There are several techniques for transducing this energy from underground heat to in-the-grid electricity. One of these, a technology called Enhanced Geothermal Systems (EGS), is currently being tested by Sausalito-based Altarock Energy only 20 beeline miles from my home in Northern California. One would think this would be big news in Wine Country, but except for a 2008 mention of seed funding by google.org and several high-profile venture capital firms, this potentially earth-shaking (remember that adjective!) demonstration project has gone unmentioned in my local paper, the Santa Rosa Press Democrat. But on June 23, 2009, NYT journalist James Glanz wrote a long article suggesting that Altarock’s EGS experiment might cause earthquakes. It was reprinted four days later in the New York Times-owned Press Democrat along with a side story about earthquakes in Anderson Springs, the tiny Lake County hamlet closest to the drilling site.

Glanz based his warning on a 2006 earthquake caused by an EGS project in Basel, Switzerland, but he did not go unchallenged. Green Momentum, a specialized media company that focuses on providing independent news coverage events and developments affecting the “cleantech” industry, immediately opined that Glanz’s article “was certainly alarmist, if not genuinely alarming.”

As a survivor of the eight-year Bush/Cheney “cone of silence,” I am suspicious of PR Kool-Aid, but given the publicly available information about EGS in both Switzerland and California, it appears that there are many differences between the EGS processes tested by Geothermal Explorers International. Ltd. in Basel and the AltaRock test just underway near Anderson Springs.

Geothermal energy has great potential for helping to solve our long-term energy problem. Producing energy from geothermal sources is mostly clean (geothermal sources do tend to release greenhouse gases trapped deep within the earth, but these emissions are usually much smaller than those of fossil fuels) and power plants can be situated almost anywhere. The heat is onmipresent…just below the top layer of the crust. MIT chemical engineering professor Jefferson Tester calculates that the US’s total annual energy consumption is 100 exajoules. It doesn’t matter if that number is incomprehensible. Prof. Tester estimates that the geothermal resource for the whole country is about 14,000,000 exajoules. In oilman talk, that’s a lot of reserves.

             Luther Burbank          early geothermal investor

Healdsburg, the Sonoma County town in which I live, gets 43% of its electricity from geothermal sources (Q3 2009 report). It is just 12 miles in a straight line from The Geysers, the most productive geothermal energy site in the United States. The Geysers Development Company began selling electricity to Healdsburg in 1926 (world-renown botanist/horticulturalist Luther Burbank, a Sonoma County transplant, was one of the original investors), but as oil came down rapidly in price in the mid 30s, energy generation at The Geysers ceased to be profitable, and operations ceased. The first modern plant went online in 1960, with generation peaking in the ’80s at about 1,500 megawatts, enough energy to power about 1.5 million homes. Because this high level of production began to diminish available underground heat at The Geysers, output was purposely decreased to about 800 megawatts in order to stretch the site’s useful life.

Each day, Calpine Energy and the state-run Northern California Power Agency pump 11 million gallons of treated wastewater through a 41-mile underground pipeline from Sonoma County seat Santa Rosa and inject it into the extremely hot, permeable rock below. The water boils, creating high pressure steam that rises to the surface where it turns turbine generators, producing enough electricity to power most of the North Bay.

Geology of The Geysers

The geology of The Geysers is special. The caprock there is thinner than average, and the sub-surface rock is riddled with cracks, making the water-to-steam process relatively straightforward. Altarock’s EGS technology, however, does not require fissured rock. This is an advantage: there are many, many more sites that sit above hot, solid rock than above hot, fractured rock. At Anderson Springs—which is near, but not in The Geysers field—Altarock will drill deeply and inject water at very high pressure, thus cracking the extremely hot, solid rock, and producing electricity with the resultant steam. When the steam condenses, the water will be reinjected into the hot rocks below.

So what is the New York Times article worried about?

