“He had been eight years upon a project for extracting sunbeams out of cucumbers...”
Chinese Petroleum Corp. Gen. Manager Chen Pao-lang last week returned to Taiwan from a 13-day trip to Libya, where-supposedly-he was laying the groundwork for a bid to explore for oil.
CPC was pretty tight-lipped over what Chen actually did in Libya, saying only it would provide more information about his trip to Libya after he had come back.
A day earlier, CPC Chairman Pan Wenent said, “CPC is preparing to bid for oil exploration rights in Libya this December, and hopefully the CPC can win the bid to explore more crude oil resources.”
We have our doubts about that. We believe CPC officials were in Libya for the sunshine. We are not suggesting they went there on vacation. We think they went there in connection with sunshine as a source of energy.
Smoke and mirrors
We were alerted to this possibility by the publication of a report commissioned by the German government, which found that solar energy from North Africa could help reduce emissions from European power stations by 70% by 2050.
Franz Trieb of the Trans-Mediterranean Renewable Energy Cooperation (TREC), who also works for the German Center for Air and Space Technology, gave the upbeat side of the report.
“Every year, each square kilometer of desert receives solar energy equivalent to 1.5 million bbl of oil,” he said. “Multiplying by the area of deserts worldwide, this is nearly 1,000 times the current energy consumption of the world.”
He added, “We can tap into this energy by using mirrors to concentrate sunlight and create heat to drive a generator.”
The German expert envisages the use of concentrating solar power (CSP) systems-in which mirrors focus sunlight on a boiler to create steam that drives a turbine-and transporting the electricity produced on a vast network of highly efficient power lines.
Sunshine from cucumbers
The real eye catcher, though, is price. Trieb said it costs about $50 for a CSP plant to produce the same amount of energy as contained in a barrel of oil, but he said this figure was “likely” to fall to around $20-a likelihood he did not explain in detail.
Gerry Wolff, of TREC-UK, said: “Many people are saying there is not enough renewable energy and that we’ve got to have nuclear power. This report shows that’s absolute nonsense.” Of course it is.
Wolff also said there would be “fascinating spin-off benefits” for North African countries beyond the money from supplying Europe with electricity. He said waste heat could be used to desalinate seawater, while the mirrors would provide shade to grow plants, like cucumbers.
Enter the Taiwanese, who, we suspect, were consulted on the best ways of putting the squeeze on those cucumbers for even more sunshine.
