What To Do About Global Warming

I'm starting to think that we're just never going to get away from fossil fuels any time soon, so maybe we should be thinking more about better ways to use them.

Within the past few years, enormous new petroleum reserves have been developed miles underground in the Gulf of Mexico (the BAHA oil field). The extreme depth of these reserves means that they are at very high temperature and pressure, which is a "problem". But what if this isn't a problem at all, but actually an advantage?

We all want hydrogen cars, don't we. (Yes.) But how do you make hydrogen? You process hydrocarbons using water and nickel (as a catalyst) at very high temperature and pressure.

Hmm. That's just what you have at the bottom of these new deep wells. Why not process the hydrocarbons into hydrogen deep underground? You also get ammonia, which is used to make fertilizer, and carbon dioxide, which will need to be left underground somehow.

What are your thoughts?

Not About Tube Travel, Necessarily

The title of this blog is inspired by Elon Musk's proposal to build ultra high speed tube travel between San Francisco and Los Angeles, which he calls a "hyperloop", but my desire is to write about any and all "hyper loopy" ideas, that is, ideas that are really, really out there. 

I've had an addiction to crazy ideas for a long time. Most famously, when I was in my twenties, I rear-ended a car while in heavy traffic because I was spaced out thinking about how an underground horizontal elevator-like transport system might be designed. And as a teenager, I came close to starting what could have been a serious fire in my bedroom trying to make a crystalline form of wax, because I didn't know that a fine spray of water would intensify hydrocarbon combustion rather than suppress it.

There are other, less dramatic incidents, but that should be enough to establish my credentials as a writer on loopy thinking.

I'm only half serious about this, so if you have any inclinations along these lines, I invite you to come along for the ride and maybe we can have some mind-bending fun boldly going where no brain cells have gone before.