Hello friends, it's the Environment Show and welcome. With the second session of this
year's Congress convening, lawmakers are facing a lengthy list of environmental bills due
for renewal, among others, clean water, energy, and endangered species that will have a preview.
Also this time, scientists and inventors concern citizens from coast to coast are busy
exploring alternate energy sources. On the east coast, a new kind of heat pump, meanwhile
in Texas, harnessing the motion of the ocean with a device called a Toroid.
These things continuously are bobbing and moving and all of this movement is captured and
created into spinning motion on this shaft and so forth. It's in the top of the thing.
We'll talk with Dallas inventor Bill Eberley. The Environment Show is a national production,
made possible by the JM Kaplan Fund of New York, and this is Bruce Robertson.
Jobs, jobs, jobs, the rallying cry of the presidential campaign for Democrats and Republicans,
say those in charge of selling the candidates. In truth though, the economy is the dominant topic,
whether on Capitol Hill, in cabinet-level meetings, or in our living rooms. Having to cope with
these pressing domestic issues and the ever-changing world of international politics, it hardly seems
likely then that Congress will find time to look over its various pieces of pending environmental
legislation. Yet look them over it must, as some are due for renewal this year. To get one
perspective on the action ahead, we called upon David Gardner, Legislative Director for the
Sierra Club in Washington. Says Gardner, Congress has some unfinished business in the form of the
Johnston Wallup Senate Energy Bill, defeated last fall in a filibuster. He says he expects some
renewed work on that. It remains to be seen whether an energy strategy which would be
primarily based on improving the energy efficiency and making substantial improvements in
energy conservation and production of renewable energy could emerge from the Congress in 1992.
So there isn't any guarantee then that any kind of bill will be taken up, particularly in this
presidential election year. No, there's no guarantee and it's clear that there are many
interests, particularly the energy companies themselves, who will be lobbying for all the wrong
things. The oil companies, for example, will continue their efforts to try to force the government
to open up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska for oil and gas drilling. And that obviously
would be extremely destructive. It's a bad proposal not only in terms of the environment but really
very short-sighted in terms of our future energy strategy as well. But it's a good example of the
kinds of special interests that are lobbying hard here in Washington to try to tilt the energy
strategy to be good for oil companies and the like and bad for the American public.
The list of new businesses quite lengthy too, slated for renewal this year,
is the Clean Water Act, a bill Gardner calls the cornerstone of environmental protection laws
in the United States. Particularly contentious is that section dealing with wetlands.
The Bush administration has proposed a measure that would substantially weaken the protection of
wetlands in this country and they have not finalized that proposal but I believe Congress will be
and the public will be waiting to see what the Bush administration does on this critical wetland
protection rule. Once the administration has made its decision I expect the Congress will begin
to take up the whole discussion of what to do with wetlands and the rest of the Federal Clean Water Act.
Gardner says strengthening our commitment to preserving the nation's wetlands should be the
primary goal of a renewed Clean Water Act. And the second plank is that we need to take on
toxic pollutants in a more serious way than we have. Our goal as a nation needs to be
this complete elimination of toxic pollution into our rivers, streams and lakes.
And I would argue that that would be the second most important part of a renewed Clean Water Act.
Also do for reauthorization this year is the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act.
Better known as Recrev, this bill says Gardner is the fundamental law regulating not only our
disposal of waste but how they are generated in the first place. I think that there's no question
that the American public has clearly seen that we are producing too much garbage and too much waste
in this country and that we need to be more aggressive than we currently have been in terms of
promoting recycling programs. We need to steer away from environmentally destructive technologies,
disposal technologies like dumps and incinerators and instead try to put pressure on companies that
manufacture products to make sure that they have small amounts of packaging and packaging which
is capable of being recycled and that that material get recycled in an aggressive way.
We can expect intense debate as well over reauthorizing the Endangered Species Act with lines of
disagreement drawn between protection of endangered species and protection of jobs.
Says Gardner, nowhere is this better illustrated than in the Virgin Forests of the Pacific Northwest,
home of the Northern Spotted Owl. The Bush administration is currently developing a plan to protect
those forests. We don't know yet whether that plan will do the job or not and we would expect that
regardless of whether the plan is good or not that the Congress will want to discuss that plan and may
in fact decide to either change it or push it forward but if we are going to we must protect
these Virgin Forests in the Pacific Northwest which are the habitat not only to the Spotted Owl but
to many endangered species and we want to preserve and protect this small piece of America's heritage
for future generations and 1992 is going to be the opportunity to do that.
