Viking Food, Super Critical Fluids, and Devil-Santa

“Okay Cowlay, here is some reading to catch you up to speed. Should be pretty straightforward. I’ve flagged the sections you should read like this one on Fluid-Fluid Interactions in Geothermal Systems, and here is a short course on Experimental Studies in Model Fluid Systems. I’m sure you remember all your phase diagrams from undergrad, right? If you need to refresh your thermodynamics feel free to borrow any of my physics text books. Probably best to start with this easy stuff before you dive into the more complicated drilling reports.”

Heavy.

“Okay Coolie, here is the local delicacy I was telling you about. Raw smoked lamb haunch. Here, eat more. More! We will eat whale steak tonight also. Yes, and perhaps I can find some rotting shark. We typically eat it around Christmas – traditionally served with the Black Death, a very strong liquor.”

You can't make this stuff up. They eat sheep's face.

I went into the grocery store to find some granola and yoghurt. I don’t know what I bought. The granola was pretty straightforward because I could see through the bags into their contents, but the yoghurt remains a mystery. I bought a jar of something resembling vanilla flavored yoghurt, then ate several mouthfuls and enjoyed it. Now I fear to ask what this delicious paste might actually be. Rotting goat testicles with vanilla extract? Most likely, based on my gastronomic experiences thus far.

Yoghurt? Fingers Crossed...


I’d better grow a pair before I fly to China. No Kashi for five thousand miles.

After taking me to the home of a mentally handicapped girl with chickens, my host family took me to a store that celebrates Christmas year-round. The store always smells like Chirstmas, sells Christmas themed trinkets, candies, and gifts, and constantly plays mind-numbing Christmas music. A grinning bearish man punched a fistful of smoked lamb haunch into my mouth as I entered. In the basement I found a barely-comprehensible pamphlet describing Iceland’s Christmas traditions. They have thirteen Santa Clauses here, all born from a giant ogre mother (featured above) who boils children and eats them, especially around the holidays. The Santas, with names like “Bowl Licker” and “Sausage Swiper,” generally revel in daily youngster maulings. The thirteen Santas lighten up around the holidays and give savage beatings with about the same frequency as kind gifts and playful trickery (like igniting your long underwear while you sleep - tee hee hee, how playful!)

Raw Smoked Lamb:

After eating so much free lamb haunch, candied almond, and toffee, I felt obliged to buy a bottle that someone squirted molten candy cane into. Apparently I can fill it with vodka later to make peppermint schnapps, which I will swill urgently when Santa Claus comes to savage me late at night.



All I know is that I’m getting the hell out of here before Christmas.


Here's an article that makes me sound really self absorbed: Middlebury Campus Please Enjoy!

A Hole in the Wall

Here's a photo taken of me after I hurled myself through "the hole," which serves as a natural wind tunnel (video below).


If taken ten seconds earlier or later it would freeze a frame of me tumbling down this jagged basaltic lava flow. The weathered rock slipped around with such incompetence that staying upright became almost impossible.

Wind Tunnel Mountain

These videos come from a very windy excursion I took with an Icelandic Geologist names Hersir. Hersir took me exploring for geothermal energy on the Reykjavik outskirts, which include hardened lava flows, desert moonscapes, verdant hills and valleys, and recent craters of hydrothermal explosions. We saw two geothermal power plants, including the plant now contentiously owned by Magma Energy (see my previous post).

On top of Wind Tunnel Mountain:



Descending through a massive hole in a rock wall:



The blustery moonscape:

Week 1: Corn Field on the Fjord's Peninsula

I’m bouncing along Route 1, the road that encircles Iceland, in the very back row of a coach bus. Always take the back row if it is a continuous row of seats; if you are lucky (or smelly) enough, nobody will sit next to you and you can stretch out in perfect horizontal bliss. I like to believe that I got lucky, but my sinuses are congested, so it could be my odor. Whatever the cause, I am staring at the big toe of my left foot as it pops out of my sock, which is happily resting three seats away. Someone muttered, “the ‘Kanne’ would take up four seats,” to which I silently replied, “yeah, but the Ameri-Kanne isn’t getting deep vein thrombosis on this six-hour bus ride.” There were only four people on the bus - take as many seats as your want! I stretched a little more and smiled and looked up at some window decals I could not read.

