An educational conversation

 

A few months ago when I was running errands in the Beech, I dropped off one of our machine shop workers to pick up something at Destination City then flew on to Gotham City, Jr., taking the wife of a ranch hand and her kids to a doctor's appointment and to have some time away from the ranch. 
After I dropped them off and ran some errands, I stopped by the local FBO office to say hi and chat a bit. There I ran into Richard, one of the corporation executives handling coal, oil and gas.  I'd met him briefly once or twice but never had a conversation with him.  His plane had a busted discronificator or something and he needed to get to Destination City. He wanted to rent a plane but none were available so I offered to fly him down since I was going to be stopping there on my way back home.  He agreed with relief, offering to pay me a hundred bucks but I waved that aside since I wasn't flying Part 135.  He could buy me lunch, instead, and have a chat while we waited for my passengers.  So we did. And I got quite an education about a field in which I was totally ignorant.
He told me that Montana.holds the largest coal reserves in the United States, having some 118.5 billion tons of recoverable reserves. Its coal is low sulfur, low-polluting, sub-bituminous with a low BTU rating, 8,000 BTU per pound compared to 14,000 BTU for West Virginia and Pennsylvania coal, meaning that it was pretty much good only for electric power plant fuel. In fact, the only reason it began being mined was because of the acid rain damage caused by eastern coal and the cost of scrubbing the sulfur out of it. America's 600 million-ton annual coal consumption is still dominated by eastern coal, but 40 percent is provided by coal from the Powder River Basin, a lot of that, of course, in Wyoming. Most of the Montana coal is in the Anderson and Canyon deposits, 50-foot in depth seams covering an area the size of Connecticut, enough to keep America supplied with electricity for centuries to come.  We won't be getting as much of it thanks to the Biden administration's decision to end coal leasing on public lands in the Powder River Basin. But we will still get some from private and Indian lands.

In recent years, a lot of Montana coal has been exported to East Asia, primarily China, shipped out via Vancouver, Canada, which has three coal terminals at the port. The coal trains I saw rolling northwest were heading there, Richard said.  So there was some discussion about whether the administration's move was to appease environmentalists or to stick it to China, which needed that coal to fuel it's economy. It could use all the coal it could get from wherever it could get it -- domestic supply, Australia, the US....   Whatever the case, he said coal was a sunset industry in America, anyway, no matter what Washington did or didn't do.
The reason coal for power plants in the US was fading away was not so much because of the "green energy" push but because vastly abundant natural gas was much cheaper, as well as cleaner and easier to use than coal, Richard said. Equipment to deliver gas to the power plant burner is both much less complex and easier to maintain and operate. Also gas-fired power plants can spool up from cold to full output in an hour or two while a coal-fired plant takes a minimum of three days and as much as a week to do so, so such plants don't have the ability to shut down during low demand times and quickly come back on-line to meet surge demands. They have to run continuously whether demand is there or not.
Richard said that, on top of this, coal is a difficult fuel to handle. At the electricity generating plants coal is dumped in yards then moved by conveyor to the plant, thence to a pulverizer and then injected into the burner. Coal dust is an explosion and fire hazard and collects on surfaces all over the plant.Quenching systems are needed to stop spontaneous combustion and explosions in the pulverizer. Further, burning coal corrodes all the exhaust equipment.
 So although Richard was in the coal business he realized that its days in the USA, aside from use in steel and cement making, were numbered thanks to cheap natural gas.
I didn't understand how coal was important to make steel and cement.  Richard said steel was made from iron and carbon -- carbon steel -- the carbon coming from coal, and fly ash was used to make cement.  I didn't know what fly ash was, but I let it go as tangential to what he wanted to talk about.
The future, he said, was exports, especially to China, which was energy poor.  He explained that American oil and gas deposits were located in rock formed of hard sediments from an inland sea while those in China were found in rock made of mushy sediment from freshwater lakes.  When the American rock was fracked, it formed cracks where the oil and gas pooled and could easily be extracted, but when Chinese rock was fracked it formed a gooey mess that was hard to extract anything from.  So the Chinese were only getting about 2 percent of the

The Japanese navy carrier Izumo flies F-35Bs.

