Kaufman takes audience down a road full of biodiesel, camelina, titanium nanotubes, and telematic road trains

AS usual, Derek Kaufman provided some guttural laughs, such as when he described Al Gore as “the climatological Bernie Madoff of our time.”

But in “Megatrends in Our Industry and Beyond,”the president/CEO of C3 Network also addressed the serious issue of energy with some enlightening comments.

“We ought to be making sure we focus on generating a form of energy policy that becomes more of a game-changer than what we have today, because what we have today isn't working,” he said. “We ought to be looking for ways to produce more energy rather than less, just by doing it cleaner.”

His game-changers:

• Biodiesel

  “Are you aware that last year, Virgin Atlantic Airlines ran a commercial flight from London to Amsterdam with one of the engines on the airplane actually doing biojet fuel? The US burns about 50 million gallons of jet fuel every day. I figure about half is burned on the tarmac in Detroit, waiting for a gate to open. Let's talk about canola, coconut, soybean … all possible substitutes. Are you concerned about substituting food for fuel? Then move to algae, which produces 60% of its weight in oil and can be grown in saltwater and waste water. Sapphire Energy in New Mexico is projecting the ability to produce 10,000 barrels a day at $60-80 a barrel. Want to spend some stimulus money that produces more jobs than funding that $34 million turtle project in Florida? Put the John Deere tractor people together and have them build 50,000 tractors. Bring trucks into their plants, ship the tractors to American ports, ship them to Afghanistan, plow up the poppy fields, plant camelina, ship the oil back to the US, pick it up at trucks at ports, and truck it to the municipalities of this country.”
• Solar power

  “Think in terms of low-tech solar and high-tech solar. Have you heard about desert technology? Twenty European firms are investing 400 million Euros to build mirror rays in northern Africa. They're going to collect sunlight, boil water, generate electricity, put it on a smart grid, and shoot it back to Europe. It's nothing new at all. We've been doing it in California and Nevada for years, but have never been able to scale it because the fuel cost in our country is so low that we can't justify the expense of the grid. They can in Europe. Now, we get a lot of stimulus money. Take a look at the stimulus list and your state. I'd venture that about 50% of it is in grants to universities. A professor at Oklahoma State just got $1.1 million to study the habits of Alaskan grandparents. How about spending that $1.1 million and analyzing the true cost of a barrel of oil in the US?

  “Over the next 20 years, we're going to see a one-thousand-fold increase in the application of solar panels because of titanium nanotubes. The typical solar panel is 15% efficient. The best commercial one is 22% efficient. Now imagine if I could take silicon wafers and tip them up. It will collect sun energy for a lot longer period during the day. Titanium nanotubes greatly increase the surface area of a solar panel, and the result in early testing is a 300% increase in the efficiency of the panel. So now cover a 53-foot trailer and roof with that and pump enough to power the truck up overnight as it sits at a truck stop.”

• Electric-drive trucks

  “We're all hung up in the press that they only get a 50-100-mile range. ‘The range is too short, charge times are too long, and we have the inability to recycle batteries.’ I tell you to forget all of what you're reading. The range might be 50-100 today, but it will be 200-400 tomorrow. Higher kilowatt chargers will shorten charge times. A bunch of cities are working on the infrastructure.”

• Telematics

  Safe Road Trains For The Environment (SARTRE) is saying, ‘We don't need complicated technology to do vehicle-to-vehicle control. We don't need digital short-range communication, imbedded wires in highways. What we want to do is send out a professional driver — maybe a dedicated freight hauler or bus route — on a group of up to six to eight vehicles, have SARTRE telematics take control of the vehicles so I'm reading a magazine or drinking a cup of coffee. I come to the exit, signal I want to exit, take control of the vehicle, and I take the off ramp, and technology closes up the train.’ It's in tests right now and working well.”