This is how I chose to shuttle myself from Reykjavik (translates to "Smoke Bay" on account of the hydrothermal ventings discovered by Viking settlers) to Akureyri (translates to "Corn Field on the Fjord’s Peninsula," apparently). For about 10,000 kroner ($80) I get a window seat looking out to fjorded coastline, moraine-filled valleys, and mountains sawed in half by the unyielding rivers. Quaint farms quilt my current valley’s trough. Only minutes ago I passed an Icelandic Pony stable – the only horse breed with five gaits, one more than the meager four speeds known to most horses.

So begins my quest for geothermal energy. This is a country bursting with geothermal resources. Learning to explore for hot water in Iceland is like learning to fish with an AK-47 and a barrel of cod. You can hardly penetrate the ground without eliciting some scalding eruption.

Steaming Earth:


Here in Akureyri I have plans both established and nascent. Tomorrow I meet with Bjarni Gautason at the Icelandic Geosurvey (ISOR), a private geothermal energy consulting firm that was spun out of a state agency almost a decade ago. We will attempt to correlate surface data with subsurface heat information to develop techniques for cheaper and faster geothermal resource identification.

I also hope to work on the International Deep Drilling Project (IDDP) – arguably the most advanced geothermal project in the world. An international consortium of firms and government agencies (the DOE in rank) are attempting to drill and exploit supercritical fluids under Iceland. Last June the project was delayed because their drill penetrated a magma chamber! The IDDP attempts to develop strategies and technologies for coping with the super-heated and highly acidic fluids found under extreme conditions.
Through both these projects, I aim to garner a better understanding of how organizations endeavor to build their power plants. How do firms and governments differ in their approaches, and which approach is most effective? My concept is that consulting firms and international consortiums will give me the broadest view of the geothermal industry – the introduction chapter of my Watson Fellowship.

My third month here will take me to Husavik, where I will work on a more specific and focused level with a single geothermal power plant. The plant in Husavik operates a Kalina Cycle Binary Phase turbine, which is the most advanced turbine currently employed in geothermal. Unfortunately the plant was also eviscerated by acidic waters during its initial operation, and is currently being refurbished. A perfect opportunity to see how thing fits together! Plans can change, but that is the plan for now.

One theme I've noticed here is the private-public clash. The majority of Iceland’s geothermal power plants and utilities are state-run, but Magma Energy from Canada is a new private player in the Icelandic electricity market. I met with several diplomats in the American Embassy last week, including the economic attaché, and began seeing the differences between private and public ownership of resources. Icelanders are fiercely defensive of their resources, their environment, and their autonomy. That defensiveness is currently playing out as backlash against Magma Energy, which bought the assets of a bankrupt Icelandic utility (financially decimated in the 2008 banking crisis here).

Magma’s deal involves a 60-year lease on a geothermal resource and an option for first-right-of-refusal on a second lease of equal length. “They have no incentive to manage the resource responsibly,” said my host in Akureyri. Locals worry that they will exploit the earth until it runs cold, and then skip back to Canada, giggling all the way to the bank. Also, a rise in electricity prices seems inevitable when private industry replaces a subsidized agency (electricity is virtually free here).

That's all for now. I am happily unpacked in my new home. I now reside under the roof of Sibbi and Disa. Sibbi (male) is an airline pilot and Disa (female) is a geologist at the Icelandic Road Works. They offered me a place to stay after a friend from Middlebury connected me (thanks Jared!) I pay rent by cooking dinners...

Not so Icy-land and the Midnight Sun

I have arrived and am glad to report, in reference to my last post, that I am not at all underwhelmed with what I find here in Iceland. First, the landing ranks among the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen. My plane glided over a thick and unbroken blanket of clouds for the last ninety minutes of flight. As we approached Iceland, the clouds began to dissipate until Iceland emerged as the center of a cloudless circle. Dipping down through the last cumulus patches, I saw flashes of a pockmarked moonscape with green hues suggesting some deep fecundity in the soil.

