[ExI] new fire at moss landing

[Keith Henson]

As some of you know, I came up with an alternate scheme to store power in
gas made from waste. One might think this would be of interest, given that
it makes relatively cheap energy in a world where fuel prices are soaring.
It does get attention of sorts when I post on LinkedIn, a thousand people
read it, but zero reach out for details.
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 many
people and a few startups 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 and 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 any ofher way to push this along, please let me
know. Or just do it.

Keith


On Fri, Sep 18, 2026 at 8:39 AM spike jones via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

>
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> Damn.
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> You may recall my having gone out to Moss Landing a year ago last summer,
> after the fire, rented a kayak and paddled around out in Elkhorn Slough,
> looking for insights on how a battery storage facility could be made safer,
> thinking of potential investment opportunities.  After a day out on the
> slough, I decided it was a bad bet: the wildlife damage had not been fully
> assessed at that time.  I concluded that the environmentalists could sue
> our brains out, put us out of business.  Soooo… I decided to not put any
> money into it.
>
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> Now today, this headline:
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> This is bad news.  Wind and solar are good, but they need associated power
> storage, which might be lithium based, which is prone to fire, and if it
> ignites, it causes a lot of toxic gases and toxic runoff into the local
> waterways, as it did into the Elkhorn.  Lawsuits still ongoing, with new
> ones pending.  In the Jan 2025 fire, they could have argued it was an
> unforeseeable accident (the plant is recent design) but with a second fire,
> I fear the local greens will send them packing.
>
>
>
> spike
> _______________________________________________
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> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org
> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat
>
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