In 2001, Geothermal Explorers, a Swiss company, undertook an EGS project dubbed Deep Heat Mining Basel. In December 2006, at a depth of just over 5,000 meters (3.1 miles), full-scale injection of water triggered a 3.4 magnitude earthquake, big enough to rattle both the local windows and its citizenry. Geothermal Explorers immediately and voluntarily shut the project down. Glanz’s report suggests that the Altarock experiment could engender similar man-made temblors in Lake County.

Anderson Springs knows about earthquakes. The number of earthquakes with magnitude greater than 2.0 has increased dramatically over the last several decades. (See chart below.) Not surprisingly, some residents have mobilized, forming the Anderson Springs Community Alliance. Its mission is to raise “public awareness about numerous significant environmental impacts affecting the community due to ongoing geothermal development.”

Altarock gave a detailed response to Glanz’s article on its website:

• We took extraordinary care in choosing our site at the Geysers to avoid siting on a major fault. The Basel Project drilled into a significant fault.
• Smaller faults mean smaller events, and the faults in the Geysers area are significantly smaller than at Basel.
• The geology of the Geysers is very different - seismic studies predict events at the Geysers likely to be imperceptible at the surface.
• Events of similar magnitude to Basel occur frequently in California.
• Basel produced an event with a magnitude which is more than 10 times the size of the maximum event estimated for our project..
• We have installed monitoring and control procedures and designed pressure relief mechanisms to minimize any impact.
• We are employing proprietary technologies to ensure a safe and well-controlled project.
• We have actively involved and informed the community.

Getting energy from geothermal sources is important…and controversial. Is it worth the risk of more earthquakes? Is the risk real?

There will be more in subsequent posts.

©2009 Steve Cotler's Irrepressibly True Tales. All Rights Reserved.

Golda Meir (1898-1978)

Tonight’s true story.

An intelligent, worldly woman is leaning over her laptop late at night, paying almost no attention to the conversations behind her. She is startled out of her browsing by her sister’s voice.

“Is there any news about Golda Meir?”

She spins away from her laptop and demands, “What’s going on with Golda Meir?”

Three adults stare at her as if she’s grown a second head. Meir’s been dead for 31 years.

She persists, “Golda Meir. What’s the news?”

After several whats and huhs, she finally learns that her sister, bored with the non-stop, pan-media banality of Michael Jackson’s death reportage, had inquired about the latest Supreme Court nominee.

You read it here first: (Sonia) SOTO MAYOR will be the next prime minister of Israel.

©2009 Steve Cotler's Irrepressibly True Tales. All Rights Reserved.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton forcefully rejected yesterday Israeli claims that the Bush administration had secretly agreed to expanding Jewish settlements on the West Bank, deepening the impasse between the two countries.

“We have the negotiating record, that is the official record, that was turned over to the Obama administration by the outgoing Bush administration,” Clinton told reporters after meeting with her Turkish counterpart in Washington. “There is no memorialization of any informal and oral agreements.”

President Obama in recent weeks has pushed Israel to halt settlement growth, including expansion that results from population growth, on the grounds that it violates commitments made by Israel in the 2003 “road map” peace plan. Israeli officials have protested, saying that they had reached a series of understandings with Bush administration officials - some written, some spoken - under which growth was permitted under certain conditions.

The Washington Post documented some of those understandings last year, quoting Dov Weissglas, one of the Israeli negotiators; at the time, the Bush White House insisted that no such understanding existed. But last week former White House aide Elliott Abrams acknowledged that there had been unwritten understandings between Washington and Jerusalem.

Is Clinton misrepresenting the record? Is Israel pulling a fast one? Or is it possible, just barely possible, that the Bush administration—that cloister of secrets—tacked toward Tel Aviv while claiming they were never in the boat at all?

Trust none of them.

©2009 Steve Cotler's Irrepressibly True Tales. All Rights Reserved.