On the horizon I saw the midnight sun. This landing occurred at 11:30 PM, yet the sun still hovered some apparent inches off the horizon. It beamed a dark red and purple pallor across the sea, land, and clouds, and for one remarkable minute, perhaps owing to the exhaust from my jet’s turbine, or perhaps from Iceland’s magic aura, the boundary between sea, sky, and clouds dissolved. The horizon became a mélange of red, purple, and orange pastels with one texture flowing into the next. I became totally disoriented in this visually blurred moment – it lasted only several seconds, but I will not forget it. It was one of those things that a photo cannot capture, and I did not even bother an attempt at photography.

I disembarked, collected my bags, boarded a bus, called Carola (with some technical difficulty, ultimately resolved), and found myself standing in shorts and Otter Creek polo outside the Viking Village. The temperature, even at "night" is not so cold that shorts feel uncomfortable. Carola came to my rescue, and together we hauled my bags up a surprisingly long and steep hill to her house. I’m typing from my room high above the Viking Village with shades drawn to keep out the night’s sun. I was warned that the hot water from the faucet will scald me and stink of sulfur, both heat and smell owing to the phenomenon I intend to study here.

Tomorrow I will head to Reykjavik. Carola recommends the “whale blubber on a stick.” Yippee.

T Minus Two Hours

In the week preceding my journey I scrambled to organize some final details. I set myself up with a number of ways to communicate internationally - a MagicJack, which turns my laptop into a mobile office phone, a Skype app on my iPad for inexpensive international calling through WiFi, and an international SIM card for my Blackberry with good rates on voice, text, and data in all the countries I will live in. I also blasted off a dozen or so final emails to line up some meetings in the American embassy in Iceland as well as a few potential projects in China.

On the 16th I flew to Boston after a really nice going away party organized by my parents (our backyard looked like a wedding reception with every surface covered in flowers from my aunt's garden, tiki torches and steak both in hazardous abundance, and friendships reaching back to grade school). My friend Dan and his girlfriend Marry picked me up at Logan when I landed. We shoved my rolling duffle, camping pack, and carry-on into Dan's Subaru and set off for Nantucket where I spent one last weekend with seven friends from Middlebury. We luxuriated on the beaches and surfed. It would have been nine friends, except one buddy fell asleep in Grand Central and missed his train, a circumstance that surfaced when his impatiently waiting chauffeur in Connecticut texted us the simple but entirely explanatory line, "I hate Ben." Those two never made it, but we had a great time despite their absence.

Before flying to Iceland, I spent two final nights in Boston in my friends' (Alex and Kevin) apartment. I got to talk with the founder of a California-based geothermal company (AltaRock Energy, www.altarockenergy.com/about.html) for about an hour on Monday, and my buddy Kevin also helped me meet a new friend, Dan, in the hybrid vehicle business. Dan hosted me to a great pizza dinner atop his Beacon Hill roof deck. We ate thin slices and drank smooth micro brews while a thunder storm rolled in some spectacular lightning fireworks over the Charles River. Dan has had a really interesting career in various parts of the alternative energy and clean tech industries, and he had some good ideas for contacts and projects in China through MIT.

I am currently typing onboard Iceland Air flight #634, headphones pumping MGMT, and fingers dancing on the iPad. I land at midnight, pop in my new SIM card to dial Carola, my host in Reykjavik, board a bus and tell the driver to let me off at "Viking Village," then meet Carola and walk ten minutes to her house. Of course I imagine an arrival scene of Viking marauders, drying fish heads, and exploding geysers backdropped by erupting volcanoes, all of which will be illuminated by the blazing midnight sun. Perhaps my imagination predisposed me to be underwhelmed. I recall my disappointment upon disembarking in New Dheli several years ago and not finding any of the stampeding elephants or snake charmers I assumed would be there to greet me.

That's all for now. My first week should consist largely of orientation, exploration, visits to the embassy, meetings with the economic attache in the consulate, and moving up to Akureyri, where I will begin a project with the Icelandic Geosurvey (ISOR, www.geothermal.is). I also hope to reconnect with a long-lost friend, Porter, who recently moved to Reykjavik to design video games.

Survived the Death Race - Next Chapter, Watson

Headline Link: Nineteen people survive the Pittsfield Death Race

I spent the last five months living out a personal dream. Before I graduated in January, I secured a sponsorship from Long Trail Brewery in Vermont for the bicycle racing tour I mentioned in the last post. Long Trail agreed to pay for travel, lodging, food, race entry fees, bike parts, and some pocket money during my adventure. They also gave me some kegs to throw a party after a good result in the Tour de Gila in New Mexico.

