Cold Fusion and Big Oil

uploaded by Emilio Lizardo August 17, 2008 at 05:16 pm
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Cold Fusion and Big Oil by Emilio Lizardo

Now Public contributor E. Lizardo
August 17, 2008 8:51 PM EDT

OPINION:

Prior to about a year ago the phrase, 'cold fusion,' for me brought to mind images of scientists sitting around a dirty little table somewhere in a dimly lit, smoke filled corner of some waterfront bar comparing notes and whispering urgently back and forth, circling words or numbers with red pencils on beer stained paper. Poorly groomed and plotting, scheming, with conspiratorial smiles and raised eyebrows they were up to something. Bad teeth, three days' worth of stubbly beards, needing showers and haircuts, their clothes looking like they had been slept in, these were images, indeed, of some very shady characters.

A year ago, before I found myself revisiting the subject when looking into alternative energy technology, cold-fusion research, at least in my mind was synonomous with trickery, charlatainism, cooking the books and just plain old bad science. That all began to change almost immediately after arriving on a reference page for this subject which served as a jump-point to all the public domain information on cold-fusion which had accrued in the nearly 20-years since it had been dismissed nearly out of hand by mainstream science as little more than deplorable fakery.

An Historic Announcement

Cold Fusion Has Been Achieved
In 1989, Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons reported producing a tabletop nuclear fusion reaction at the University of Utah. In their press conferences and papers, they reported the [the production of more energy out of than was put into a test] cell ... Lacking an explanation for the source of such [excess] heat, they proposed the [theory] that the heat came from nuclear fusion of [heavy water]. The report of their results raised hopes of a cheap and abundant source of energy.

Source: en.wikipedia.org

Ironically, Pons' and Fleischmann's announcement was partially eclipsed a mere 12-hours later by the sudden and sensational news of the greatest environmental disaster to ever hit the Pacific Northwest, the grounding and hull breach off the Alaskan coastline of the Exxon Valdez ...

Public Reaction

We are reminded of the excitement and frenzied media activity which followed immediately in the wake of the public announcement of this now historic and infamous scietific event by a citation from a mainstream newspaper article which ran a few days later.

Fusion in a Jar: Announcement by 2 Chemists Ignites Uproar
March 28, 1989

Two chemists who claimed last week to have triggered nuclear fusion in a jar of water have ignited a major uproar in the scientific world.

At a news conference Thursday, Dr. B. Stanley Pons of the University of Utah and Dr. Martin Fleischmann of the University of Southampton announced that they had not only achieved hydrogen fusion in a simple electrolytic cell, but had obtained a substantial yield of energy.

If their assertion is verified, scientists agree, the two would almost certainly win a Nobel Prize and would probably become very wealthy through the commercialization of their process. Such an achievement might also give the world a new source of cheap energy.

Source: partners.nytimes.com

For someone such as myself, who felt as if the wolves were never far from his door, the notion of a sudden windfall of cheap and abundant energy, although certainly wonderful and exciting, seemed almost too good to be true.

And so, it turned out to be. Further on in the same NYT® announcement already cited, was news of the vastly negative reception of Pons' and Fleischmann's cold-fusion work and the huge controversy it was already causing amongst the fold of the faithful 'mainstream' researchers.

Deepening the professional skepticism was the unorthodox way in which the claimed achievement was announced. Although the two said they had been working on their idea for 10 years, they said they had confided in no other scientists. Up to the present, they have not published their claim in any scientific journal, a procedure that would have required them to submit convincing experimental results to a panel of their peers.

Dr. Pons said in a telephone interview that his work had, in fact, undergone peer review by a professional journal, which would publish it. But he refused to say which journal, or to disclose other details of publication.

He said he and Dr. Fleischmann had paid for their work with their private funds, about $100,000, because they had assumed that "mainstream" scientific financing agencies would not take them seriously.

Even scientists who believe the claim to be hypothetically possible deplored the way in which the achievement was disclosed.

Source: partners.nytimes.com

Pons and Fleischmann had worked under the cover of secrecy. Using their own funds their work remained under the radar of the scientific establishment for more than ten years, quietly advancing toward their goal. In hindsight, they certainly may have been justified in their decision to keep their work a secret, for already, not ten days after their initial announcement of success, one gets the undeniable impression that somehow the wagons of mainstream science are circling to exclude them.

The story of what happened to them and their careers over the next few years illustrates very clearly they were probably correct to do so.

The Announcement's Aftermath

The US government wasted little time in taking strong measures to correct what evidently appeared to to them as a deplorable malfeasance of science.

The Energy Research Advisory Board

In November [1989], a special panel formed by the Energy Research Advisory Board, under a charge of the United States Department of Energy, said that it was not possible to state categorically that cold fusion has been convincingly either proved or disproved. The experimental results of excess heat from [test cells] reported to them did not present convincing evidence that useful sources of energy will result from the phenomena attributed to cold fusion.

Source: en.wikipedia.org

Only two years later, in 1991, Dr. Fleischmann found his career in ruins

Scientist in Fusion Dispute May Lose His Job
AP
Published: March 24, 1991

One of the two scientists who claimed to have discovered a process in which atomic fusion could be induced at room temperature has been told by the University of Utah that his future there is in jeopardy.

In a letter dated Feb. 4, the chairman of the university's chemistry department asked Dr. Fleischmann, who is living in Britain, whether he intended to reapply as an auxiliary professor in the department before his current appointment expires at the end of the academic year.

Dr. Fleischmann, a widely published electrochemist, replied March 6 that he wanted his appointment put to a vote and said he had no doubt that his colleagues would reaffirm his position.

