Will High-Speed Rail Ever Succeed in the U. S.?

 

So far, the answer seems to be no.  While Japan, China, and some European countries enjoy the benefits of rail travel at over 100 MPH (160 km hr^-1), the closest thing the U. S. has to a major (rather than single-point to single-point) high-speed rail system is the Acela system in the Northeast.  Yes, it does go up to 150 MPH (240 km hr^-1), but only over a stretch that's about 10% of its length. 

 

The rest of the time, Acela slows down to the relatively glacial pace of the rest of the Amtrak system, which this summer especially has been suffering more than the usual amount of delays and other problems, according to a recent article on the Slate website by Henry Grabar. 

 

Before you can enjoy high-speed rail, you have to build it.  And building such a thing in the U. S. presents an extraordinary number and magnitude of challenges, as Grabar shows from a recent New York University study on how hard it is, and how we could do things better. 

 

First off, there's the permitting process.  If you want to take a piece of land and build anything more industrial or transportation-like than houses or apartments (and sometimes even those), you must go hard-hat in hand to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which acts for all intents and purposes as a grouchy de-facto landowner who would rather have undisturbed snail darters on his property than the world's most valuable factory.  I have nothing against snail darters, but if primitive man had acted toward the natural world like the EPA tries to make the rest of us act, we'd all still be living in trees and eating nuts and berries—but only government-approved nuts and berries, of course.  And there might be as many as 50,000 of us scattered over the North American continent.

 

Even if the environmental obstacles are overcome, the next problem is getting equipment such as rails, signaling equipment, and, you know, trains.  Not surprisingly, there are no domestic high-speed rail manufacturers, and so it becomes a question of which imported model you're going to choose.  And because every high-speed rail project so far has been a one-off deal, you go out and hire consultants (because nobody has in-house expertise on high-speed rail), who then steer you this way and that and charge exorbitant fees. 

 

And even if you make it through all those difficulties, there's the not-in-my-back-yard problem.  And here we run into an issue we haven't even discussed yet:  if you build it, will they come?

 

Here I'm reminded of a much smaller-scale rail project that is familiar to me:  Austin's CapMetro rail line.  By the time it opened in 2010, it had cost north of $100 million, and while it's still running, only about 1800 people ride it on a typical weekday.  In other words, a system that cost a tenth of a billion dollars fifteen years ago keeps maybe a thousand cars off the streets of Austin.  Although it's a silly comparison, that's about $100,000 per car.  To make a noticeable dent in the hundreds of thousands of cars that make up Austin commuter traffic, you would have to improve that cost per rider number a lot, or else bankrupt the city.

 

The NYU folks have suggestions to improve the delivery of high-speed rail projects, including standardizing the equipment, streamlining the federal permitting process, and enacting a nationwide plan that would supersede little local efforts that never seem to get to reality.  I can't fault these ideas, and if the political winds blew favorably they would probably work.  But I move the previous question: if we built it, would people use it?

 

That doesn't seem to be the case with Austin's rail line.  The reason is that transportation is fundamentally a service, not a product.  And the mechanical means you use to provide the service depends on a lot of factors that are not always considered seriously.

 

Population density and local infrastructure are two of them.  In the Northeast, there are numerous cities on the Acela corridor which have public transportation systems of their own—Washington's subways, Boston's surface rail, the New York City subways—which make it not only feasible but preferable to travel entirely without aid of a private automobile.  And those cities are so situated for historical reasons—they got big before the era of the automobile got serious around 1920, and built the right-of-ways and housing and commercial patterns that make such a situation work.

 

The rest of the country, outside of maybe Chicago, and San Francisco if you count cable cars, is not so situated.  If there was a high-speed rail line from San Marcos to Fort Worth that opened tomorrow, I still probably wouldn't take it, because although I might manage to get a cheap cab to the rail station here in my town, once I got to Fort Worth I'd either have to ride the slow intermittent buses or catch Uber everywhere I went.  And frankly I'd rather have my own car with me, and the four-hour drive from here to there isn't that big a deal to me. 

 

Multiply that tradeoff by a few hundred million, and you get the real reason that the U. S. does not yet have high-speed rail, and may never have it.  It's only a partial solution to the problem, and unless and until every town of 50,000 or more people has local public transportation of comparable quality to the best subway system in the country (which used to be Washington, DC, but I'm not sure now), you will end up spending billions on a large-scale version of CapMetro's rail line:  it's pretty, it works well, and almost nobody rides it.  In other words, a smoothly-running version of Amtrak. 

