranium enrichment centrifuges using lasers as it was run up to final operating speeds. The people there were the brightest minds in the world on high-speed machines.
Our clients were mostly the national labs and the big defense departments. So, production economics were unimportant to them. They were if you wanted something to sell to the public (we designed and built the gas turbine-driven engines for Chrysler). Most often we just build demonstration projects to prove an idea was feasible. For example, we built fuel cell powered cars long before the models you see now entered the market.
When you live in the world of defense, economics doesn’t matter. You literally only care about developing a better mousetrap. But, once you must face the real-world markets, it is quite another thing, and the market is unforgiving. Just because you build a better mousetrap, they do not necessarily beat a path to your door.
So, I was curious to read the latest approach to an area we considered about 40 years ago: Power generation from geothermal heat sources. On one level, it is an obviously good idea since it would seem to be an endless source of energy. However, once you take a closer look at the geothermal hot springs around the world, you find these sources are extremely corrosive and the sites are intrinsically dangerous and unstable.
MTI was so used to crazy ideas that our designers would often use the phrase: “we will have to build that out of superillium or unobtanium.” These obviously fictitious metals were their polite way of expressing doubt that anything could survive these working environments. Of course, when you do work in defense you also encounter the brutal fact that the service life of some things, like the engines used in fighter jets, only have a service life of a few hundred hours. Think about that.
So, here we go again with geothermal energy … the seemingly endless free heat available from within the core of the earth. Here is an article that offers one perspective: Volcanos Powering Homes
While this idea has proven to work in some narrow cases (Iceland and New Zealand) it has never been workable where high temperatures or extremely corrosive brines are encountered. Plus, most of the recent attempts have failed to operate reliably over time even with government subsidies.
All too many of these dreams are more about sucking money out of a government research punchbowl faster than others while it lasts. We have seen dozens of these projects emerge over the past few years doing absurd things like attempting to remove carbon dioxide from our atmosphere. Removing it by capturing it at the major sources makes much more sense. Eliminating the emission in the first place can make the most sense.
Contrast that with businesses that extend the boundary of economics … extracting lower grade resources due to economics that now make sense. That was a necessity when we ran out of iron ore and had to figure out how to use taconite. Here is the case for the production of copper, which is so essential in today’s markets. The Next Generation of Copper Mining
However, copper isn’t sexy. Our climate alarmists like chasing the dream of free energy. It is not free … it is extremely costly to chase … and we don’t have superillium or unobtanium.