242 



trial wave energy conversion at sea, first to electricity and then, in situ, to a variety 

 of synthetic fuels including hydrogen. 



"The development of this technology along these new avenues of approach would 

 proceed for the most part at sea, on an incremental basis. Without entailing an 

 excessive initial investment of funds, it would be proved to be both commercializable 

 and economically competitive at each successive level of wave energy extracting 

 capacity. At no level within the range between an initial 1 MW or less and an 

 ultimate 100 MW or more would there be any major technical roadblock, or any 

 factors (other than possible international jurisdictional ones) that might inhibit 

 early adoption by private industry. 



"Each seagoing ocean wave energy system contemplated here, of whatever wave 

 energy extracting capacity, would extract almost all subsurface wave energy availa- 

 ble within a correspondingly predetermined annular region spanned by an array of 

 submerged wave energy absorbers surrounding and upported by a central platform- 

 vessel. After suitable conversion, the extracted wave energy would be conveyed 

 inwardly to the central platform for further conversion and subsequent storage 

 and/or product processing. 



"Every such system would be so designed as to operate safely in practically any 

 sea state, in such a way as to extract wave energy efficiently in light as well as 

 heavy seas. 



"Implementation of this technology on a large scale could, of course, significantly 

 influence future trends in a wide variety of related industries. . . ." 



A complete description of an illustrative seagoing ocean wave energy conversion 

 system of this kind was published on June 28, 1979, as an international patent 

 application under the Patent Cooperation Treaty. For the sake of brevity, rather 

 than reproduce that publication here, I will merely cite it as follows for the interest- 

 ed reader: its International Publication Number is WO 79/00349; and its title is 

 "System for Extracting Subsurface Wave Energy." A corresponding United States 

 patent will issue before the end of this calendar year. 



The remainder of my present statement will be concerned with defining more 

 clearly the general idea — expressed in the passage just quoted above — of implement- 

 ing on a large commercial scale the foregoing ocean wave energy conversion tech- 

 nology through its direct application to certain potentially related industries. For 

 this purpose, I shall confine most of the following discussion to one particular 

 industry which has, in my opinion, not only an immediate need for, but also by far 

 the greatest likelihood of benefiting from, the kind of innovative cross-fertilization 

 of ideas that can come from the direction of ocean wave energy conversion technol- 

 ogy- 



That industry — one that remains yet to be established for the direct liquefaction 

 of domestic coal — could thereby set the pace for the entire domestic commercial 

 synthetic fuel industry whose creation "from scratch" is the principal objective of 

 the recently passed Energy Security Act of 1980 (Public Law 96-294). This act 

 anticipates that, by the end of a projected four-year "Phase I" of a concerted 

 government-industry effort to build commercial plants, a comprehensive strategy 

 can be formulated for meeting the overall synthetic fuel production goals of the 

 United States. It is furthermore the intent of this act that that strategy shall be 

 based on experience gained under Phase I; and a crucially important part of such 

 experience will have to do with environmental effects associated with facilities 

 already by then in being, and will presumably enable reliable projections to be 

 made about future environmental effects and future water requirements. 



Already, however, in an article ' entitled "Energy Technologies and Natural Envi- 

 ronments: The Search for Compatibility," John Harte and Alan Jassby have direct- 

 ed attention to the National Academy of Science's CONAES study as being "prob- 

 ably the most ambitious effort to date to assess all energy sources and evaluate and 

 compare environmental impacts"; and they have made the following very signifi- 

 cant comment relative thereto: "This study focuses attention on new energy technol- 

 ogies that could provide substitutes for petroleum and natural gas. It concludes that 

 the most serious ecological impacts result from the water consumption requirements 

 of these technologies, and that these water requirements could severely constrain 

 their rate of development." 



More specifically, in another article ^ entitled "Energy and Water," based on the 

 above mentioned study, John Harte and Mohamed El-Gasseir have shown that "in 

 the scenarios for intensive coal use, . . . the eastern regions (of the United States) 

 will become vulnerable to drought"; and they have cautioned that, "before setting 

 forth on a course of massive development of a coal-conversion industry in the 



' Annual Review of Energy, Vol. 3, 1978, pp. 101-146. 

 * Science, Vol. 199, 10 February 1979, pp. 623-634. 