The other major challenge facing not so much Congress but the Bush administration is preparing
for the June environment summit in Rio de Janeiro. Gardner says President Bush not only needs to
attend the meeting, but the President needs to assume a leadership role. Overall says Gardner.
Well I'm always optimistic about the prospects for environmental legislation during an election
year because elections have a funny way of making elected officials much more responsive to the
interests of the public and since the public is such a strong advocate for stronger environmental
protections I think the prospects overall for the environment in 1992 look good.
David Gardner, Legislative Director for the Sierra Club in Washington and this is Bruce Robertson.
Let me show you the circuit. It's really a very simple one. In this case air is coming through
this filter which is the return side of the unit. Air is being pulled through this blower.
Thomas O'Connell peers through a glass window at plastic tubes and rotating fans as he describes
how a geothermal heat pump works. It is actually a demonstration unit in his office. What is missing
is the geothermal part or heat from the earth. An engineering researcher in the 1970s O'Connell
heard about heat pumps used in Sweden which converted heat from the earth into heat for the home.
The two major oil embargoes of the 1970s further drew his attention to the dwindling supply of
world oil. He took a closer look at geothermal energy. Being a researcher I was working for
Bell Labs at the time I decided that I was going to actively work in the area of alternative
energy and see if I could use my ingenuity to find a solution. It took me many years and a lot of
thinking and reading and so on and I actually looked at all the areas of alternative energy solar
wind hydro and so on and then came upon the concept of getting heat from the earth and simply looked
at what existed in the industry which at that time was relatively primitive and found an area where
I thought I could make a contribution. Now O'Connell holds two patents that make the Swedish concept
more efficient. He is a computer science professor at Siena College but his alternative fuel research
happens at Geotech, a company he founded in nearby Troy, New York. There he designs heat pumps
which extract energy from the ground about 25 feet below the surface. The heat near earth is
available year round and if you go vertically that is drill bore hole it's going to be a relative
of a constant temperature. So we put a collector underground by simply drilling a hole inserting a
YouTube which is a polyethylene tubing material and then circulate a fluid in that tube picking up
the natural heat in the New York state area that averages about 50 degrees in the winter time and
50 degrees in the summer. So we can transfer that heat in through a heat pump which is able to
amplify it thermally to about 75 or 80 degrees. And we'll pretend again that the home water is trying
to see comfort in the winter time. Okay and in this case what we're doing is we're taking energy
from the ground. Underground pipes carry the heated fluid usually water into the basement of the
building and then into the heat pump itself. There the heat is absorbed by a refrigerant which is
then compressed, increasing pressure causing the temperature to rise. When that heated refrigerant is
released into a coil it cools off producing heat. A fan then blows that heat into the ducts
which in turn heat the building. O'Connell says the underground system is more efficient than
traditional heat pumps which use energy from the air outside. In traditional heat pumps the main
problem is that as the source of energy which is the air drops in temperature okay it becomes
a less effective medium to extract energy from. And so for example on a zero degree day a heat pump
is not really able to take sufficient energy from the air to provide comfort to the space.
In addition the compressor which is outside is working in a fairly hostile temperature range
and needs to have some additional hardening and other kinds of modes of operation to make sure
it's protected and so there's some strain and stress on equipment at those low temperatures.
Normally what happens then is because of this a lot of electric heat has to come on to support
the heating requirement of the household. So when the weather gets cold traditional heat pumps
have to work harder to convert the cold air outside to heat inside. That means more electricity is
used by the fan and compressor and sometimes electric heat has to be used to make up for the pumps
inefficiency. On a zero degree day O'Connell says an air source heat pump uses two to three times
more electricity than a geothermal pump. But O'Connell says electricity is not the only thing
conserved. We have several areas which are significant one is conservation and the protection to the
environment go hand in hand. The less energy you consume the more likely you're going to protect
that ozone layer. That's just a direct relationship. In addition we have conservation in terms of the
tremendous first cost of building new power generating facilities and the impact and the
environment of just building one of those. That's going in our favor. Conservation in terms of
simply saving money. People really are tired of paying high bills just to stay warm and
or to be cool. And so we're finding ways to deliver a device that can do that. O'Connell points out
advantages over other heating systems. Oil for instance must be transported over long distances.
