I’ve noticed a pattern lately, a happy pattern in some of the renewable energy news that I read. There are multiple examples of technologies and skills originally developed for the oil and gas industry that are becoming directly applicable in renewables.
Example 1. Fervo is a energy company that drills not for oil but for heat. Geothermal energy is useful stuff when it’s conveniently located near the surface. Picture boiling hot springs next to Icelandic volcanoes. Heating water is easy when the hot water is already right there. But if you drill deep enough, you can make your own geothermal party just about anywhere. The trick is being able to drill deep and cheap and fast. It turns out this is not so easy. But as luck would have it, the fracking revolution of the last few decades has developed exactly the skills we need to go bobbing for hot rocks. Houston-based Fervo is now moving out of their initial proof-of-concept period with solid evidence that they’ll be able to sell geothermally-generated electricity at a reasonable rate. Even if the current batch of news coverage is optimistic, it’s still satisfying to see fracking tech put to low-carbon use. It’s like watching a con man raise money for the orphanage.
Example 2. Solugen, also Houston-based company, makes chemical products, chemicals that would typically be created from petroleum feedstocks. One of its two founders had a background in the industrial chemicals industry. The other one brought the biological know-how. They’ve built something called a Bioforge that looks like a petrochemical refinery, but instead of starting with petrochemicals and warping them at high temperatures and pressures, they start with sugars and use specially engineered enzymes operating a low temperatures and pressures to create their end products. As they scale up their technology, they’re able to build on properties and skill sets originally developed for the chemicals industry, but creating much less waste and greenhouse gas emissions along the way.
Image by Midjourney
Example 3 Ørsted is a Danish company that makes sea-based wind turbines. To do this, you need fleets of ships specialize in towing, positioning, and securing enormous steel structures in the middle of the ocean. Once again, this is not easy. But Ørsted has been doing this kind of thing for a long time. Only, back in the day, they used to make oil rigs. But around 2008, Ørsted started building offshore wind farms. Since then, they have fully transitioned from being a fossil-fuel company to being a renewable energy company. Everything they learned sucking oil from the seafloor they can now apply to pulling electricity from a passing breeze.
There is an insane amount of money, talent, and expertise in the oil and gas industry. Rather than making enemies out of the people in that field, how can we give them a playbook that puts them, their skills, their capital, and their equipment to work in a newer, cleaner energy industry?
My friend Jay Czarnecki has made multiple contributions to this blog over the years. See for example, his 2022 piece on birding during the pandemic. Jay and I first met because we were both majoring in aerospace engineering, so it’s only natural that we should share a fondness for all things aviation. In Jay’s case, you might say that the fondness runs from biology right through to literature: birds as aviators and aviators as poets. Here he muses on the latter.
Image by Midjourney
Aviation Poetry
by Jay Czarnecki
We all know now that one of the great joys and great pitfalls of our age of ubiquitous information is the way you can pull one little thread of intriguing fact and uncover a whole world. Falling down the rabbit hole, we call it. I fell down one recently. In an article marking the 100th anniversary of the British Broadcasting Corporation, passing reference was made to one of the founding employees (Cecil Lewis) who was a former World War I fighter pilot and poet. My attention snagged on that combo: poet aviator. That’s an unusual mashup, I thought. Or is it?
Far off, far down, some fisherman is watching As the rod dips and trembles over the water, Some shepherd rests his weight upon his crook, Some ploughman on the handles of his ploughshare, And all look up, in absolute amazement, At those air-borne above. They must be gods!
Reading this, one could imagine the scene is from Kitty Hawk in 1903 with the amazement directed to the Wright Flyer, with Orville Wright. But no: it a passage from the poem “The Metamorphoses” written by the Roman poet Ovid in roughly 10 A.D. describing the even older Greek myth of the doomed flight of Icarus. If the role of the poet is to help us understand how to be and live in the world, then maybe the role is needed even more urgently when that world is changing and expanding. So when the ancients’ dream of human flight became real at the beginning of the last century, perhaps it was no surprise that the poets were not simply observing on the ground – they were right there in the cockpit. Because the pilot’s new airborne perspective changed how to think about the world and ourselves.
The airplane has unveiled for us the true face of the earth. For centuries, highways had been deceiving us … we been making our way along the winding roads. Roads avoid the barren lands, the rocks, the sands. They shape themselves to man’s needs.