 

For a while it looked like autonomous vehicles, eventually electric ones, were going to solve the problem.  But self-driving cars, at least the Level 5 kind that you can sleep in, seem to be as chimerical as they always were, and so it's not clear how people in 2060 are going to be getting to work.  My guess is that high-speed rail won't be a big part of the picture, but I might be wrong.  It's happened before.

 

Sources:  Henry Grabar's article "Train Dreams:  How high-speed rail in America can become a reality" appeared on July 12, 2024 on the Slate website at https://slate.com/business/2024/07/high-speed-rail-amtrak-transportation-policy-china-japan-europe.html.  The NYU report can be viewed at https://transitcosts.com/high-speed-rail/.  I also referred to a Wikipedia article on CapMetro Rail.

The Colorado Mine Waste Spill: The Fix That Broke

On Wednesday, Aug. 5, heavy-equipment operators employed by the U. S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) were working at the site of the abandoned Gold King mine near Silverton, which is about a hundred miles northeast of the Four Corners area in southwestern Colorado.  The mine had not operated since 1923, and the workers weren't trying to get gold out of the mine.  Instead, they were trying to make sure that thousands of gallons of toxic-mineral-laden water that had filled large parts of the mine would stay there.  Their efforts were part of a larger project to clean up some nearby mines, an effort that would be spoiled if toxic water were to leak out of the Gold King mine and run downhill to the other mines. 

So, the workers had good intentions.  But good intentions don't always stop bad things from happening. 

It turned out that there was a lot more water backed up behind the "adit" (the horizontal mine opening) than the workers realized.  Apparently, if they had bored a test hole beforehand, they might have determined from the high pressure that it was dangerous to do what they were doing.  But bore holes cost money and time, the geology of the site made such a project tricky, and so they went ahead with some shoring-up operations.

Exactly what happened has not yet come to light, but somehow, the actions of the construction machinery disturbed the delicate balance of whatever loose rock was keeping the water in the mine, and here it came.  Some veiled references about prompt action preventing fatalities imply that things must have gotten pretty exciting for a while, as a flood of yellow acid water poured from the mine's opening down the hill to find its way to Cement Creek, where it spread to watersheds that cover parts of three states.  Some of these now-polluted streams pass through Indian reservations, and the Navajo Nation's president Russell Begaye has declared that his tribe is going to sue the EPA.

Clearly, the EPA has a mess on its hands.  But what about those good intentions?  Doesn't that count for anything?

The Gold King spill has drawn attention to an ongoing problem shared by many regions where mining was carried out with more enthusiasm than wisdom by operators who did only what they had to do to get the gold out.  As anyone knows who as a child played in sand on the beach with a toy shovel, holes in the ground dug below the water table eventually fill up with water.  Abandoned mines often contain soluble compounds such as iron sulfide (pyrite, or fool's gold) and minerals containing toxic elements such as lead, cadmium, and arsenic.  When water gets into these mines, the water acquires significant concentrations of these undesirable chemicals, and oxidized pyrite makes it highly acidic.  Sooner or later, water usually finds its way out of an old mine, either through natural fissures in the rock or more violently as water pressure builds up and breaches blockages, which is what happened at the Gold King mine, with a little accidental help from the EPA.

What one generation messed up, a succeeding generation is trying to clean up, but the task is Herculean—or maybe even Sisyphean.  Sisyphus was a mythological Greek king who played tricks on the gods.  The gods, in particular Zeus, didn't appreciate this, and so when Sisyphus died, Zeus condemned him in Hades to try to roll a boulder up a hill.  Just as he'd get nearly to the top, the enchanted boulder would elude his grasp and roll back downhill, and Sisyphus had to lather, rinse, and repeat, so to speak—forever.

The EPA won't have to clean up mines forever, but with 22,000 abandoned mines in Colorado alone, they have enough to keep them busy for quite a while.  The fact that the EPA has resources to prevent mine-water spills at all is due to the passage of laws such as the Superfund act, which helps pay to clean up environmental messes that the owners (or former owners) can't afford to fix.  The agreement under which the EPA was working on the Gold King mine wasn't a full-fledged Superfund situation (such a label was feared to discourage tourism), but millions of government dollars were committed to the cleanup anyway.  And it was in pursuit of this type of cleanup that the site workers inadvertently caused exactly the kind of problem that they were there to prevent.

