An action thriller by Jock Miller
Fossil fuel has an ageless affinity with dinosaurs. To create oil, dinosaurs died.
The perfect energy storm is sweeping over the United States: Japan’s Fukushima nuclear plant meltdown has paralyzed nuclear expansion globally, BP’s Gulf of Mexico oil spill has stalled deep water drilling, Arab oil countries are in turmoil causing doubt about access to future oil, the intensity of hurricanes hitting the Gulf’s oil rigs and refineries has intensified due to global warming, and the nation’s Strategic Oil Supply is riding on empty.
As the energy storm intensifies, the nation’s access to Arab oil, once supplying over sixty percent of our fossil fuel, is being threatened causing people to panic for lack of gas at the pumps, stranding cars across the country and inciting riots.
The U.S. Military is forced to cut back air, land, and sea operations sucking up 58% of every barrel of oil to protect the nation; U.S. commercial airlines are forced to limit flights for lack of jet fuel; and businesses are challenged to power up their factories, and offices as the U.S. Department of Energy desperately tries to provide a balance of electric power from the network of aged power plants and transmission lines that power up the nation.
The United States must find new sources of domestic fossil fuel urgently or face an energy crisis that will plunge the nation into a deep depression worse than 1929.The energy storm is very real and happening this very moment. But, at the last moment of desperation, the United States discovers the world’s largest fossil fuel deposit found in a remote inaccessible mountain range within Alaska’s Noatak National Preserve surrounding six and a half million acres.
Preventing access to the oil is a colony of living fossil dinosaurs that will protect its territory to the death.Nobody gets out alive; nobody can identify the predator--until Dr. Kimberly Fulton, Curator of Paleontology at New York’s Museum of Natural History, is flown into the inaccessible area by Scott Chandler, the Marine veteran helicopter pilot who’s the Park’s Manager of Wildlife. All hell breaks loose when Fulton’s teenage son and his girlfriend vanish into the Park.
Will the nation’s military be paralyzed for lack of mobility fuel, and will people across America run out of gas and be stranded, or will the U.S. Military succeed in penetrating this remote mountain range in northwestern Alaska to restore fossil fuel supplies in time to save the nation from the worst energy driven catastrophe in recorded history?
World’s Worst Power Outages
Northeastern U.S. and Canada, 2003
Photograph by Andrew Lichtenstein, Corbis
On August 15, 2003, a mass of New York commuters crossed the Brooklyn Bridge on foot during a blackout that robbed 50 million people of power for as long as two days in southeastern Canada and the Northeastern United States. It also crippled all trains, stranding many travelers. The U.S.-Canada Power System Outage Task Force determined that equipment failures and human error had combined to cause the blackout, which started when power lines shut down after contact with trees.
An improving ability to monitor the exact condition of the power system at any given instant with voltage and current sensors, and to make rapid changes like taking lines out of service, is critical to avoiding the cascading effects that lead to widespread outages like the 2003 event.
"If something goes wrong and an ice storm brings down a line or someone blows up a transmission tower that will propagate a disturbance and we need to know exactly how far it propagates and exactly what it looks like—like the ripples of a pebble dropped into a pond, so that we can take a definitive corrective action," said EPRI's Clark Gellings. "When that capability doesn't exist, like it didn't in 2003 in the United States, the system is set up for some kind of failure."
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