It was 1967. I was a first-year graduate student living in Peabody Terrace, the married students’ housing, a walking bridge across the river from Harvard Business School. These were tall, narrow buildings, four units to a floor, all sharing a long narrow balcony that looked east over the Charles River toward Boston. We had the uppermost balcony, a twentieth-floor apartment. When the weather was warm, all four apartments might be open to the balcony, on which rested only two heavy chairs, the frequent strong winds making predictable patio furniture a hazard to ground dwellers.

Treswick lived two apartments away and often walked the parapets, pacing the railing, three feet down on one side, 200 on the other. One evening, our door to the balcony open, I stepped from the bedroom into the living room and found Treswick aprowl. Words of encouragement accompanied by mild gestures toward the open door did not inspire him to exit. Raised tones and more challenging approaches only served to anger the feline. He stood his ground, offering hisses as counterpoint. Rapid wieldings of a long-handled broom and several high-octaved unintelligibilities finally convinced him; Treswick backed out, expressing discontent and disaffection toward me, my wife, and our unborn children.

My wife Jane worked as a school nurse, often coming home before I did. Her previous and long-standing fear of non-cuddly felines was now in foment. I came in late one afternoon not long after the aforesaid interloping to find the bathroom door locked. Jane was in the tub. She had come home, leaped when she found Treswick in the living room again, and escaped to the the bathroom, where she had been closeted for two hours. The cat had exited, how long before I could not know. Jane was pruney; I was pissed. I trotted over to the owners’ apartment, explained the invasion, and suggested an accommodation. Each of us would look to see if the other’s exterior door was open. If so, the examiner would keep his closed. With such an arrangement, I explained, Treswick would patrol only when our living quarters were closed to him, and we would enjoy the air only when Treswick was locked in.

A few nights later, balmy weather prompted me to check the door status as I retired. Treswick’s was shut. I opened ours to the night air.

Jane, in her first trimester with our first child, had already gone to bed and was nearly asleep when I joined her. Our bedroom, small, concrete-walled, and spare, had one window that opened to the building side opposite the balcony, providing a welcome cross-breeze on this warm night. Twenty floors up, there was little ambient street light; the room was lit by starlight only. The moon, which began this evening on the balcony, east, was a building away. I fell asleep.

Sometime later in slumber, I turned from my left side onto my back, Jane to my right, and awoke with the realization that Treswick had come in our balcony door and settled down on the pillow between us, his fur brushing my cheek. Reptilian brain suddenly firing, my heartbeat leaped from ahhh-sleep to lion-on-the-veldt. But my body did not move. Even slogging through the sodden clod of partial consciousness, I knew that to startle Treswick was injudicious. But what to do? I am right-handed, and my right arm was beneath the beast. I am near-sighted, and the room, dimly lit by the toenail moon now in the west, was entirely undefined.

Lying on my back, cat near my right ear, I constructed a plan. I would slowly extract my left arm from the covers, carefully reach across my chest without translating that motion to the bed, pillow, or feline, grab Treswick with one sure snatch, and fling him back across my body hard against the concrete wall which stood only two feet from the edge of the bed. It was not a great plan, but it was all I had. If he awoke while I was cocking my arm… If I mishandled the grab and left him startled on the bed… If I muffed the fling and only angered him… the night murk would be claws, blood, and blinded eyes.

It was dark. I was desperate. I had one chance.

I slowly extricated my arm from the covers. The cat didn’t move.

I began moving my arm toward Treswick. I was just past halfway when I felt my wife begin to turn. The roll began at her hips; one moment more and Jane would turn her head, either discovering the cat or upsetting it. Either way I would have to strike immediately and with all the force I could muster..

The events that followed must have taken place in a blur of milliseconds, but even today those steps are clear, discrete memories.

The impulse to reach and snatch formed in my brain and began its electrochemical transit to my arm. My vision, heightened in the moment by adrenaline and necessity, focused on the back and neck of the cat. But my wife’s head turned, and in that sliver of time before my muscles fired, I realized that the darkness of fur that appeared as Treswick was actually Jane’s head. Motion and mind froze.