There is an opportunity here, even in this crisis, for engineers and engineering educators.  It's hard enough to dig a mine without having it fall on your head, but as numerous accidents have shown, digging a mine is a piece of cake compared to trying to do anything with an old abandoned mine for which few records exist and maintenance ceased decades ago.  But doing the kind of thing that the EPA is doing is engineering too—pure-D environmental engineering, but probably not of a kind that too many environmental engineering departments consider. 

With so many abandoned mines to fix and federal money to fix them, one can imagine a new engineering subdiscipline of abandoned-mine remediation.  Typically, new engineering disciplines are practiced under other guises for some time before anyone recognizes them as distinct from previous disciplines.  For all I know, there may be a division of some civil engineering department somewhere that already teaches these things, but I doubt it.  If there isn't, though, there ought to be.

Maybe all the education in the world might not have prevented the breach that caused the Gold King spill.  Sometimes a bad thing is bound to happen no matter what you do.  But now that we've had a bad example of how not to handle abandoned mines, maybe the academics and engineers can get together to develop best practices and procedures to prevent things like this from happening in the future. 

Sources:  I referred to articles on the spill carried in the online editions of the Washington Post on Aug. 10 at http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/08/10/what-the-epa-was-doing-when-it-sent-yellow-sludge-spilling-into-a-colorado-creek/ and the Denver Post on Aug. 26 at http://www.denverpost.com/news/ci_28705984/epa-underestimated-water-pressure-led-colorado-mine-spill, as well as an article about the Navaho lawsuit at

https://www.rt.com/usa/312499-toxic-spill-tribes-epa/.  The Wikipedia article on Sisyphus has some great details about exactly what it takes to tick off Greek gods, by the way.

Is There Methanol In Your Car's Future?

Suppose that tomorrow you could get in your car, go down to the gas station, and choose between buying regular gas at $3.12 a gallon, or methanol at $2.08 a gallon.  You would know that the miles per gallon you get with methanol is only about 2/3 of what gasoline gives you.  But then you do the math:  if methanol is less than 2/3 the price of gasoline (including taxes), you're ahead mileage-wise.  And sure enough, two-thirds of $3.12 is $2.08 exactly. 

Then you think of all the nice consequences of burning methanol instead of gasoline.  Almost no carbon monoxide comes out your car's tailpipe when you burn methanol.  Other pollutants (including carcinogenic aromatic compounds that result from burning gasoline) are reduced or eliminated, and your carbon footprint per mile is decreased too, because methanol has fewer atoms of carbon per molecule than gasoline.  And every gallon of methanol you burn is a strike against the Organization of Petroleum-Exporting Countries (OPEC), because in the hypothetical methanol economy of the future, most methanol is made from U. S. fuel sources:  natural gas, coal, or even biomass sources can all be converted into methanol.  Knowing all this, you choose methanol. 

This little tale is more than a pipe dream.  The numbers are based on the hard realities of current gasoline prices at the pump and methanol prices, with taxes prorated according to the miles-per-gallon capability of the respective fuels, which would only be fair.  But a lot would have to change in both technology and the regulatory environment to bring this vision into reality.  In a recent issue of The New Atlantis, author Robert Zubrin promotes the methanol economy as a way of breaking the petroleum cartel enforced by OPEC, which he estimates make gas prices about 50% higher than otherwise.  As Zubrin points out, there are other reasons to adopt methanol besides geopolitical ones, but both technical and legal issues stand in the way of widespread adoption of methanol as a transportation fuel.

Methanol shares with ethanol a difference in chemistry between oxygen-bearing compounds such as alcohols and the purely hydrocarbon nature of gasoline.  Unlike gasoline, methanol is corrosive to the aluminum and steel commonly used in automotive fuel systems, so a new transportation infrastructure would have to be developed before methanol could be made widely available at the retail level.  Fortunately, new "flex-fuel" cars have systems made to handle methanol, ethanol, gasoline, or a mixture of fuels, so there is no longer a major technical barrier to making cars that could burn methanol.  As Zubrin points out, however, there is a huge legal barrier:  the U. S. Environmental Protection Agency. 

For reasons that seemed good at the time, the EPA adopted rules some years ago that prohibit the burning of any transportation fuel with more than a 2.7 percent oxygen content.  Methanol is about 50% oxygen, so the EPA would have to issue a special waiver of this rule before methanol could be sold as a motor fuel.  (It has already done this for the "E85" ethanol-gasoline mixtures available in some locations.)  The EPA also prohibits after-market modifications of older cars to burn methanol, but this rule could be changed as well.

