Archive  April 1999 Vol. 220 No. 4  Editorial

Thomas R. Wright, Jr.,  Editorial Director

Solar isn’t the panacea after all

It was just a glimpse — a video clip that probably lasted less than five seconds — but it showed a huge fireball, with black smoke billowing hundreds of feet into the air. Then it was gone, as the network news anchor reassured us that nobody was injured by the explosion and fire and a California solar plant.

Wait a minute. Explosion, fire, solar power, California — somehow it didn’t fit together. Solar, we’re told, is the completely-safe, "green" power source and the answer to all of our pollution and depleting fossil fuels problems. So, how could it be related to this recent disaster? Then we realized that we had not heard any mention of hurried evacuations in advance of a poisonous gas cloud or any predictions of how the smoke would ultimately lead to global cooling (or warming). Neither were there any video shots of birds falling from the sky or writhing on the ground.

Since we haven’t seen any further media accounts of the incident, and suspect that many of you never heard about it in the first place, we decided to try and dig up some more information. A more detailed article was finally located in The Bakersfield Californian.

Titled "Authorities evacuate area after blast at solar plant," the story was datelined Feb. 26, 1999, Daggett, CA. It said a storage tank exploded at a solar power plant, sending flames and smoke into the sky and forcing an evacuation of the immediate area. No injuries were reported. The blaze occurred at the SEGS II power plant near Interstate 40 in San Bernardino County. Its cause was not immediately known.

The 900,000-gallon tank that burned contained a heat-transfer fluid called therminol, which is used in electric power generation. And from the Geo-Images Project web page at the University of California at Berkeley, it was learned that tubes containing the therminol are routed through trough-shaped, mirrored reflectors, which focus solar energy onto the tubes. This heats the therminol inside to about 850°F, which is in turn used to boil water for electric power generation.

In addition to evacuating employees (all were accounted for), officials evacuated a 1/2-sq-mi area around the facility. The Federal Aviation Administration also restricted three miles of airspace around the plant up to 2,500 ft because of the billowing smoke. Daggett is about 100 mi northeast of Los Angeles, near Barstow.

The Bakersfield Californian said the fluid can be "mildly toxic," which makes one wonder how much escaped. Wouldn’t it be ironic for a solar power facility to end up classified as a toxic waste site? That would surely put into question all of Greenpeace’s incessant promotion of solar energy.

Beatle bites Gore. In another ironic twist, Vice President Al Gore was speared recently in a news release from a group you would expect to be one of his allies — People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA). It seems that Paul McCartney, acting as a spokesman for PETA, sent a letter to Gore, urging him to save millions of animals who will die in chemical tests he ordered the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to fast-track last fall. PETA says that animals used in the tests "will be poisoned with thousands of chemicals, many already known to be hazardous." McCartney wrote, "With all due respect, do you really need to kill rabbits, ducks, fish and guinea pigs to make sure turpentine and rat poison are unsafe?"

The letter was timed to arrive in the Veep’s office just one day after PETA’s placement of a full-page advertisement in The New York Times. Along with a photo of a rabbit whose fur and skin purportedly have been ravaged by chemical testing, the ad warned, "Republicans won’t be the only ones suffering through four years of Al Gore."

Gore also got a whacking from a more traditional source in the February issue of Forbes. The article details the powers that he (and his current boss) have appropriated through regulation as Congress ceded lawmaking authority because of complex scientific judgments and details. Gore has been successful in his pursuit of excessive and misguided environmental regulations primarily because he has put his cronies into positions at EPA, the Council on Environmental Quality and the DOE.

In fact it was the DOE, which the Forbes article called "a backwater brimming with Gore lieutenants," that has come up with the idea of dictating that your clothes washing machine will have to be front-loading rather than top-loading. DOE says front-loaders use less hot water, thus saving energy. But they forget that front-loader capacities are smaller, meaning more loads. And we’re asking Bill Richardson for help?

More DOE brilliance. The Energy Information Administration (EIA) just released the report, "Deeper Wells and Faster Project Development Marks Offshore Natural Gas Production." In it, EIA cites the dramatic advances in drilling technology that have tripled the water depth record for gas or oil production from 1,760 ft in 1989 to 5,376 ft in 1997.

EIA also says technology advances have lessened the time between discovery and initial production for offshore projects, which enhances the expected economic returns. Improvements for deep-water prospects have been especially impressive, declining from ten years for a discovery in 1984 to roughly two years for fields discovered in 1996.

However, (and this is where it gets interesting) the near-term outlook for offshore gas production may suffer as a result of the low 1998 gas prices, which have been caused in part by the plummet in crude oil prices. At first, EIA says, "Although 1998 offshore production is not expected to show a substantial drop, the cumulative impact of decreased drilling and other support work during the year may be substantial. A low-supply scenario suggests that offshore gas production in 2002 could decline by almost 30% from the 1997 level." In the next sentence, the agency goes on to say, "A high-supply scenario using more optimistic assumptions indicates that gas production in 2002 could rise by 39% from 1997 levels.

Good grief — that’s a 69% swing from one extreme to another! The gas futures traders ought to have fun with this one.

Copyright © 1999 World Oil
Copyright © 1999 Gulf Publishing Company