Any combustion adds pollutants to the atmosphere. But more importantly other sources like coal, oil,
and gas come from a finite source. Yet this system is not free of pollutants.
Free on a substance which contributes to global warming and ozone depletion is the refrigerant
used. But O'Connell argues the substance is safer in the geothermal unit than in the traditional
heat pump. The factory has the ability to totally seal the system. A refrigerator is a good example.
It's a factory sealed system. Okay refrigerators by and large don't leak refrigerant and are not a
real threat to this environment. Okay. On the other hand systems that have to be put together in
the field there is some reasonable risk that some refrigerant can escape during the process of
charging the system. Okay you don't have any control over the technician in some cases things
O'Connell says leakage is possible from a traditional pump because it is assembled and the
refrigerant injected on site. But perhaps the biggest advantage of geothermal systems is the price.
O'Connell estimates installation in the average house costs less than $10,000 followed by a 30
to 60% decrease in heating costs. Right now the company which sells the geothermal pumps,
water furnace, reports sales of 20 to 30,000 systems a year across North America.
Though he hopes this means a project with many false starts is finally off the ground. O'Connell
says there is plenty of work left. I'd like to think I've made a dent. I certainly am genuine in
my interest and I think I have personally made an impact. But I still see a lot of work to be done.
There's still a lot of information that needs to get out into the public. There's certainly a lot
more systems that have to be installed to start making a real impact in terms of the energy
outlook in New York State and New Jersey and in the broader sense nationally. O'Connell recently
received a $700,000 grant from the state of New York to work on a 100% geothermal system which will
use no electricity either for the fan and compressor or for backup heating. He is also working with
Stockton College in New Jersey considering converting to the geothermal system. On top of that
there are three more patents also being considered. Thomas O'Connell is a computer science professor at
Ciena College and founder of Geotech. The challenge may sound overwhelming but he says if there is a
better safer way to provide energy he will not rest until he finds it. And this is Bruce Robertson.
In this coil, in this case it is truly heating so it's picking up heat. The refrigerator
is electrifying as it's giving off the heat.
The mesmerizing rocking motion of the ocean has inspired all those who have ever come down to the
sea. A motion that existed long before even the ancient Greeks applied the wine dark seas.
A motion that will exist long after you and I walk the shores today. For Bill Eberley though,
it wasn't myth, legend, or romance that drew him to seaside. It was the prospect of energy.
Moto, motion of the ocean energy. Before we talk to Mr. Eberley we should tell you
Moto is not yet in operation anywhere. It is an idea, a blueprint, a plan. Though we have seen
a video artist's depiction of what such an operation would look like. So from his Dallas, Texas
headquarters, Eberley takes us to a fictitious coastal site where standing on an imaginary bluff
overlooking an intangible bay, we look out at a Moto installation. Basically what you'd be looking
at would be a bunch of things that would appear like posts sticking up out of the water around which
were displayed donut shaped floats. We call them Torridge because that's a geometrical design word
that describes a circle that goes around and meets itself like a donut. You would see these things
bobbing up and down around the pilaster or post if you will. And what this thing is doing is these
bob up and down. They're the tremendous force that's generated by these great big donuts going up
and down is driving an air compressor. The rising and falling motion of this donut or Torridge
actually performs three tasks which we will describe in just a moment. To reiterate what we are
looking at here from our fictitious vantage point is a series of installations partially submerged
in the water. Perhaps you might visualize a concrete pillar of a bridge. Around each pillar,
Eberley calls it a pilaster is what looks like a huge round life preserver. This circular device
basically floats with the waves rising with the ebb and falling with the flow in a constant motion
up and down. But how does this do anything but ride the ocean swell? Well Eberley explains.
The donut is built to where it can freely move up and down around this pilaster and then it's
connected the engine portions of it that are up in the top with a rack and pinion arrangement,
a rack being a long piece that has gear teeth on one side and then the pinion being a round gear
that's on a shaft up in the top of the thing. And as this thing goes up or down, either one, it captures
the force by using left and right hand clutches it captures this force and creates it into a spinning
motion on a giant shaft with big fly wheels on it to make it run smooth. And any motion of the ocean,
it can be waves, it can be the tides of course only happen four times a day so you don't get a
whole lot out of them but it's designed where it can operate at high tide or low tide and it can
withstand anything up to a king size hurricane or typhoon and if something like that should occur,
it's designed to open sea cocks automatically and sink below the surface and help support the
rest of the structure until the storm is over and then it can easily be brought back up again and
put back in service. And if you were to throw a cork or any, you take a small boat and go out in the
ocean, you'll notice that this boat never holds still, it's always bobbing up and down and moving
this way and that way and so forth. Well all of these forces are harnessed by this Torrid.
