To address global warming, we're going to do something that may surprise the save-the-planet camp: burn more fossil fuel less efficiently. Big oil will prosper.

It's official: global warming is a republican issue, too, now that the Bush Administration has officially acknowledged its gravity. So something will be done. But what? To address global warming, we're going to do something that may surprise many in the save-the-planet camp: We will burn more fossil fuel less efficiently. Big oil will prosper. So will Saudi Arabia.

Fossil fuels--hydrocarbons--are part hydrogen, part carbon. Both elements burn well. Your charcoal barbecue burns pure carbon. The Space Shuttle's main engine burns pure hydrogen. The carbon, which becomes carbon dioxide when you burn it, is what the climate models link to global warming.

Natural gas contains relatively more hydrogen and less carbon; that's why greens like it more than other fossil fuels. Over half of the heat from a methane-gas flame comes from the hydrogen. But about 80% of the heat in coal comes from the carbon. Oil lands in the middle.

One way to burn hydrocarbons without raising carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere is to burn first, then suck the carbon back out of the air--by growing new trees, for example, or by seeding the oceans with iron to promote massive new growth of algae. If things go right, the new green plants will get buried, and in the fullness of geological time, turn into new coal--call it recycling. This is the cheapest approach, and the greenest, too, but it doesn't curb energy consumption. And truth be told, many environmental activists are as determined to curb energy consumption itself as they are to curb carbon emissions.

A second option is to strip the carbon out of the fuel before you burn it. Most fuel cells depend on "reformers" that do just that. Most current reformers dump the stripped-out carbon into the air as carbon dioxide, but other processes can leave the carbon behind as a solid residue. That takes care of carbon emissions all right--roughly speaking, such a fuel cell starts with methane, extracts the hydrogen and then returns coal to the ground. But this also costs about 50% of the heating value of the original gaseous fuel.

We might eventually displace some coal when we find an economical way to liquefy natural gas, and thus make it easier to transport. But it won't be a lot of coal, and the carbon reductions would be modest in any event. Every other alternative on the low-carbon diet plan entails a significant energy overhead, too. Scrubbing huge amounts of carbon dioxide out of smokestacks and tailpipes isn't easy and can't be done without sharply reducing overall efficiency. We already pay significant efficiency overhead for the scrubbers that remove comparatively tiny amounts of sulfur dioxide from coal plant smokestacks and for the catalytic converters that remove comparatively tiny amounts of nitrogen oxide pollutants from tailpipes.

The long-term hope for many greens is that we can get beyond hydrocarbons entirely and burn just the first half of those compound fuels, the hydrogen. Hydrogen is abundant, they remind us, it's part of water. But water is what you end up with after you burn the hydrogen in the hydrocarbon--steam goes out the tailpipe and up the smokestack, alongside the carbon dioxide.

To turn water back into hydrogen fuel again, you have to unburn it--you have to pump energy back into the water, usually in the form of electricity. The greens know this but hope that the electricity will be solar. Perhaps someday, but anyone who does the numbers knows that it won't be anytime soon--solar isn't close to cost-competitive yet, and the panels require ridiculous amounts of real estate. Coal- or gas-fired electricity won't do either--that would defeat the whole carbon-reduction objective. Nuclear power plants could be used, but if there's one element that most greens hate even more than carbon, it's uranium.

So it is more or less inevitable that we will indeed burn hydrogen, the most pristine of all fuels, just as they hope. And we will quietly accept that the only readily available supplies of hydrogen in unburnt form are in gas, oil and coal. Our national policy will be to burn more fossil fuel, less efficiently--to extract a lot less heat out of the same amount of fuel. Even as we struggle to design new car engines that get more miles out of the same amount of heat. We will raise efficiency in every tier of the energy pipeline except at the source, where we will reduce it, drastically, far more than we can raise it in any of the tiers above. This may perhaps save the ice caps. It certainly won't ruin the oil companies.

Peter Huber, a Manhattan Institute senior fellow, is the author of Hard Green: Saving the Environment From the Environmentalists and the Digital Power Report. Visit his home page at www.forbes.com/huber.

Thanks to maximus@Nashville for the headsup on this article:

Local inventor's process may produce clean air, clean water for all

Sunday, 06/09/02
Local inventor's process may produce clean air, clean water for all

By BILL LEWIS
Staff Writer

Vanderbilt children's neurologist and inventor Robert Holcomb may be, in the words of one university official, the Thomas Edison of our age.

