An action thriller by Jock Miller


Fossil fuel has an ageless affinity with dinosaurs. To create oil, dinosaurs died.


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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?

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Flying Wind Turbines Reach for High-Altitude Power: The Wild Windy Yonder


Makani wind turbine picture - tethered wing power generator in flight
Photograph courtesy Makani Power

The landscape appears to pitch beneath the Makani Airborne Wind Turbine  during a test flight near the start-up company's headquarters in Alameda, California.

Moving a wind turbine from a 328-foot (100-meter) tower to 1,640 feet (500 meters) above the ground would tend to double the available wind speeds, and increase the available power eightfold, says Cristina L. Archer, a University of Delaware engineering professor and one of Caldeira's former post-docs.

"Above 2,000 meters [6,562 feet] you get rapid gradients of winds, with the jet streams [at 30,000 feet (9,144) meters] being [the] Mecca of winds," Archer said.

Even though airborne wind pioneers are currently aiming at altitudes far below the jet stream, they face significant technological challenges as they try to bring wind power down to the ground. Long runs of wire can be expensive and prone to tangling. The devices could pose a risk to air traffic or the environment. They would also have to be protected from bad weather.

Joe Faust, editor of the website Upper Windpower, said in an email that research is under way on alternative transmission methods, including beaming power via lasers or microwaves, although such solutions are far off. More immediately viable, perhaps, has been the work on nonconductive tethers that transmit power by applying their motion to generators or fluid pumps, or by operating saws or moving carts.


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