I could use some help!

Late breaking information about my latest edition of, “SOLUTIONS!”

This new book should interest all of you, regardless of your political or social leanings or agenda. It contains a broad range of information about energy, fuels, power generation, their environmental impact, and associated subjects. It also provides some real answers to the basic questions about this important subject. These answers are ready to implement NOW! Not in decades, but maybe even months. Some are even in use as I write.

This Information should give you some idea what is in the book. Starting with the table of contents, it then highlights some significant excerpts from the book.

NOTE: As this is written, I am preparing to once again contact my representatives, media personalities and others who have the public’s attention with the latest information as contained in the current edition of this book. I could really use some help here. If you are at all concerned about fuel costs, global warming, or pollution of the environment by fuel use byproducts, please help me with this publicity or at least give me names of those I might contact.

The exciting news is that the microturbine power system described in the introductory story about the tribrid car has already become a practical reality and is in use. This proven system provides fuel flexibility impossible with others as it can be fueled by: gasoline, diesel, methanol, ethanol, natural gas, bio-fuels, propane and even hydrogen. No other currently supported technology can come even close to making this statement.

I continue to send copies of this book to any interested group or government agency I can find. Should anyone want a hard copy of my book please email me at hobarb@netscape.com or hobarb@yahoo.com

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SOLUTIONS! – the book – contents:

Author’s Comments about Section 1 Page 1

Section 1 - The SUPER Hydrogen Energy Economy Page 4
Purpose and background
Hydrogen Vehicle Won’t be Viable Soon, Study Says Page 10
An Interesting scenario -
A day in the Life of a Tribrid© Car Page 14
The turbine powered Tribrid© car is here! Almost Page 16
What this scenario could point to Page 17
Another Scenario of the Future Page 22

ESSAYS ABOUT THE HYDROGEN ECONOMY
The Hydrogen Fuel-cell System - lots of hype Page 24
Why the hydrogen fuel-cell vehicle may not be all Page 25
it's cracked up to be.
Practical Alternatives to the Hydrogen Economy Page 29
Alternate Fuels - Fuels for the Future Page 30
Reports on Methanol Manufacture Page 32
Methanol: New Infrastructure - Economic Boon Page 38

OVERVIEW OF MODERN ENERGY SYSTEMS
I Fuels Page 46
II Fueled power systems Page 54
III Electric power plants Page 56

THE TRIBRID VEHICLE Page 61
Alternativesto the Hydrogen Fuel Cell Vehicle Page 33
The Methanol/Electric Economy - Steps on the way Page 67
Power sources for generators in tribrid© vehicles. Page 68
Engines and other power devices Page 71
Summary of Power Devices Page 73
A Case for a Gradual Transition - Evolutionary Page 74
Where will we get the Required Methanol Page 75
The problem of Lack of Glamour & Lack of Cost Page 76

SUMMARY AND A CALL TO ACTION: Page 77

ADDENDUM
A collection of correspondence to and from people who have strong and
varying interests in the energy economy.
Dr. Jeremy Rifkin, The Hydrogen Economy Page 79
SFNovelist writers group Page 85
Co-opAmerica, Sustainability This Summer Page 91
Letter and reply - Indiana Senator Luger Page 95

A FANCIFUL TALE BASED ON REALITIES THAT MAY AFFECT THE SYSTEMS DESCRIBED IN THIS BOOK WHILE DRASTICALLY CHANGING OUR LIVES IN THE NOT TOO DISTANT FUTURE

The Ultranet - a Journey through the near future? Page 101

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SOLUTIONS! – the book – some significant excerpts:

Title page: Some radical, but practical ideas for designing a system to solve our energy problem by replacing all fossil fuels with renewable fuels. This system, from raw material to fuel in vehicles, would also be a huge economic boon and even help solve some of our vexing environmental problems.

Purpose, Page i: The purpose is to propose an effective new fuel/energy system to replace the existing petroleum based system with one that does not use fossil fuels. The benefits of such a system are many, varied and have far reaching positive possibilities including immeasurable economic and political benefits for any country that adopts such a system and environmental benefits for the entire world. I hope the US will be the first to do so.