The sponsorship became a reality when I approached the brewery’s owner in a bar one night. Some friends and I had wandered into Two Brothers Tavern in Middlebury, VT, and a friendly guy at the bar suddenly offered to buy everyone’s beer as long as it was Otter Creek or Long Trail. Turns out this man was Dan Fulham, a private equity guy who owned Long Trail and had just bought Otter Creek. He was promoting his beer in the local tavern.

After a few drinks, I proposed my idea to Dan. I started by telling him what I had already organized, “I’ve got a blog, an agreement with the Lance Armstrong Foundation to raise money for their cancer research and patient support, a direct deposit fundraising system for donations, twitter, a facebook event, an email list, and a full three months of racing planned all over the country.” Then I took a big sip of my Copper Ale and, with fingers crossed, said, “all I need now is a financial sponsor – I’m hoping to wear the jersey of a brand that I really believe in. I’d love to ride for LT if you’d help finance my project. I think I can really spread the word about your product out west, and you’d be helping me raise money to fight cancer.”

Dan loved the idea (or had drank enough not to care about a few thousand dollars), and agreed to pay for everything. It was a real “name your price” situation, and he told me to dismiss all the other sponsors I had approached. We signed our contract on the back of a bar tab, exchanged handshakes and contact info, and talked for about an hour before heading our separate directions. Dan came through on every promise, and I got to race in California, Utah, New Mexico, Colorado, and Vermont.

I got a podium finish in the Sea Otter Classic, a handful of top ten finishes in Utah, Colorado, and New Mexico, and I placed fourth in the Death Race in Vermont. You can read about all the racing in more depth by visiting my other blog: www.deathraceforlife.blogspot.com. More important than the racing, I delivered thousands of dollars to the Lance Armstrong Foundation, which I hope will make a difference for their important mission. THANKS TO EVERYONE WHO SUPPORTED ME AND DONATED!

Now I'm hanging up the bike to begin the next chapter. On July 16th I fly to Boston to say goodbye to some college friends in Nantucket before I fly to Reykjavik, Iceland on the 20th to begin my Watson Fellowship. I am officially banished from the United States for one year beginning on the 20th.

Over the next twelve months, I expect to find myself in or around powerplants, oil rigs, financiers offices, wind testing sites, geology research camps, solar cell laboratories, coal mines, steel mills, factories, electric utilities, district heating systems, hydrothermal springs, and lots of places I can't imagine yet. My little mission is to learn about energy businesses and technologies, mostly geothermal energy, but I'll work with wind and solar power companies too. I'll see coal, oil, and gas along the way also. The idea is to prepare myself to make a real and positive impact on the energy systems we depend on. I know this sounds impossibly vague and directionless, but I promise I have some pretty specific plans and goals - the details will come in a later post. For now, suffice it to say that I will be spending a year outside the US studying and working with energy businesses (mostly renewables) in five or six countries.

(To my family and friends) My folks are throwing me a little going away party on Thursday, and I'd love to see anyone in Denver one last time before I head out. You all probably don't remember this, but we had a similar goodbye on the night before I left for my big west coast bike trip after graduating from high school. I thought about everyone that came to say goodbye very often, especially when I was freezing, terrified, hungry, or otherwise needing empowering memories. Well, that only lasted one month, and everyone I met along the way spoke English. What I'm about to do will last a year, and the places I'm going are pretty
intimidating to be honest. I don't speak many of the languages, nor do I understand the cultures I'll be living in. I'm confident in the plans I've laid over the last six months, still, a fond farewell could prove indispensable if I find myself choking down another dog-kebob in Beijing or testing geothermal gradients in "encephalitis avenue" in Indonesia.

If you want to say goodbye, or are just curious about what I'll be doing, where I'll be, or what I hope to accomplish, then please stop in for a moment on Thursday. You can have dinner, snacks, and/or drinks starting around 7:00 - should be informal with lots of good food and libations. Please let me know whether or not you can make it so we can plan accordingly.

I am retiring my Death Race blog, and I’ll be using this one to keep a log of my experiences on the Watson Fellowship. Please check back often to read about my adventures.