I saw a local agency demo their use of the pirate box for Wildland firefighting.

They had a GIS team working on mapping updates to fire lines, cut lines, dozer paths, crew assignments, etc. And as required they'd upload everything to the pirate box and the commanders / captains could download the maps to their tablets.

Amazing stuff all without internet.

The manufacturing of H2 from CH4 is one thing that really bothers me about the whole concept.

We have CH4 cars today, and an infrastructure in place. It should be expanded and tbh it's a great fuel. The leakages are a problem but I think much of them can be fixed.

I had a Honda Civic Gx, (natural gas) and it was comfortable and very convenient while in Los Angeles. Road trips and camping sometimes sucked so we just rented for those. But there are already "natural gas" highways because so many trucks use it.

Sadly I think it's era is over, oh well.

Exactly. The old ones were basically passive cleaners. The modern ones are full on inspection tools with cameras, magnometers, etc.

We have a natural gas line running through one of our agency properties, and it was recently repaired due to the pig's findings.

Basically the engineers running the pig mark sections of the pipe that need physical inspection. The crews come out, dig it up, and repair or replace a section depending on how bad it is. Or do nothing if the engineers see that it's nowhere near as bad as they thought.

Yeah his practical engineering is excellent as well.

Pretty cool!

One thing that fascinated me working for a sanitation district was that we had some huge pumping stations like this, but hiding in plain sight.

There would be a metal vault cover in the sidewalk, it opens up to a stairwell, then you walk downstairs to a massive concrete wet well and pumping station under the street.

I had no idea they were even there, but they are, especially in urban areas.

It's a lot cheaper to build them above ground, but they did what they had to to move sewage.

And in the US we have plenty of open land to place them.

I understand places like Japan wanting to find alternative means

It might even be sooner than that.

Once oil gets too expensive to pull out the the ground, mining plastic from landfills and decomposing it back to the hydrocarbons might end up big business.

The natural gas/ ch4 production follows a pretty well known curve, at about 40-50 years it's nowhere near as potent. And with the push to keep organics out of the modern landfills that might get even worse.

We can make plastics from bio sources, or directly from elemental carbon. Oil is a lot cheaper, but we can do it. In WWII the Germans were running on synthetic gas. Last I checked you can buy synthetic gas - at about 5x the cost of standard pump gasoline. (synthetic gas has more energy per gallon so sometimes it is used in a race)

Energy has a lot of dark horse candidates and it's hard to pick winners. But one that sounds interesting to me, though it's still early, is pulling carbon directly out of the air using solar energy [1].

On basic principles, it sounds a whole lot easier than mining landfills? But that's assuming the capital costs can be lowered enough. (Solar costs keeps dropping, they figure out the other costs.)

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2024/04/01/terraform-industries-conve...

I really enjoyed my time working at a medium sized landfill as their surveyor and civil tech.

The engineering discussion in the article is spot on. We chose to reinject most of our leachate as that helps with CH4 production, and more CH4 for us meant more micro-turbines running generating us $$$ under our power purchase agreement with the local utility.

The well field balancing was crucial as well, we had to not only try to extract lots of methane, but not pull too hard or else that's how you get an underground fire. Big trouble if that happens.

And even the stockpile balancing was hard! You couldn't run out of dirt before your closure date, cause now you gotta start importing! Lots of volume calculations for me.

Fun stuff. If I was to go deeper into civil (I'm a licensed surveyor now) I'd likely consult for landfills. Big money and extremely interesting work.

What sort of substances end up in leachate, and how'd that contribute to greater CH4 production in your landfill? I was hoping that the OP post/video went into more detail on the chemistry involved.

It wasn't so much the substances, more the moisture.

A wet environment is much better for ch4 generation (was my understanding).

So we had an area that we called "the galleries" where we would rotate injecting the leachate. To keep all that stuff underneath wet (this is in southern ca, a pretty dry environment).

That was the concept anyway.

Got it, thanks!

Any time! I enjoyed the work, and I also got to work on closed sites which always made for pretty fun days as one was an isolated area and another was a golf course.

We do the same concept in night diving. Set a glow stick with a pie tin low, and another high behind and above it.

Then when you come up from the dive you can see which way you need to swim along shore to exit where you entered.

Does one have to take a test for renewal? Or is it a one and done type thing?

You don't have to take the test again. I believe you only have to take the test if your license expires at the end of the ten years AND you wait more than two years before renewing it again.

Thank you for your response.

I did get my novice license (or whatever the lowest license is called) but never got an old borrowed radio to actually transmit. Then life kind of got in the way.

I keep meaning to get back into it, the sstv and various data networks are really cool. I really dig the analog tech.

Yeah even if you move to another country you don't have to do the test again. You can just transfer your license.