Page ii: I believe the system I came up with and have outlined in this book to be far better than the hydrogen fuel-cell system in virtually every aspect. This system will be:

1. Relatively inexpensive to utilize
2. Far easier, simpler and less expensive to implement than the hydrogen system
3. Adaptable to and can use most of existing infrastructure.
4. Based on raw materials we already have or can be developed here.
5. Applicable to existing vehicles with relatively minor upgrading.
6. Applicable to existing IC engines of all type with minor upgrading.
7. Developed using existing, evolving technology.
8. A net zero contributor of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere.
9. An evolutionary as opposed to revolutionary change - a good start to becoming a constantly improving, adapting system driving a growing and improving technology.

While the main thrust of such a system is to provide a new, better, less expensive and less environmentally intrusive system for energy and transportation, there are many benefits other than just getting away from fossil fuels. These include positive effects to four of the first seven of the top twenty-two “most serious concerns of the American public” as shown in a public survey conducted by MIT and cited later in this book

Nbr 1 Terrorism - cut off the billions in oil money now going to so many despotic regimes and into funding of terrorism, chiefly to Islamic fundamentalist terrorists, and their fangs would be effectively pulled

Nbr 3 The Economy - An American fuel industry would be an enormous boon to our economy if it only shut off the hemorrhaging of oil money

Nbr 4 Unemployment - thousands of new, high paying jobs would be created right here.

Nbr 7 Federal Budget deficit - profits from this new industry would pour billions into the federal treasury - money now going out overseas

Nbr 13 The Environment - may be far down the list of public concerns, but net carbon dioxide emissions would be greatly reduced if not eliminated

Page 2: Purpose:
to propose timely, affordable and practical solutions to the energy crisis facing our nation including:

1. The growing consumption and dwindling supply of petroleum based fuels in the entire world. This is aggravated by the now rapidly expanding economies of the huge nations of China and India among many others.

2 The growing amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and its link to global warming.

3 The increasingly dangerous transfer of huge amounts of money from the US (and many other free-world countries) to totalitarian regimes that threaten, indeed promise, our destruction.

Page 2: This section proposes solutions in years, instead of decades, with little infrastructure changes using existing technologies.

In short it will:

1. Almost completely replace fossil fuels, petroleum and coal, for transportation and electrical power.

2. Stop the rapid increase of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere.

3. Stem the drastic hemorrhage of money now going mostly to totalitarian nations that vow our destruction.

4. Provide an immense growth in our economy with many high-paying jobs right here in the US. It could very easily be the biggest opportunity for growth in our economy ever and a real answer to many environmental concerns.

Page 5: “Big Oil can sleep easy for another decade or two should we wait for hydrogen fuel-cells to wean the west off its addiction to oil. Hydrogen Vehicle Won't Be Viable Soon, Study Says” - by Nancy Stauffer
Spokesperson for Laboratory for Energy and the Environment of MIT - Boston - Mar 07, 2003

Page 9: Microturbine powered hybrid electric buses, trolleys and other transit vehicles today deliver benefits unattainable through conventional approaches. Partnering power generation with electricity storage:

1. Achieves dramatically lower NOx emissions with no pollution controls

2. Cuts operational and maintenance costs

3. Maximizes in-service availability

4. Enables vehicle size, payload and operating range capabilities impossible with electric-only vehicles

5. Provides fuel flexibility impossible with others as it can be fueled by: gasoline, diesel, methanol, ethanol, natural gas, bio-fuels, propane and even hydrogen. No other currently supported technology can come even close to making this statement.

Page 13: In the May 2004 issue of Scientific American, Mathew L.Wald writes:

“President Bush has called hydrogen the ‘freedom fuel,’ but hydrogen is not free, in either dollars or environmental damage. The hydrogen fuel-cell costs nearly 100 times as much per unit of power produced as an internal combustion engine. ‘To be price competitive, you’ve got to be at a nickel a watt and we’re at $4 a watt,’ says Tom R. Dawsey, a research associate at Eastman Chemical Company, which makes polymers for fuel-cells. Hydrogen is also about five times as expensive, per unit of useable energy, as gasoline. Simple dollars are only one speed bump on the road to the hydrogen economy. Another is that supplying the energy required to make pure hydrogen may itself cause pollution. Even if that energy is from a renewable source, like the sun or wind, it may have more environmentally sound uses than the production of hydrogen. Distribution and storage of hydrogen—the least dense gas in the universe—are other technological and infrastructure difficulties. So is the safe handling of the gas. Any practical proposal for a hydrogen economy will have to address all these issues.”

Page 15: There are a number of alternative fuels already being used in growing quantities and with vehicles designed to use them. These include methanol, ethanol, E85, M85, bio-diesel, methane and propane. Ethanol has been blended successfully up to 10% in gasoline for several years.