Holcomb and a lot of other people think he has solved a scientific riddle whose answer could reduce the United States' dependence on Middle Eastern oil, keep industrial poisons out of America's back yards, and turn the oceans into drinking water for dry, poor countries.

He has invented a chemical process that would allow power companies to burn coal without spewing pollution into the air. The same process, changed somewhat, preserves lumber without using toxic chemicals that are being banned by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. With another change, it makes gasoline burn more cleanly, he said; change it again, and it purifies sea water that would destroy ordinary filters.

This process, which one executive in the wood-preservation industry called ''magical,'' is called Inorganic Polymer Electret. IPE-C, the name for the substance used to treat coal, consists of ordinary ingredients such as sand, water and alkali. What Holcomb does to those ingredients, however, is not ordinary. He manipulates their molecules' electric charge to make them behave in new ways.

Holcomb compared it to the way your tongue reacts differently to sweet and sour flavors.

''There are receptors on your tongue,'' he said. ''When you eat a good-tasting Nutty Buddy, it stimulates those.'' IPE stimulates molecules the same way.

Black & Veatch, the worldwide engineering company, was hired to test samples of crushed coal mixed with an IPE product. Even when the company burned high-sulfur coal mined near Jamestown, Tenn., there was almost no pollution in the smoke.

The sulfur, which causes acid rain when it goes up a power plant's smokestack, stayed in the ash and was transformed into a substance resembling the gypsum used in the wallboard of houses. Emissions of mercury were reduced. Levels of nitrous oxide, carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide and hydrocarbons also fell substantially, Black & Veatch reported.

IPE could breathe new life into economically depressed Appalachian coal-mining communities by giving electric utilities a way to burn millions of tons of coal with too much sulfur to meet federal clean air regulations. Utilities could burn that coal instead of oil.

''I think we may have found a revolutionary solution to the energy crisis,'' Black & Veatch consultant Suquing Wang said at the April public unveiling of Green Coal, the official name of coal treated with IPE.

Greater use of coal would make the United States less dependent on foreign oil, Black & Veatch executive Alex Silver said.

Coal generates more than half of the electricity in the United States, but environmental concerns keep the country from making full use of its huge reserves, which are expected to last 400 years at the current rate of use, said Burt Davis, associate director of the Center for Applied Energy Research at the University of Kentucky in Lexington.

''The United States, as far as coal, is the Saudi Arabia of the world,'' he said.

That would be good news to the 7,700 members of the United Mine Workers of America who lost their jobs after passage of the Clean Air Act of 1997, union spokesman Doug Gibson said. The law clamped down on sulfur emissions.

''We got killed out there,'' Gibson said.

He asked the same question others have about Green Coal and IPE: ''Does it work?''

Dr. Harry Jacobson, vice chancellor for health affairs and professor of medicine at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, has no doubts.

''The data is the data,'' he said of the test results. ''We can make a profit and produce a significantly beneficial effect on the environment.''

Holcomb says he is pursuing contracts with large energy companies and that the technology could be on the market in a year to 18 months.

To attract the power industry, Green Coal must be substantially cheaper than the $20-a-ton cost of using a scrubber, said Tom Jaster, a consultant to the electric power industry who has worked on the Green Coal project. Scrubber devices treat the smoke before it leaves a power plant's smokestack.

The only question is how much it might cost to produce huge quantities of IPE-C. The answer looks encouraging.

''The numbers look like the utility could save more than we would charge them,'' Jaster said.

Vanderbilt has invested $500,000 in IPE and Demeter Systems LLC, the company formed to market it. Jacobson is a member of the company's board of governors.

Green Coal was unveiled in April, but it might not be the first IPE-based product that is sold. That distinction may go to Herculean, the brand name of the IPE formula used to treat wood.

Rock Island Tie & Timber Inc. in Jefferson City, Mo., plans to build a plant that will use that formula of IPE to preserve wood without using either creosote or a very toxic preservative called CCA, short for chromated copper arsenate.

The arsenic in CCA, one use of which is to protect backyard decks from insects, can seep out of the wood and into the ground and water. Children who play nearby are vulnerable to arsenic poisoning.

Creosote, a probable human carcinogen, is used primarily in railroad ties. There are also concerns about creosote contaminating the environment. It takes about 7 gallons to preserve one railroad tie, and it takes 3,200 ties to lay a mile of track, said Bob Moses, Rock Island's president.

Herculean, which Moses developed with Holcomb, not only is nontoxic but also preserves wood better than creosote or CCA and doesn't cost more, Moses said.

The IPE used to formulate Herculean is a mixture of borate and silicate that crystallizes inside the wood, making it stronger, harder and fire-resistant.

