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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Inside China's Energy Machine

A Cathedral for Hydropower

 

Photograph by Toby Smith, Reportage by Getty Images

Water runs through five miles (eight kilometers) of rock tunnels from the Jiulong River to reach this turbine hall built more than four miles into the mountainside. Lined with bedrock, this underground powerhouse in Jiang'an, Sichuan, holds a trio of 110-megawatt turbines for generating hydroelectricity.

Constructed, managed, and operated by CLP Group, the project began commercial operations in late 2011. The energy feeds into Sichuan Province's power grid.

Landlocked Sichuan, which is 1,600 kilometers from the coast and surrounded by mountains, is one of China's leading agricultural regions and also is a major center for hydroelectricity.

Today, China has the largest installed hydro capacity of any country in the world, according to the International Energy Agency, with most hydro stations found here, in the country's central and southern regions.

The image illustrates well the access Smith gained in his effort to document China's energy complex. Over two years of effort to win the trust of the developers, he interviewed directors at many of the sites and toured and photographed freely inside the facilities, even when they were under construction.

Smith has been mapping his photographic projects with the help of an Innovation in Storytelling grant from National Geographic. His work across China covered 11 provinces. 

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A Rare Look Inside China's Energy Machine
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