Page 20: Most of the infrastructure required for the methanol economy as proposed by the author would be directly applicable to the ME fuel economy and even to a hydrogen economy. Should developing technology ever make the hydrogen economy a practical reality, all of the infrastructure required to manufacture hydrogen would already be in place. Not only that, but microturbine vehicles would run equally well on hydrogen as on other fuels. There would not have to be “two major infrastructure changes.” Since any “portable” energy source could be used for transportation, both the proposed methanol and hydrogen economies are merely distribution systems to move the energy generated in electric power plants to the vehicles needing that power.

Page 22: The Benefits of Changing to a methanol Economy - There are many substantial benefits to be gained by switching to the methanol economy as described in this article. Besides making us energy independent, those benefits include:

1. Reduction in the amount of atmospheric carbon dioxide and its greenhouse effects.

2. Reduction in air pollution.

3. Major improvement in the electric power grid with downward pressure on energy prices.

4. Continued use of existing transport, storage and distributions systems with little modification.

5. Increased fuel efficiency over gasoline.

6. Remove our foreign oil requirements.

7. Retain energy money within the US creating a major economic boom.

8. Provide many new, well paying jobs for Americans.

9. Reduce or eliminate our national interest in the turbulent middle east.

10. Reduce or completely eliminate our indirect financing of Islamic terrorists.

This final excerpt from the University of Florida Report on one method of producing methanol. Additions and notations by the author to this quote are indicated by bold italics.

Start of quote

CHAPTER 9 - CONCLUSIONS

1. The amount of petroleum imported into the United States is greater than during the energy crisis of the 1970s and is increasing.

2. Of the alternatives for primary chemical energy, only natural gas and coal are available in energy quantities comparable to petroleum.

3. Recoverable reserves of coal will last at least five times as long as technically recoverable natural gas or petroleum in the U.S.

4. Because of the possibility that the time scale for a substantial hydrogen infrastructure might be significantly longer than the time scale for the continued availability of inexpensive petroleum, an intermediate liquid transportation fuel might be appropriate.

5. Methanol is the most desirable liquid hydrocarbon fuel for fuel cells and can be effectively utilized in internal combustion engines using existing technologies.

6. Methanol and hydrogen are both being produced primarily from natural gas feedstocks, but both can be and have been produced in quantity from coal.

7. It is likely that there will be significant increases in both prices and quantities of imported natural gas, if demand continues to increase as expected.

8. If demand continues to increase as expected, natural gas might not be an appropriate feedstock for future alternative fuels due to availability and cost.

9. The recent historical trends have indicated a decrease in the price of coal with increasing demand and production. It is likely that coal prices will be relatively stable, possibly decreasing somewhat, even with large increases in production.

10. From the standpoints of projected costs and attributes as a fuel for both fuel cells and internal combustion engines, methanol could be an effective alternative fuel.

11. If environmental and other relevant issues can be satisfactorily resolved, coal-based methanol could provide relatively stable fuel prices and increased energy independence for many decades.

12. There are environmental and other issues to be considered if there is to be large-scale utilization of methanol as a transportation fuel. (Only if it is produced using coal or natural gas as a raw material. HJ)

13. There are environmental issues to be considered if there is to be a significant increase in the utilization of coal as a primary energy resource. (The primary one being the increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide. HJ)

14. Projections indicate that fuel taxes must be imposed on any significant distribution of alternative fuels in order to maintain adequate tax revenues.

15. Since there is such disparity among energy content per volume of alternative fuels, it is likely that taxes will be modified to reflect energy rather than volume fuel purchases.

16. It is projected that hydrogen produced on-board a fuel cell vehicle from coal-based methanol will cost less than off-board produced hydrogen.

17. While all alternative fuels are expected to be more expensive to the consumer than present-day gasoline, methanol produced from coal is likely to be the least expensive of the fuels considered, if natural gas prices increase as projected.

End of quote

Page 23: NOTE: If the author’s method of energy conversion to methanol is utilized, methanol could be much cheaper than gasoline. This is particularly true now that unleaded gasoline has been fluctuating between $2 and $3 per gallon at the pump.

Page 28: Gas turbine/electric combinations are used in power plants for increasing numbers of buildings and remote locations with costs lower than that of power from the electric grid. This includes small, even portable power plants. Growing in popularity with bus and truck owners, “microturbine” powered hybrid vehicles are showing up all over the world in increasing numbers.