FERTILIZER FROM THE SEAS

Now once you have the megawatts along the Georgia and Florida coasts, how do you get the electricity to the mainland?

Here, too, there is a new idea: You don't.

Electricity is of little use in itself; it is primarily a convenient energy transporter. The solar sea plants could use their electricity for some energy-intensive production (e.g., processing aluminum from bauxite) and ship the product, rather than the electricity, to the mainland. Methanol and hydrogen are other possibilities; as fuels, they are also energy transporters and leave wider options for further processing than does aluminum.

Of course, the electricity could be transmitted to the shore by submarine cable, too.

What a recent report by the Applied Physics Lab of Johns Hopkins University suggests is the manufacture of ammonia - an idea that has a multiple sting to it.

The technical details of a demonstration ship producing 100 MW are the following: displacement 142,000 tons, length 480 ft. width 200 ft. length of cold-water intake pipe 2,500 ft. cost $125 million; the ship would accommodate a crew of 31, and a 10,000 ton ammonia storage area. The report recommends that such a demonstration ship be built by 1981, and that in the following five years, 21 commercial-sized ships be built, each with a 500 MW capacity, producing 586,000 tons of ammonia per year.

Ammonia, a vital component in fertilizer production, is a compound of hydrogen and nitrogen. The solar sea vessel would include a liquefaction plant to produce liquid nitrogen from the air, and the hydrogen at present extracted from natural gas would be produced by electrolyzing water. (It takes more energy to produce hydrogen from water by electrolysis than is contained in the resulting hydrogen - a point often forgotten by advocates of the "hydrogen economy.") The hydrogen and nitrogen woutd thert be compressed to form ammonia, and stored at -28OF for loading onto ammonia tankers, which would take it to the mainland.

Though the initial investment would be relatively high ($500 million for the first commercial sized ship, and $400 million for the last 15), the report indicates that with the production costs of ammonia cut by more than half, the investment could be recovered in 5 1/2 years, perhaps earlier, since it would become more competitive as ammonia produced from fossil feedstocks becomes more expensive (or non-existent, if price controls on natural gas are maintained).

The small-is-beautiful dreamers have never considered the energy that goes into fertilizers to make possible the miracle of US agriculture; but growing food is one of the most important energy uses in the US. By bringing down the price of fertilizer, ammonia production by OTEC would benefit both farmers and consumers.

And not only in the US. The Third World, which is being victimized by the OPEC cartel far more cruelly than the industrialized countries, could produce its own fertilizers from the sun, without oil or gas resources.

In short, OTEC is bad for OPEC.

It is also bad for the sham-environmentalists. When news of OTEC gets around, they can be expected to rise as one man against this horrible abuse of solar energy. Large-scale, economic conversion of solar energy? That's not what they had in mind at all. The idea was piddling little amounts from home-installed gadgets that only upper-income intellectualoids can afford.

[More: OTEC Program Summary, Oct. 1976, ERDA Solar Energy Div., Washington, DC 20545; G.L. Dugger, Maritime and Construction Aspects of OTEC Plant-Ships, Report APL/JHU-SR-76-1A and B. Appl. Phys. Lab., J.H.Univ., Laurel, Md., April 1976.]