originally projected amount of oil they expected.  We could make a fortune selling energy to China but he was afraid Washington might someday restrict or even forbid such exports.
Like we did with Japan before Pearl Harbor, I asked. Something like that, he said, but noted China gets most of its oil from the Gulf, in particular Saudi Arabia, and the US Navy protects that Chinese lifeline since China has no blue water navy to do it itself.  The largest blue water navy after the US is Japan.  That I knew. Also the one with the most aircraft carrier warfare experience.
 The oil wells in Montana vented off as much natural gas in a day as would power all of New York state for a month, Richard said, a fact that astonished me.  America is wildly rich in energy resources, he said, if only the politicians, federal regulators and courts would allow us to develop the extraction processes and distribution networks to use it ourselves and export it to the world.
Then he talked about being in the National Guard and getting deployed to Iraq twice, not in a combat role himself but in an intel role supporting a combat unit. The thing he remembered most about his deployments was his  reluctance to go back the second time after a year away, during which time he had hoped he would never see the dump again, and then when he did go back to the same unit in the same place he saw that nothing had changed. 
It was as if he had never been away, the same dusty file cabinets, the same computer he had worked at before sitting on the same wobbly-legged desk, the same saggy cot to sleep on, the same crummy shower with a drizzle of water that stank of something, the same noisy air conditioner that only seemed to blow warm air, the same lousy institutional cafeteria food.  He was immediately overcome with a sense of futility wrapped around a core of boredom. 
He told me about some of the incidents during his time in "I-wreck."  Not the blood-and-guts stuff civilians assume soldiers reminisce about but odd incidents and funny stories.  The one that made me laugh was when a trusted source informed him that a dangerous terrorist that they were looking for was a midget.  He passed that on to the gunslingers and they went off looking for a midget.  Some hours later they returned driving a truck.  He went out to see if they had found the midget terrorist just as they were unloading their haul, some two dozen midgets, all looking highly indignant. The troopies must have rounded up every midget in the vicinity. 
Now it was his job to interrogate them and find out which one was the terrorist. It turned out none of them were. His informant had played a joke on him, and now the midgets were all going to tell AFP and Al Jazeera that Uncle Sam had kidnapped them for what purpose Allah only knew. To avoid news stories about the US Army going around grabbing Iraqi midgets, he gave each an apology and $25, probably more money than any of them had ever seen in their lives, to shut up and go away.  He fired his informant but then hired him back when he couldn't find another.
I asked Richard what he thought about the military's plan to recall to active duty those who had reached their EAOS, even those long retired.  He said he had had enough of the whole shit show and if they dragged him back in he would just F Troop it.  I didn't understand that so he explained that "F Troop" was an old TV show about a company of incompetent soldiers who bungled everything assigned to them.  He said that if he were sent to a combat zone he would Bowe Bergdahl it. 
I remembered Bergdahl.  He deserted his post in Afghanistan and was court-martialed by the Army but had his court-martial over-ruled by a federal judge.  National Security Advisor Susan Rice said he served with honor.  The outrage her statement caused among those serving that I knew was still fresh in my mind. I'd heard that as a result of what she said many senior NCOs, furious with what they saw as a profound insult, left the service. The problem of experienced personnel getting out was later exacerbated by the implementation of CRT and now, it seems, is critical if the Pentagon is talking about calling retirees back into service.
I asked Richard if he really would F Troop it and desert and, after a thoughtful pause, he said, no, he probably wouldn't.  He was just venting.  He had too much self-respect to do nothing less than the best he could do.  I thought about what I would do if I were recalled.  I wouldn't like it, that's for sure.

Shannon Kent on assignment with SEALs.

I remembered Shannon Kent, a cryptologic warfare technician whom I had met in Afghanistan when she was an IA volunteer with a SEAL team.  She was very impressive, speaking Arabic and several other languages fluently.  Before Afghanistan, she had served in Iraq with the SEALs.  Years later she was set to enter the Navy's doctorate of psychology program at USU, the armed services medical school, but the Navy decided they wanted her skills in Syria.  I heard that she begged off, citing the fact she now had two children to care for, a three-year-old and an 18-month-old, and had also just had surgery for thyroid cancer, but the Navy was adamant.  So she accepted her duty and went to Syria where she was killed by a suicide bomber.  She should have Bowe Bergdahled it.
When my passengers finally showed up and we all traipsed out to the ramp heading towards our Twin Beech, which was parked next to a King Air 360, Richard wondered who owned "that classic."  I said it was ours.  He seemed a bit taken aback, saying he thought we'd be flying in the King Air. I told him he didn't have to fly with us if he didn't like the ride.  He said he hadn't meant what he said that way.  He'd love to fly in "a true legend."

Someone lost control and ran off the runway.

He mentioned that at one time he owned a Cessna 195, a single-engine tail dragger, but it was too much trouble. He said taxiing was a real chore and crosswind landings were a challenge. He asked how the Beech was and I said I didn't have any problems with it. As we were taxiing, he watched me carefully and commented on how I only used the throttles to steer with, never touching the brakes while he was always working the brakes in his 195. I said I sometimes used the brakes, depending on the situation. When I launched down the runway, he also watched what I did intently.  After we were airborne he complimented me on keeping the plane dead on the centerline, saying he tended to veer left and right in the Cessna until he could get good rudder authority.  It was one reason he finally sold the plane, it was just too much of a bother dealing with it. I said twins are easier, just lead with the left engine and keep going straight by using wrist action on the throttles till the tail comes up.
I asked what plane he had now and he said a 1981 Piper Aztec F turbo with wingtip tanks which he liked very much. The age of his and our planes led to a discussion of the death of general aviation.  Not so long ago, if a person wanted to, he could buy a plane and fly it for fun just as he could own a motorcycle, boat or RV.  Light planes were manufactured in the thousands every year by a number of makers.  That's no more.  Young people still train to be pilots, but only because they want to have jobs with the airlines.  A twenty-something, never mind a teenager, can't afford to buy even a used, decades-old airplane, and the new light planes, such as the Cirrus, cost over a million dollars.  That's for a four-place flying compact car.

I'll keep my good old Twin Beech.

I recalled the conversation I had with the King Air pilot passing through our local airport who mentioned that when he was in high school in the early 1960s he had bought a Piper Cub  for $1,200. That would be something like $12,000 today.  He earned the money to buy it by working after school, weekend and summer jobs. He averaged about $800 a week, also in today's money, during the school year and I suppose more during summer when he would work more hours, so  $12,000 was within his means. A used Cirrus runs about $850,000.  No high school student could afford that, let alone the flying lessons, which are not cheap.
The old days really were a golden era Richard and I both agreed.  How did we let them get away from us, he asked.  I had no answer.