I had nearly grabbed my pregnant wife’s head and flung it against the wall.

I was the man who mistook his wife for a cat.

It was years before I told her.

©2009 Steve Cotler's Irrepressibly True Tales. All Rights Reserved.

What an image!

The NASA space shuttle Atlantis and the Hubble Space Telescope, seen in silhouette during a solar transit at 12:17 p.m. EDT, Wednesday, May 13, 2009, from west of Vero Beach, Florida. The two space craft were at an altitude of 600 km above the earth. It took only 0.8 seconds for them to cross the solar disc.

Photo Credit: Thierry Legault

©2009 Steve Cotler's Irrepressibly True Tales. All Rights Reserved.

Do they even come close to knowing what’s going on?

Today I mailed the letter below to Barbara Desoer, President of Bank of America Home Loans, in Charlotte, NC. According to Money magazine, she received $9.6 million in compensation in  2007, and was one of the 25 highest-paid women in America.

Dear Barbara:

I begin this letter with an intimate salutation, taking a cue from the letter I received from you today, addressed to me and my wife (Stephen and Ann).

I, a Bank of America retiree, was intrigued by the outside of the bright red envelope that contained your letter. “Welcome to Bank of America/Look inside for your new opportunities” it said. At first I thought it had something to do with my previous employment, but the letter’s opening sentence (”We’re pleased to welcome you to Bank of America and Bank of America Home Loans.”) belied that assumption.

I tossed it out. Another bothersome solicitation from a company seeking to sell me a mortgage product. I get at least one such every week.

Then I recalled that that my home mortgage company, Countrywide Financial, had been acquired by Bank of America, so I retrieved the material from the trash and looked for some indication that the contents of your envelope related to my loan. The name “Countrywide” did not appear once in your letter. I set the letter aside and looked through the many glossy inserts. Countrywide was missing there, as well. It was only when I came back to the other, non-glossy page (headlined in red “Important things you should know”) that I found it. Five paragraphs down.

Wouldn’t it have been better customer communication to start out with an explanation of why this letter was coming to former Countrywide clients?

Barbara Desoer

And even more importantly, as a former employee and former stockholder, I shake my head at the cost of your glossy mailing. With the public’s image of bankers rivaling that of used car salesmen, there are better choices. Countrywide has my email address. People throw out junk mail (which is what this looked like). They read email from their lenders.

You have a huge job to do, Barbara. From what I have read of your career, you are extraordinarily talented. Your marketing department is letting you down.

Indebted to you for another nine years, I offer my wish for your success.

Sincerely,

*     *     *     *     *

It’s a hot night. My wife is asleep. It was either save the banking industry or tidy up my desk. I chose the hero’s journey.

If I get other than a form letter reply, I shall post it here.

©2009 Steve Cotler's Irrepressibly True Tales. All Rights Reserved.

Yesterday, the Avon Books division of HarperCollins Publishers released a short promo video for Julia Quinn’s soon-to-be-released novel, What Happens in London. The promo is so professionally done, I would probably have commented on it even if best-selling novelist Quinn (her last book hit #1 on The New York Times list) were not my daughter.

Ms. Quinn wrote the script. The young actress is Talia Gottlieb, a college senior who grew up in Kenya, the child of international aid workers. Ms. Gottlieb, who auditioned for the part at Ms. Quinn’s suggestion, beat out the other performers based upon her obvious-to-all-who-watch talents…not because she happens to be Ms. Quinn’s second cousin, once removed and my first cousin, twice removed. (Confusing, huh? For a consanguinity chart, click here.)

For more about the how and who of the promo, click here.

©2009 Steve Cotler's Irrepressibly True Tales. All Rights Reserved.