He also accused Dr. Stang of trying to sabotage the university's cold-fusion research program, which resulted from the claim made by Dr. Fleischmann and Dr. Pons. "I think you would like to close the file" on cold fusion "because you find it uncomfortable," Dr. Fleischmann wrote.

For much of the last two years, Dr. Pons and Dr. Fleischmann have come under fire from the scientific community, and as a result, the cold-fusion program being financed by the State of Utah has suffered setbacks.

Source: query.nytimes.com

Dr. Pons, Fleischmann's partner in crime, so to speak, being perhaps the wiser of the pair, had chosen to retreat from the furor their work had caused. He was on sabattical somewhere in France by 1991.

And where are they today ?

Martin Fleischmann
In 1992, Fleischmann moved to France with Pons, to work at the IMRA laboratory (part of Technova Corporation, a subsidiary of Toyota); the laboratory closed in 1998 after exhausting a research investment of $12 million USD. The pair parted ways in 1995, and Fleischmann returned to Southampton, where he remained as of 1999. He has recently co-authored papers with researchers from the U.S. Navy and Italian national laboratories (INFN and ENEA).

Source: en.wikipedia.org

Stanley Pons
Pons moved to France in 1992, along with Fleischmann, to work at the IMRA laboratory (part of Technova Corporation, a subsidiary of Toyota); the laboratory was closed in 1998 after burning through a $12 million research investment ... As of 1999, Pons was living in southern France. According to a report of the history of the chemistry department at the University of Utah, as of 2000 he is no longer doing research in France.

Source: en.wikipedia.org

The strange and terrible saga of the careers and lives of these two gifted researchers unavoidably brings to this writers mind a remarkably similar series of events which has already been described in another Now Public® article, Galileo and Big Religion.

Cold Fusion Research Today

Work in cold-fusion research has been quietly and seriously underway for nearly 20-years now, being conducted in military, government and university labs

2007 Cold Fusion Symposium

The American Chemical Society's (ACS) 2007 conference in Chicago held an "invited symposium" on cold fusion ... and thirteen papers were presented at the "Cold Fusion" session of the 2006 American Physical Society (APS) March Meeting in Baltimore. Articles supporting cold fusion have been published in peer reviewed journals such as Naturwissenschaften, European Physical Journal A, European Physical Journal C, Journal of Solid State Phenomena, Journal of Electroanalytical Chemistry, Japanese Journal of Applied Physics, and Journal of Fusion Energy.

In 2007, a United States Naval Research Laboratory researcher ... wrote a review of [cold fusion research] experiments ... [He] said that more than 10 groups worldwide have reported the measurement of excess heat in 1/3 of their experiments and that most of the research groups have reported occasionally seeing 50-200% excess heat for hours to days.

Source: en.wikipedia.org

But other groups are working on it too, ones we don't often hear of, ones which have presented no papers at any scientific conferences. Their research goes on in what may only be described as a rather secretive manner.

When I first looked into all this, just last year I was able to rather quickly find more than a few links referring to cold fusion research being conducted by big oil companies. Today, after more than an hour of searching, the best I could come up with were a few names of individuals currently working in cold fusion reseach and who were formerly employed by Exxon®. For example

Lou Furlong

CETI has spent about $2 million on cold fusion research since its foundation in 1995, much of it family money, a large fraction paying for additional patents ... "We just finished a $2.5 offering about nine months ago. That enabled us to hire a president, Jack St.Genis, who was a very senior manager at Matsushita, NEC, and IBM. And Lou Furlong joined us six months ago as director of research, formerly at Exxon®.

Source: wired.com

One other interesting find I made is a 194 page book on cold fusion in pdf format available freely at what appears to be the author's website. Foot-note 92 on the bottom of page 74 refers to an Amoco® internal technical report

Cold Fusion and the Future - a footnote

Lauzenhiser, T. and D. Phelps, Cold Fusion: Report on a Recent Amoco Experiment. 1990: Amoco Production Company, Research Department.

Source: lenr-canr.org

Another citation from the same page perhaps sums up the situation as well as any might

Cold fusion has largely been developed by maverick scientists working within mainstream
institutions, including mainstream energy industry research institutes. Amoco Production
Company and the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) funded some of the most impressivecold fusion research, but they put the results aside and scaled back or cancelled programs, apparently because managers within these organizations are hostile toward cold fusion.

A working cold fusion generator at any price, for any market, will be the kiss of death to theelectric power industry ... Cold fusion cannot help the energy industry. It can only strangle it. The rational response to cold fusion would be to prepare for the orderly liquidation of the electric power industry, the oil companies, and the rest of the energy sector. This would be unthinkable to managers at EPRI® and Exxon®.

Source: lenr-canr.org

Summary

I must apologize for the excessive length of this article. Upsetting to our carefully conditioned short western attention spans, it's length resulted from my effort to thoroughly make the case that the crib-death, as it were, of cold-fusion technology was a direct result of the immense threat such technology would pose to the practical strangle-hold big oil has on the energy supply for the world's energy consumers. A market so gigantic it truly boggles the imagination. For instance, the gross cash income to big oil from the pockets of American car drivers is around 10-billion dollars a week, by my recent estimates, for the purchase of their automotive fuels alone.

This article is tagged OPINION since it was the writer's intention to show a relationship between big oil and the apparently doomed prospects of commercial cold-fusion technology, a relationship not officially regarded as fact, to his knowledge, by any references publicly available.

Finally, I would hope this article was informative, interesting and enjoyable to read.

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