This observation is from one of the first aviators whose time in the skies inspired philosophical writings on life, Antoine Saint-Exupéry, best known for the beloved fable “The Little Prince” with its pilot-narrator and his newfound young friend who hitched a ride with a flock of birds to traverse the heavens. Saint-Exupéry (Saint-Ex to friends) took a notebook with him on long solo flights to capture his reflections in real time. In the book “The Right Stuff”, in its early chapters a chronicle of the culture of the early test pilots, he’s mentioned in passing, reverently: “The good Saint-Ex! And he was not the only one. He was merely the one who put it into words most beautifully and anointed himself before the altar of the right stuff.” As the Little Prince departs, he bids his new friend that to find him to look to the sky at night where “there is sweetness in the laughter of the stars.”
The boundary between atmosphere, the domain of aircarft, and space, the domain of spacecraft, can be defined in differing ways, and I take advantage of that ambiguity here. In the movie “Contact”, based on Carl Sagan’s novel which imagined a first human interstellar journey, there was great debate on what profession the first traveler should be. Ultimately, a scientist is chosen, but when awestruck upon viewing the grandeur of the cosmos for the first time, she (portrayed by actress Jodie Foster) breathlessly says “They should have sent a poet”, as if to say it’s the poet’s ability to observe and describe that’s needed to convey beauty at such scale and to connect it with what’s known and meaningful to us.
That’s great screenwriting! But perhaps it was inspired by the experiences of real-life astronauts. The Apollo 11 astronaut Michael Collins was the one who stayed behind on the Moon-orbiting command module in 1969 while Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked the Moon. Alone in his craft, often on the far side of the moon out of sight and radio contact, he was perhaps the most alone any human has ever been. Afterward he said: “I think a future flight should include a poet, a priest and a philosopher … we might get a much better idea of what we saw.” The phenomenon behind these feelings, often expressed by astronauts seeing the Earth from space, came to be known as the “overview effect”: the way the view of our entire home planet created feelings of transcendence and sense of connection to others.
We may not have yet sent a poet into space, but we have sent poets’ works. The NASA mission called Lucy, launched in 2021, is en route to study asteroids in the orbit of Jupiter. When it’s finished, the spacecraft will remain in a stable orbit traveling between its asteroid subjects and the Earth’s orbit for hundreds of thousands of years … perhaps to be encountered in some far future by humans of that time. Whereas the Voyager spacecraft which journey beyond our Solar System carried recordings meant for the “ears” of distant others to describe our species, Lucy carries a plaque of written messages, some poetic, meant for our own descendants. Of them, I find the words of poet Charles Simic most moving:
I’m writing to you from a world you’ll have a hard time imagining, To a world I can’t picture no matter how hard I try. Do you still have birds that wake you up in the morning with their singing And lovers who gaze at the stars trying to read in them the fate of their love? If you do, we’ll recognize one another.
Finally, I’ll bridge the realm of air and space again, first by reaching back to the era of the mid-century aviators.
In 1941, John Gillespie Magee, Jr of the Royal Canadian Air Force, experienced a sense of euphoria while in an acrobatic test flight in his Spitfire aircraft. But like fellow poet Saint-Exupéry, he captured those feelings while still aloft. A few weeks later, he mailed his writings to his parents, saying: “I am enclosing a verse I wrote the other day. It started at 30,000 feet, and was finished soon after I landed.” After his death in an air accident a few months later, the poem was published and became renown. Titled “High Flight”, it is now the official poem of both the Royal Air Force of the United Kingdom and the Royal Canadian Air Force.
Like many, I did not know of “High Flight” until 1986. Many generations have a specific event, usually a tragedy, so impactful that everyone always remembers exactly where they were and what they were doing when it happened: Pearl Harbor, the assassination of JFK, September 11th. For me, I would add the Space Shuttle Challenger accident of 1986. I remember watching the news reporting and the endless looping video, until President Reagan appeared to console a shocked country. He referenced the poem, memorably closing his address with Magee’s final line.
“High Flight” is considered by many the most famous aviation poem:
Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings; Sunward I’ve climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth Of sun-split clouds, — and done a hundred things You have not dreamed of — wheeled and soared and swung High in the sunlit silence. Hov’ring there, I’ve chased the shouting wind along, and flung My eager craft through footless halls of air . . . Up, up the long, delirious burning blue I’ve topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace Where never lark, or ever eagle flew — And, while with silent, lifting mind I’ve trod The high untrespassed sanctity of space, Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.
Rambles Blog at Star Chamber 