Really Big Balloons

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Really Big Balloons

• Joe Van Ryzin
• Makai Ocean Engineering, Inc.

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Towed steel structure?

• Steel structure pre-fabricated in modules
• Assembled in deep water
• Filled with special water offsets weight of
  steel. Not fresh.
• Tow to site and submerge.
• Expensive and forced to transport you water to
  the site in an inefficient structure

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Towing
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Fresh Water Problems

• Anchoring is expensive
• Must deliver weight (in either anchor, salt or
  whatever) anyway
• Buoyancy within sphere, because of diameter, is a
  significant structural problem for fabric
  balloon.
• Any leak serious problem

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Alt deliver special salt and fresh water

• Reduce balloon costs by perhaps 90, keep
  buoyancy to 0.1 of that of fresh water (300
  tons, more then enough).
• Deploy concrete-weighted balloon just slightly
  negative use fresh water to offset anchors.
• Deliver to site special salt.
• Produce fresh water at site with RO
• Pump mixed solution to bottom through long HDPE
  pipeline.

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Mini OTEC

• First Hawaii deep water pipeline
• HDPE
• Flexible mooring and intake pipe

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Delivering Fresh Water
5 km long HDPE pipe assumed. 30 pipe reusable
estm 10m
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Deliver Salt to Site
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Prelim conclusions

• Fresh-water filled not a good idea
• steel structure no cost advantage and have
  serious deployment issues.
• Need to transport water in any case cheaper to
  make on site
• Fabric balloons are workable structure.
• Fabric balloon deployed empty, deliver salt and
  produce fresh water at site to fill balloon over
  several trips.

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Prelim wild guess

• Fabric balloon 56 million
• Anchoring 5 million
• Salt and water delivery 42 million
• General deployment 15 million
• Total 118 million??