In one test, a propane torch took 45 minutes to burn through a 1-inch-thick board treated with IPE. The torch burned through an untreated board in 15 minutes, Holcomb said.

Two other companies that are part of Demeter — ROM Technologies LLC and Emissions Control LLC — are marketing IPE's use in water and gasoline.

IPE ''de-clusters'' gasoline molecules, Holcomb said. In tests, pollution went down 36%, while gas mileage went up 10%.

Gasoline is made up of clusters of different-size molecules that don't burn evenly. IPE rearranges those molecules so they burn completely in an engine. The result is less carbon monoxide and other pollutants.

Because more of the fuel is burned, IPE squeezes more energy from a gallon of gasoline. It even cleans the fuel injection nozzles, according to literature produced by Emissions Control LLC.

In water, IPE helps remove chemicals and microbes. Seawater becomes drinking water. It works by protecting the membranes used in reverse-osmosis filters. It also removes minerals that can collect on equipment exposed to water, such as air conditioning and heating systems.

''In some parts of the world, they have no water,'' Holcomb said. ''We're excited about being able to provide clean energy and clean water.''

Holcomb unlocked the secrets of IPE slowly. When the answer came one day in 1995 as he labored in the workshop he keeps in Birmingham, Ala., he was ready. Working without pause, he built the machine that made the first IPE.

''I basically worked all night when I finally figured out how to build it,'' he said.

Using his blacksmith's forge and an emissions tester borrowed from Vanderbilt, he burned a sample of coal. There was almost no pollution.

Not bad, Holcomb jokes, for a one-time art major at the University of Alabama.

He never got a degree in art, but he did earn a medical degree and a doctoral degree in pharmacology and holds numerous patents, as well as keeping his practice at Vanderbilt.

He followed his natural curiosity into his laboratory, where, in the 1990s, he developed and marketed pain-relieving magnets that he uses himself. He also developed a self-cooling beverage can.

''I'll go to the grave to defend my inventions,'' he said.

His self-cooling beverage can caught the eye of a thief, he said.

He alerted the authorities, proved he was the owner of the Cool Can, and, then, after making his point, made sure it never appeared on store shelves.

The technology wasn't ready, Holcomb said. The problem was that occasionally one of the cans would go off like a firecracker.

He's still working on the idea and believes that one day it will work.

The same goes for his pain-relieving magnets, which also became the focus of a court battle.

The company he formed to sell his magnets, Holcomb Healthcare Services, went to federal court in Nashville in 1999 to defend his patent. That lawsuit was settled earlier this year, and the final court record was sealed.

For now, he promises to keep ''tinkering'' in his workshop, always with the goal of finding answers that help people.

Regarding the Company marketing IPE we have this:

Demeter Systems LLC is a holding company (which owns four operating companies)

Demeter Systems LLC is a holding company (which owns four operating companies) whose objective is to commercialize an exciting and innovative new technology that has application in a number of industries relating to raw materials and energy resources. Treated materials and resources are made safer and more efficient through Demeter's patented technologies.

This technology is "Inorganic Polymer Electret" (IPE™). IPE was developed by Vanderbilt University faculty member, Dr. Robert Holcomb. The technology has application in four specific market segments that include coal, water, fuel and wood.

IPE is itself non-polluting. It combines a chemical compound and a physical process whereby ingredients common in nature (i.e., sand, water, alkali, etc.) are blended in a patented process to yield a solution with properties that are advantageous in many applications.



		Demeter Systems' Operating Companies Green Coal LLC (Coal) Reduces harmful emissions and enhances combustion ROM Technologies LLC (Water) Cost effective method to purify and condition water Emissions Control LLC (Gasoline, Diesel) Reduces harmful emissions and improves gas mileage Electro-Chem LLC (Wood) Comprehensive process which improves durability and strength as well as providing fire retardancy, insect resistance and "rot" protection

Demeter's initial focus will be in the coal industry. Green Coal LLC manufactures and markets a coal processing method that significantly reduces emissions of Sulfur Dioxide and other pollutants by as much as 95% and, at the same time, increases the Btu content of the coal by as much as 10%.

Intellectual Property

Demeter's intellectual property is protected by a portfolio of US and foreign patents (both issued and pending).

Vanderbilt University

Vanderbilt University, through its Chancellor Fund, has made a seed investment into the Company. In addition, the Company has entered into a management contract with a wholly-owned subsidiary of the University, the Vanderbilt University Technology Company (VUTC).

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Demeter Systems' Operating Companies

Intellectual Property

Vanderbilt University