=economics =technology =projects
I wrote a post about viable US megaprojects, and people wanted another post on that topic.
Any project has some set of costs
and benefits. I defined megaprojects as being expensive, so the costs would
be large, and if they're viable, then the benefits are even larger.
For such large benefits to be plausible, projects must produce results with
large demand. For example, the ultimate outputs of the projects in that post
were basically:
- living
space
- electricity
- electric wires
- transportation
- military
- materials (including plastics and fuels)
Most of the reasons those projects haven't happened involve government:
- political
gridlock and lack of vision
- political gridlock and incompetence
-
political gridlock as a response to regulatory capture
- political
gridlock and lack of vision
- government lack of vision and technical
incompetence
- government procurement incompetence
Recently, US prices for ammonia and plastics have been very high. Why would companies fail to invest in viable production of basic materials?
What I was doing was looking at things in
demand, looking at what's available, figuring out the best routes connecting
those, and then describing key points of such routes. What companies have to
do when deciding whether to build a big chemical plant is different:
they have to predict what prices are going to be. I have no idea how to
predict the price of propylene a few years from now beyond saying it will be
within a certain (fairly wide) range adjusted for inflation. Prices depend
on the distribution of profits, and that's harder to predict than the
overall viability or under-utilization of a route from an overall societal
perspective.
Economists talk about the "invisible hand" of markets, but Adam Smith didn't
really consider investment decisions. Lots of small businesses have bought
machinery that ended up being useless due to offshoring or changing economic
conditions. Lots of students have studied to become, say, lawyers, and found
that there was an oversupply as they graduated.
What chemical
companies end up doing is making long-term contracts to buy or sell things
at fixed prices. In other words, a planned economy, rather than a market.
Not a centrally planned economy, but one in which the planning involves
multiple companies that hide information from each other. That system tends
to get outcompeted by a centrally planned economy, by which I mean a single
large corporation doing everything itself. But the more significant purpose
of vertical integration is preventing competitors from using things, rather
than synergy or coordination. In this sense, the Chinese system is arguably
more free-market than the current state of large American corporations.
From this perspective, if we want
to find more viable megaprojects that aren't being done, we could consider
things with a large minimum scale and a large number of processing steps
that make coordination of anything new difficult.
An obvious example
is aircraft development. Boeing has no new aircraft in development. They
might not even be able to develop a new aircraft anymore. Meanwhile, Airbus
is now outcompeting Boeing on the relative strength of existing offerings.
Development of a new blended wing body passenger aircraft and
manufacturing for it could be considered a megaproject, and that seems
worthwhile to me, but only if development isn't botched, and I'm not sure if
America has any institutions capable of competently developing that. Maybe
Northrop Grumman could do it?
But this is a different kind of failure
than the original theme: loss of institutional capability for tech
development, rather than failure to do projects that ways to do are already
known.
Construction of skyscrapers in a city like New York is also a
different type of problem: it's well-understood and potentially very
profitable, but everyone with the power to obstruct construction wants as
much money (or favors) as they can get.
So, is there anything else
that matches the original theme? Let's see...
The US has recently had
high prices for lumber because of a shortage of mills, and high beef prices
despite cattle prices not increasing because of inadequate processing
capacity and an oligopoly led by Cargill. Arguably those cases fit the same
theme, but the undersupply of meat processing capacity was more deliberate
and less based on price uncertainty.
In that case, how about...
Western N95 mask production didn't immediately ramp up once it was clear
SARS-CoV-2 would be a pandemic, due to concern about low prices from
overproduction. The US government could have ordered a billion N95 masks for
a stockpile with delivery due once the pandemic was over; that would have
spurred immediate expansion of production. It also could have
maintained its mask stockpile, and maybe kept the masks in a nitrogen
atmosphere for longevity.
But wait, this is forgetting about the
"megaproject" part of the theme: N95 mask production doesn't require a
billion dollar scale for viability.
I could
go on, but...in retrospect, I'm not sure what the exact theme was.
The point of that post was
mainly about failure to do projects rather than advocacy, and I thought an
extended list of projects wouldn't further that point as well as this. But
that might not be what my readers are looking for. Maybe there's more demand
for the kind of speculation about important future technology that you might
find in Scientific American or NewScientist or r/futurology. Unfortunately,
I have the rather prohibitive disadvantage of caring about viability and
understanding why most of the things they write about aren't practical.
I suppose I could list a few of the major projects involving new
technology that I think are viable, such as:
- Large-scale
production of GaN wafers, using new processes that I don't want to talk
about here because of the strategic significance and applications in eg
military AESA radar. GaN is the future of power electronics, not silicon
carbide.
- Growing lots of certain kinds of miscanthus and making
certain biorefinery designs to convert them to levulinic acid and furfural,
then processing that to polymer precursors and possibly (depending on CO2
mitigation value) fuels. I guess I could potentially just describe the
design in a post, but the details are beyond the scope of this post and a
bit hard for most people to appreciate.
- Large-scale production of
xylylenediamine and trans-1,4-H6XDI for high-resilience polyurethanes for
tires. Typical polyurethane loses more energy as it bends than polybutadiene
rubber, but certain polyurethanes don't, and polyurethanes are generally
much more durable.
- Production of nano-precipitated CaCO3 as a
replacement for carbon black in tires. Release of carbon black from tires as
they wear away on roads is actually a significant source of particulate
pollution. Calcium carbonate particles are much less hazardous, and it's
possible to get the same performance as carbon black (or even slightly
better) if you precipitate it in very particular ways.
I can make lists like this, and I can even go into more detail, but this kind of content only has value in a certain context.