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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Floating Wind Farms in the Middle of the Ocean




There's been plenty of talk of developing offshore wind farms to supply electricity, but as the chronically-delayed effort to build the CapeWind project in Nantucket Sound demonstrates, it's not that easy to convince people in coastal areas that wind turbines won't mar the natural beauty of their surroundings or damage delicate marine ecosystems [source: Lindsay]. That's why the ultimate solution may be to put wind farms hundreds of miles from coastlines, conveniently out of view, and to have them float on the surface of the water, tethered rather than attached to a structure to the ocean floor.

In addition to being less obtrusive, floating wind turbines have a much greater potential to generate power. They can capture the energy of winds in the open ocean, which can reach speeds at least twice as fast as winds near land [source: Economist]. Some reports suggest that wind farms could provide up to 15 percent of the world's future energy needs [source: Jacquot].

In late 2011, the first such offshore floating wind farm, a $30 million prototype called WindFloat, was put in place 217 miles (349 kilometers) off the coast of Portugal [source: Scientific American]. It uses a 2-megawatt turbine manufactured by a Danish company, Vestas, which is bolted onto a triangular floating platform made by Seattle-based Principle Power. The platform is moored with four lines, two of which are connected to the column stabilizing the turbine, which helps to reduce excess motion. As the wind shifts direction and places loads on the turbine and foundation, pumps will shift ballast water between chambers in the platform, enabling the installation to cope with more powerful offshore weather. As Antonio Vidigal, CEO of EDP Inovacao, one of the partners in the project, told Scientific American: "The deep ocean is the next big energy frontier" [source: Scientific American].

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