Compare Joe Lieberman and Arlen Specter. Each abandoned his party in order to assure or improve his chance of winning re-election. Pragmatic?  Egomaniacal? Fighting the neverending battle for truth, justice, and the American Way?

Whom do you love?

Lieberman, 67, lifted high by the Democratic party (vice presidential candidate in 2000, winner of the national popular vote with Al Gore), abandoned his party when he lost the 2006 Connecticut primary to challenger Ned Lamont, but won the election when Republicans ditched their own candidate to vote overwhelmingly for Independent Lieberman. He followed this two years later by speaking at the 2008 Republican Convention in support of John McCain. He is officially listed in Senate rolls as an “Independent Democrat” (ID-CT) and is ostensibly part of the Democratic caucus, but is no longer invited to leadership or policy-making meetings. Most had considered Lieberman one of the more “moderate” Democrats in the Senate.

Specter, 79, reading the pollsters’ tea leaves last month, concluded that crossing the aisle too many times had destroyed his chance to win re-election as Pennsylvania’s Republican senator in 2010. He is now a Democrat. Most had considered Specter one of the more “moderate” Republicans in the Senate.

Do you admire one for standing up for what he believes in, while abhorring the self-serving tactics of the other? If so, you are rooting for your team irrespective of behavior. “My party, right or wrong” is no slogan to be proud of.

I have great antipathy for the two-party system. The stability it engenders (compare our “civilized” changing of the guard to Italy’s or Israel’s multi-party chaos) is actually a demonstration of do-little calcification more than it is a platform for improvement. This is not a liberal vs. conservative issue; it is evidence of inertia and stagnation of ideas on both sides. In a previous post, I cited the strict party-line Congressional questioning into baseball pitcher Roger Clemens’ use of steroids (clearly an issue that should be non-partisan) as evidence of how the political parties control the minds of our legislators even when independent thinking would not undermine party platforms. [Note that my prediction in that post was wrong: Pres. Bush did not pardon Clemens as I thought he would.]

Although I have many deep (check that…HUGE) disagreements with the politics of both Lieberman and Specter, I wish they truly were independent and were joined by a dozen more Senators whose independence would be testament to creative and critical thinking.

©2009 Steve Cotler's Irrepressibly True Tales. All Rights Reserved.

H1N1 strain of Influenza A

How close are we to Armageddon?

Is the eleventh Plague upon us?

Blood, Frogs, Gnats, Death to Livestock, Pestilence, Boils, Hail, Locusts, Darkness, Slaying of the Firstborn…and now H1N1 swine flu?

Is this the return of the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918 during which about 50 million people died?

Assess swine flu this way: according to the Center for Disease Control each year in the United States, on average, 5% to 20% of the population get the flu; more than 200,000 people are hospitalized from flu-related complications; and about 36,000 people die from flu-related causes. That’s 100 deaths each day. So far one U.S. death has been recorded from swine flu. And research indicates the H1N1 strain is no more virulent than the typical yearly flu.

USA Today reports that the Mexican health secretary said that the H1N1 strain is not as lethal as originally thought.

Nonetheless, the threat of a pandemic shakes the walls of every newsroom and Congressional office. Doctors are assailed by patients demanding Tamiflu (oseltamivir) or Relenza (zanamivir). This is good for the makers of those drugs. It is also good for the flu virus because the more people who get Tamiflu and Relenza when not really needed, the more likely it is that new strains resistant to these drugs will mutate into existence.

Perhaps I am cynical, but I suspect the reason for all the hype is this: the bigger the crisis, the bigger the budgets for the yellers.

©2009 Steve Cotler's Irrepressibly True Tales. All Rights Reserved.

