[ExI] Fwd: What Keith has been up to

[Keith Henson]

---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Friends of Annita and Tomas Harlan <
friends-of-annita-and-tomas-harlan at googlegroups.com>
Date: Sun, Sep 13, 2026 at 4:20 PM
Subject: Re: What Keith has been up to
To: Friends of Annita and Tomas Harlan <
friends-of-annita-and-tomas-harlan at googlegroups.com>


There are two people who have passed on that I really miss, Annita Harlan
when I have something to edit and David MacKay, who wrote "Renewable Energy
Without the Hot Air." Annita edited the space farm paper Carolyn and I
wrote )in 1975) that caused the L5 Society to come into existence.  L5 was
one of the main places promoting solar power satellites.

I worked for decades on solar power satellites. Finally gave up about ten
years ago after producing the "Beamed Energy Bootstrapping" video. The
economics failed, and it is still out of reach though there are a number of
people still trying.

But an offshoot of that work led to a proposal to use curtailed renewable
power to process carbon in MSW (trash) into syngas that can be stored and
burned for power or turned into liquid fuels. Recently, it dawned on us
that if you feed the gasifiers on vast amounts of biomass, you can make
synthetic fuel at a profit *and* sequester half the carbon (as CO2). This
provides a way to end the use of oil while avoiding mass deaths from
starvation that would result from a lack of diesel to farm ans ship food,
while ending the increases in CO2 that are warming the Earth.

(You need to convert half the CO and steam to hydrogen via water gas shift
to get the right ratio to feed the F/T fuel plants. You sort out the CO2
and sequester it. The biomass can come from the boreal forests, which are
going to burn anyway due to global warming, unless they are cut down and
turned into fuel.)

It is a very large project. It gets little traction. Given the current oil
situation, you might think it would. But it is a renewable related project
and those are out of favor in the US.

If anyone can think of a way to push this along, please let me know. Or
just do it.

Keith
On Tuesday, 21 April 2026 at 00:54:32 UTC-7 Keith Henson wrote:

> https://engrxiv.org/preprint/view/6777/11088
>
> Best wishes,
>
> Keith
>
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