[intro music, ocean sounds]
Welcome to World Ocean Radio…
I’m Peter Neill, Director of the World Ocean Observatory.
Sometimes it’s the simplest things. We look to future technology to solve old problem. But there remain past technologies that can be re-adapted to solve a new problem – in effect, an alchemy turning old into new, dross into gold.
One such idea has been promoted by Renewell, a company that has developed a patented method to re-purpose abandoned oil wells across the United States, predominately in Texas and Oklahoma, but also in areas of urban density such as Los Angeles, Houston, Dallas, Detroit, and other municipal concentrations where we have become used to seeing the incongruous presence of pumping wells in unexpected neighborhoods.
As we move away from an oil/gas dependent energy system, to solar, wind, and other alternative technologies, these wells, uncapped and abandoned, more than 2 million of them, now useless, leaking methane, become pervasive, a still polluting urban blight – unless they can be re-purposed to a new utility. And so they can.
Renewell proposes their conversion into “displacement reserves,” capped and plugged to stop the methane leak, and installed with a pumped hydro-power system as a renewable storage capacity already purchased, connected to the existing grid and communications, and accessible for installation, maintenance, and emergency through existing infrastructure – all at substantially reduced cost for installation, production, distribution, pollution control, regulation, rehabilitation – generating energy near-term and renewed financial return as rent to owners deprived of past income. The externalities are also measurable by the obviated damage of methane and other toxins released into the atmosphere and watershed, the re-evaluation of real estate, new jobs and retained employment, taxes, and financial investment in more expensive new installations in unspoiled environment – adding up to a net-negative carbon footprint with minimal investment.
Renewell describes its technology as a “gravity well” that utilizes the mechanical energy captured by lowering a long cylindrical weight, comprised of used oilfield equipment and high density filling, down the drill column producing clean energy by turning a regenerative winch, the weight remaining at the bottom until it makes economic sense to buy energy to lift the weight back to the top, thus “re-charging” the potential until it is needed -- in effect, maximizing storage capacity, inexpensive output, and other benefits from economies of means and scale.
According to its promotional materials, Renewell aims “to partner with oil and gas companies to seal and convert over 1.8 million wells, in the process creating 132 GWh of storage, some 5% of the needed capacity for a 100% renewal grid nationwide in quick-time and affordable.
There is an obvious, but so paradoxical connection here to the myth of the Phoenix, the immortal bird that is reborn in a burst of flame. Enabled by the sun, energy is created by fire, as coal, oil, and gas encased in the earth that when released has driven an immense expansion of civilization – population and security, quality of life, and capacity to meet our needs over time, until scale and consequence corrupted that way of living, and worse, created what can seem to be an immutable challenge to the climate that sustains us. That fire wanes and we search through invention for a new source to meet our needs. The irony that the abandoned reality of that failing can be turned, Phoenix-like, into a new form of fire is hopeful and compelling.
The pun “Renewell,” a start-up technology company, with “renewal” as a force for the future is more than clever. It belies a means beyond adaptation and mitigation of existing circumstance, through human imagination and ingenuity, making something new from old, something good from evil, something simple from something now too complicated and destructive. It is only a temporary contribution to the real solution which requires invention of a much more revolutionary commitment – to more than a fix of an old problem, to the understanding that, like technology, values, structures, and behaviors can also be “renewed,” as a part of the step-by-step process of extracting the best from the worst, replacing the worst with a best step forward.
Every example, incremental and forward, toward displacement and reserve, enables sustainability and possibility of a future made of the simplest things.
We will discuss these issues, and more, in future editions of World Ocean Radio.
Find us wherever you listen to podcasts and at World Ocean Observatory dot org.
[outro music, ocean sounds]