I wish the price differential were greater between methanol and gasoline, because there would then be a powerful economic incentive to lower the legal and technical barriers to adoption of methanol.  As things stand, however, some hidden economic incentives may be pointing the other way.  Zubrin traces lots of money invested in auto companies to holders of vast OPEC-controlled petroleum investments, and speculates that any major move away from gasoline-burning cars by the major U. S. automakers would be squashed by the money-bag guys.  Personally, if I find a situation that can be explained either by (a) a vast secret conspiracy or (b) ignorance and inertia, I'll go for ignorance and inertia every time. 

The main reason we don't have a methanol economy right now is that the gasoline economy we have in place is not in an immediate crisis, and so the red-alert alarm bells that it takes to get the attention of government officials and elected representatives are silent.  The last time this country got really serious about alternative fuels was back in the early 1980s, when the price of crude oil spiked at around $100 a barrel (in 2011 dollars).  That motivated a spate of energy research that faded almost as quickly as the price of oil fell.  We are almost at that same price now again, but since it's happened before and we survived, nobody seems to be very motivated to do much about it this time.

Some readers may recall President George W. Bush's call for a hydrogen economy during his 2003 state-of-the-union address.  That scheme would have had some of the advantages of the methanol economy, including less pollution and less dependence on foreign fossil fuels.  But hydrogen, which is the lightest known gas at room temperature, is devilishly hard to transport and use for transportation, simply because it must be stored under extremely high pressures or liquefied at extremely cold temperatures.  While these measures are practical for exotic applications like interplanetary rockets, they were sufficiently challenging to smother the hydrogen economy in its diapers, so to speak, even if more politicians than the President had gotten behind it, which they by and large refrained from doing.

Methanol is much more practical than hydrogen as a motor fuel, and in fact is used exclusively in many race cars, where its naturally higher octane rating is an advantage.  I think the biggest single hurdle blocking the way to a methanol-fueled transportation system is not technical and not legal.  It's a lack of leadership.  The last time I can recall that a national leader resolved to do something definite and new, and had the support of most of the nation, was right after 9/11/2001 when President Bush said we were going into Afghanistan and whip some you-know-what.  But that state of the national mind lasted about three weeks.  Then Bush himself encouraged people to go shopping and revert to business as usual, and the moment was lost.

Man does not live by bread—or gasoline—or methanol—alone.  There are more important matters than the health of the economy, but you wouldn't think so by listening to most political rhetoric nowadays.  Zubrin's motivation in calling for a methanol economy is not strictly economic or technical.  He sees OPEC as a world-class force for evil that needs to be broken up, and I agree with him.  But there are so many domestic concerns that obsess the political class nowadays that it would take another 9/11-style crisis to get their attention.  And nobody wants that.

Sources:  Robert Zubrin's article "Why We Should Break OPEC Now" appeared in the No. 40 (Fall 2013) issue of The New Atlantis, pp. 19-32.  I referred to Wikipedia articles on methanol, the methanol economy, and fuel taxes in the United States.

Global Warming, Solar Energy, and $300,000 Tortoises: The Morality of Energy Production

On Tuesday, June 25, in a speech before enthusiastic students at Georgetown University, President Obama delivered a message outlining his vision for what the United States ought to do, and what he personally is going to do, about the moral issue of energy production.  Now at first glance, you would think that energy production is a technical issue that should be left to engineers and economists.  But it was clear from the President’s speech that he thinks it is also a moral issue, as moral as which side you should fight on in a war.  His speech, in fact, was peppered with militant terminology.  He spoke of having the “courage to act,” he talked of the “fight against climate change,”  and expressed his desire for America to “win the race for clean energy.”  Toward the end, he called for citizens “who will stand up, and speak up, and compel us to do what this moment demands.”  To that end, he announced that he was going to ask the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to issue regulations that, according to Obama critic Charles Krauthammer, will “make it impossible to open any new coal plant and will systematically shut down existing plants.”

