Al Gores film, An Unpleasant Truth, which won an Academy Award in 2007 painted a picture of impending global temperature increases which would cause polar ice to melt, and sea levels to rise dramatically. Gores problem is not that hes an alarmist; its that he has little understanding of the practicalities of reducing carbon emissions. It has been proved time and again in commerce that its market forces which are most likely to change peoples habits. To try and tax the nation into submission to compel them into doing something they don't want to do, like not driving their car, when there is no viable alternative is sheer folly. Like many politicians he has little experience in commerce and is out of touch with reality.
Take one well recognized source of carbon emissions, the large rigs that haul containers across the country. Many of them have their exhaust pipes pointed to the sky so they do not immediately annihilate the driver in the vehicle stuck behind them. Could we move any of that traffic onto the railroads? In theory yes, in practice no, because the cost of upgrading the railway system to transfer any meaningful volume of truck traffic to rail would take decades and cost billions of dollars.
What if we could use a transportation system which doesn't use trucks, trains or airplanes and uses water to move cargo? But we have rivers. Yes but they are far and few between and can only transport cargo at slow speed on a few limited north/south arteries in the USA .
Imagine a system that uses pipelines just like those that pump oil across America but this time filled with eco friendly water, transporting hermetically sealed capsules carrying cargo across the country. The oil industry uses such capsules traditionally called pigs to both clean and monitor pipelines but they have also been used in James Bond film plots three times to transport goods and people including the movie The Living Daylights where a pig was modified to send a person across the Iron Curtain in an oil pipeline. Fiction aside, serious players in industry have also thought that hydraulic transport merited sufficient attention that in 1977 Hitachi was awarded a US patent (4,000,927) for a Capsule Hydraulic Transportation System. In 1982 the University of Missouri was awarded a patent (4,334.806) for a Capsule Injection System for a hydraulic capsule pipeline system which improved on the Hitachi patent by introducing a magazine type system similar to that used in revolvers to hold shells to load capsules into a pipeline.
In 1977 the average price of a barrel of oil was $11.95 so there was no great compelling need to find alternatives to truck transport. Twenty five years later with oil prices hitting $80 per barrel the needs to find alternative methods of transport are not simply motivated by a desire to reduce the carbon footprint but there is an economic driving force to do so.
So imagine 4 foot diameter pipes crisscrossing the country filled with water transporting hermetically sealed 10 foot long cargo capsules at 20 mph. Each 125 cu ft capsule carrying a variety of goods silently city to city in a matter of hours and coast to coast in a little over 4 days without a single traffic jam. Using the system proposed by the University of Missouri cargo capsules could be inserted and retrieved from the pipe network at the rate of one capsule every 10 seconds. A single cross country 4 ft diameter pipeline with capsule drop and insert points and spurs at major cities could move 600,000 cu ft of cargo per day from New York to Los Angeles with each trip lasting 4 days. Thats the equivalent to 240 forty foot container trucks per day traveling across country adding up to a staggering 18 million cu ft of cargo carrying capacity per month. Each pipeline would eliminate 7,200 truck trips in the same period and move cargo at a fraction of the cost, assuming infrastructure costs are spread over a 10 year payback period.
This pipe dream of thirty years ago is surely worth examining again.
Vince Waterson is VP of Business Development at Hawaii Pacific Teleport and he can be contacted at vwaterson@aol.com
You are going to take on a Nobel Peace Prize recipient? First I think that you should get the name of his documentary correct. You probably never viewed it. Work on your facts and then try again. Respond to this comment
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Article added to SearchWarp.com on 9/30/2007 3:26:23 PM. View other articles written byHighway 101(219)
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