Another music reference title for y’all. My wife is originally from Texas, and she’s had an old friend staying with us for the past week…so I find myself saying “y’all” a lot. Anyway, I digress as usual. This is a photo of the wind having two distinctly different effects at the same time. The steam on the left is heading east from the Tesoro refinery, while the steam from the Heskett Station power plant is drifting in the opposite direction.

I did some extensive poking around inside almost every single powerplant in North Dakota during the summer of 2006, including standing atop one of the 23-story boilers at the Coal Creek Station. You could fit the state capitol, the tallest building in North Dakota, inside that boiler. Crazy, huh? One thing I saw that hadn’t occurred to me before was the volume of steam generated by these plants, something that many people assume is smoke. After all, that’s what a power plant does: generate steam. The steam powers the big generators, sure, but everything upstream of the generators exists solely to produce steam.

While I still think that ethanol is a waste and the numbers show it to be a thermodynamic loser, I have to give credit to the guys who came up with the idea of using steam generated by the Coal Creek Station to power an ethanol plant. At least they’re not adding to the amount of energy it takes to produce ethanol, only to get a product with 70-80% of the energy output of an equivalent amount of gasoline. And one thing that nobody’s making a big deal out of is that E85 can actually be sold as E65 in this state without running afoul of state regulations!

None of these thoughts really crossed my mind when I snapped this photo, they just popped into my head as I started typing. After a long day in the garage, I guess it was just time for a big ol’ word dump accompanied by a reasonably neat picture.