If the construction of new coal-fired power plants is going to come to an end, maybe we can start building more Ivanpahs instead.  Ivanpah is a Piute term meaning “good water,” and is the name of a giant solar-energy project not too far from where Interstate 15 crosses the California-Nevada line on its way to Las Vegas.  Built by a consortium of construction and solar-energy firms, plus money from Google investors, Ivanpah consists of three circular arrays of tracking mirrors that direct sunlight onto four-hundred-foot tall “power towers.”  Atop each power tower is a cubical black boiler to make steam that turns turbines that drive generators to make electricity.  This is the kind of thing that President Obama sees as the future of energy production:  it is solar-based, it adds nothing in operation to the nation’s carbon footprint, and it is even respectful of the rights of the 150 or so desert tortoises on the construction site who were carefully inventoried and transported to an equally suitable habitat at a cost of about $50 million—or roughly $300,000 per tortoise. 

The engineer in me applauds the Ivanpah project.  It is an elegant yet simple solution to several of the problems that plague direct photoelectric energy production using solar cells, one of which is the fact that all days are not equally sunny.  When clouds show up, energy production from solar cells drops instantly, and this is not the sort of behavior that power grids like. 

The Ivanpah plant mitigates the cloud problem in a couple of ways.  First of all, unless there’s a solid cloud cover (not too common in the desert), smaller cloud shadows won’t put the five square miles of mirrors out of commission all at once.  And even if insolation, as it’s called, varies over a time period of minutes or even hours, the thermal inertia of the large power-tower boilers means that the plant will still be producing energy even when it is temporarily in the shade due to clouds.  So without any extra effort, the Ivanpah project has sidestepped one of the significant technical obstacles faced by solar-cell arrays.

Still, Ivanpah is expensive.  According to Wikipedia, the whole project, now nearing completion, will cost about $2 billion when finished.  This is roughly four times what a new coal-fired plant of equivalent peak output would cost.  And the coal plant will run any time you want it to.  True, you have to buy coal over the life of the plant, but this can be factored into the cost, and the economics of that calculation tells you why so much of our electric energy is still supplied by coal.

If we stopped building new fossil-fuel power plants tomorrow and allowed only nuclear, solar, and other renewable forms of new plant construction henceforth, several things would happen.  Electricity would become gradually more expensive and possibly less reliable than it would be otherwise.  And America’s contribution to the world’s output of carbon in the atmosphere, which has already fallen to 1992 levels, would fall faster and be overwhelmed by the soaring use of coal and other fossil fuels by China, India, and the rest of the world.  The overall objective effect on global warming would be minimal.

Everyone has a moral compass that helps prioritize ethical decisions.  For most people, murder is a more significant moral issue than jaywalking.  President Obama views the threat of global warming as a moral equivalent of war, to judge by his Georgetown speech.  He clearly wishes to unite the country around a common set of sacrifices that will allow us to hold our heads up before our grandchildren, whose world we should literally save from destruction by the evil forces of climate change.

I will merely point out, as Krauthammer has, that climate change comes in dead last in a poll of 21 matters of concern to Americans.  Jobs and the economy are things that the average U. S. citizen is far more concerned about, but the President’s moral compass seems to be insensitive to such concerns.  Or perhaps, as a practical politician, he realizes that in his lame-duck term he should spend his limited time on matters where he can act unilaterally, as with his instructions to the EPA, and not waste his energy on proposals he will not be able to get through Congress.  Leadership is a mysterious thing, and some leaders who have received the laurels of historical honor were excoriated and criticized at the time.  The President obviously feels he is in this category, and often refers to his unpopular proposals as being on the “right side of history.” 

But there sometimes is not much difference between being ahead of the pack and simply being out in left field.  If there was a truly united sense among Americans that the nation was under an existential threat and climate change was the culprit, President Obama’s rhetoric would fit the national mood and history might go his way.  But I fear what we are witnessing is instead the desperate actions of a leader who wants to force his vision of the future on a public that is unwilling to pay the high price for a dubious honor that may not come for generations, if ever.   

Sources:  I learned about Ivanpah from the print edition of the June 24, 2013 issue of Time Magazine.  I used information from the project website http://ivanpahsolar.com, President Obama’s speech of June 25 as transcribed by the Wall Street Journal at http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2013/06/25/full-transcript-of-obamas-remarks-on-climate-change/, Charles Krauthammer’s column for July 6, 2013 as presented in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette at http://www.post-gazette.com/stories/opinion/perspectives/charles-krauthammer-obama-will-risk-the-economy-for-no-impact-on-climate-change-694450/, and the Wikipedia articles on “Ivanpah Solar Power Facility” and “Fossil fuel power station.”