Max Weber

Also in 1905, another German, Albert Einstein, as a pioneer of modern physics, published three seminal papers, including one that would eventually bring him a Nobel Prize. Surprisingly to us today, the prize-winning paper was not the one on special relativity (“On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies”) in which he derived the formula that eventually made him a household name: E=mc². It was a paper about the photoelectric effect (“On a Heuristic Viewpoint Concerning the Production and Transformation of Light”) that proposed the existence of energy quanta; energy had to exist in discrete, non-continuous steps.  The third paper (“On the Motion Required by the Molecular Kinetic Theory of Heat of Small Particles Suspended in a Stationary Liquid”) explained Brownian motion—the jiggling of small particles in a liquid—a phenomenon that had been observed for almost a hundred years, but was unexplained. With this paper, Einstein indirectly confirmed the existence of atoms.

In 1905, physics was a rapidly expanding field. Scientific—include here the new “science” of economics—progress was accelerating, and science was expected to provide physical/mathematical/logical explanations to all previously unsolved or unsolvable conundrums…including the stock market.

Roger W. Babson

In 1904, Roger Ward Babson, a 29-year-old, tenth-generation native of Gloucester, MA, formed what would eventually become Babson’s Reports, a stock market research/analysis company. Babson, a Protestant, a capitalist, and also a graduate of MIT, subscribed to a scientific explanation of economic cycles, relying upon Newton’s law of action and reaction. Babson’s company prospered, and he became well known and somewhat influential. In a speech on September 5, 1929, he predicted, “Sooner or later a crash is coming, and it may be terrific…Factories will shut down…Men will be thrown out of work…and the result will be a serious depression.” By the end of the day, the market was down 3%. John Kenneth Galbraith, in The Great Crash (p. 85), noted that

“Babson was not a man who inspired confidence as a prophet…. As an educator, philosopher, theologian, statistician, forecaster and friend of the law of gravity [Blogger's note: in 1948, Babson founded and financed the Gravity Research Foundation which encouraged research into anti-gravity physics], he has sometimes been thought to have spread himself too thin. The methods by which he reached his conclusions were a problem. They involved a hocus pocus of lines and areas on a chart. Intuition and even mysticism played a part. Those who employed rational, objective and scientific methods failed to foretell the crash. In these matters, as so often in our culture, it is far, far better to be wrong in a respectable way than to be right for the wrong reasons.”

A generous philanthropist, Babson founded three business colleges: Babson College in Babson Park, MA (1919),  Webber College, now Webber International University, in Babson Park, FL (1927), and the now-defunct Utopia College, in Eureka, KS (1946).

Eccentric and somewhat poetic, Babson wrote in his autobiography, Actions and Reactions (1935):

“Another thing I have been doing, which I hope will be carried on after my death, is the carving of mottoes on the boulders at Dogtown, Gloucester, Massachusetts. My family says that I am defacing the boulders and disgracing the family with these inscriptions, but the work gives me a lot of satisfaction, fresh air, exercise and sunshine. I am really trying to write a simple book with words carved in stone instead of printed paper. Besides, when on Dogtown common, I revert to a boyhood which I once enjoyed when driving cows there many years ago.”

For more on this unusual man, see this review of his autobiography.

Last month I walked among Babson’s boulders (images of all 24 here). Viewed from within this new economic crisis, Babson’s worthy, Protestant ethic inscriptions seem quaint and entirely out of touch with modern Wall Street sensibilities.

Be Clean       Be on Time       Be True       Courage       Get a Job    Help Mother
Ideals       Ideas       If Work Stops Values Decay       Industry       Initiative
Integrity       Intelligence       Keep Out of Debt       Kindness       Loyalty
Never Try/Never Win       Prosperity Follows Service       Save
Spiritual Power        Study       Truth       Use Your Head       Work

What would today’s Wall Streeters inscribe on their boulders?

*     *     *     *     *

[If you are in Gloucester and want to see the Babson Boulders, contact Walk the Words for a personal tour. Photos of me and the boulders courtesy of Seania McCarthy/Walk the Words.]

©2009 Steve Cotler's Irrepressibly True Tales. All Rights Reserved.