No matter what direction the water is coming out, if the water is a little bit higher than
was split second to go, now this thing rises and as soon as the water is a little bit lower,
which it continuously is, one or the other with the waves and the ground swells and that sort of
thing, these things continuously are bobbing and moving and all of this movement is captured
and created into spinning motion on this shaft and so forth, it's in the top of the thing.
Okay so we have motion now, almost a perpetual motion machine. What do we do with this motion?
Well early we mentioned three possible uses, one being to drive an air compressor.
Everly says in this case the entire Torrid itself would become the storage tank like a hollow donut.
The air would be then piped ashore. And on shore they can be driving a, they can use this compressed
air to drive a electricity producing generator and turbine combination. In some cases it could be
a power plant that had formerly been driven by steam from a boiler system,
burning fossil fuel or whatever other method that they might have had. Most of them are either
oil or coal fired and they have a boiler and all the problems of keeping the boiler working and
getting up steam and all that sort of thing. And the turbines really don't care what blows on them
as long as something does. And so this vast array of big donuts out there can hold a tremendous
amount of pressure, their capable of being pressurized up to 500 psi. Well the turbine runs very
well on 100 psi. So they act as load leveling devices that allow you to have a
boundful supply and constant performance of the turbines or generators or whatever.
The tremendous horsepower created by the bobbing Torrid could also be used to pump
seawater ashore to desalination facilities. The pumps run by fossil fuels in conventional plants
being one of the most expensive elements in making fresh water from salt water. Finally says
Eberly the Motoyunit could power a direct current generator DC generator to conduct
electrolysis splitting water H2O into its constituent components oxygen and hydrogen.
One of the alternate fuels of the future. The primary use, however, would be to generate electricity.
Actually each one of these post-looking things with a donut around it would probably create
or an average of one megawatt each which is a million watts. Now a basic installation you can't
just put one up out there. You have to have at least three so that they with the catwalks
tying them together they become well-braced in every direction so they can stand the high forces
that happen out in the ocean. But after the first basic installation of three which would produce
about three megawatts then you can add them one at a time because each new one you add creates
another triangle when you put the catwalks on it. Earlier we said this concept is just that
a theory of Bill Eberly's. This is not quite accurate. First of all the idea of harnessing the
ocean waves has been around for a while. In France, England, China, Norway and Canada have been
successful in designing variations on this technology with varying degrees of success.
And secondly, Eberly has in fact seen something of his idea at work.
We built a very small prototype about a tenth of the actual size and instead of building a complete
array where we could put it in the ocean or in a big body of water, we only made it instead of
30 feet across the donut is only three feet across and the pile-astor and the center central post
instead of being eight feet is only one foot. And we put it in a swimming pool and with my grandchildren and
my my my children diving in the pool to create waves we were able to light up her backyard.
Eberly says the units could be camouflaged in such a way as to be barely noticeable and to
function properly the units would be in water at least 20 feet deep thus necessitating some distance
offshore. In other words, from our mythical bluff overlooking the bay we would not be able to see
very much. Countering possible objections that the pile-astors would disrupt the marine ecosystem
on the ocean floor Eberly points out the curious irony that oil rig platforms have long been known
to provide a reef-like habitat for marine plants fish and shellfish. Former Navy diver Bill Eberly
is chief executive officer of Eberly Energy Enterprises Inc. and he spoke to us from company headquarters
in Dallas, Texas. This is Bruce Robertson. And that's our report on the Environment Show for
this week our piece on heat pumps was written and produced by Karen Kelly. The Environment Show
is a program about the environment the air, water, soil, wildlife and people of our common
habitat. For a cassette copy of this program call 1-800-767-1929 be sure to ask for the
Environment Show this week number 108. The number once again 1-800-767-1929 the Environment Show
program number 108. The Environment Show is a presentation of national productions solely
responsible for its contents. Dr. Alan Shartuck executive producer and this is Bruce Robertson.
The Environment Show is made possible by the JM Kaplan Fund of New York.
