(The following column by James Powell and Gordon Danby appeared on The Augusta Free Press website on November 17.)
AUGUSTA COUNTY, Va. — The United States faces a transportation crisis in the next 10 to 20 years – an oncoming perfect storm of declining world oil production, rising fuel prices, increased roadway congestion and accidents, more global warming from vehicle emissions and dirtier air.
In 20 years, the U.S. Department of Transportation predicts truck ton-miles and auto miles will almost double. U.S. demand for oil, most of which goes for transportation, will also almost double. Most oil experts predict oil production to peak at the same time. The oil prices will rapidly climb as the U.S. and other nations fight over the shrinking amount of oil. The U.S., with only 4 percent of the world’s population, currently consumes 25 percent of the oil. As other nations industrialize, particularly China and India, the U.S. will not hold its 25 percent share.
Maglev, passenger and freight transport that does not burn oil, can help weather the oncoming storm. Per passenger mile and ton-mile, Maglev at 300 mph costs less and uses less energy than 60 mph autos and trucks and 500 mph airplanes. Electricity for Maglev can come from non-polluting, non-CO2 emitting sources like wind, solar, hydro and nuclear. Maglev is not futuristic. It is already here – here being Japan and Germany.
The U.S. was first out of the gate for Maglev, to be as important in the 21st century as autos, trucks, trains, airplanes and ships were in the 20th century. Our 1966 invention of superconducting Maglev sparked a worldwide Maglev race. Sadly, the U.S. government soon decided that autos, trains, and planes were sufficient, and dropped out of the race. The Japanese and Germans forged ahead to commercially ready first-generation Maglev systems.
The Japanese system, which uses our early inventions, holds the Maglev speed record at 355 mph. Their vehicles carry powerful superconducting magnets that induce currents in normal aluminum loops on the guideway, automatically levitating them four inches. The levitated vehicle is strongly stable, and automatically resists forces, like wind gusts, that try to push it away from equilibrium. Additional AC current loops propel the vehicle and brake it at stations. Maglev vehicles accelerate like automobiles and climb steep grades. Japan Railways plans a 300-mile Tokyo to Osaka route to carry 100,000 passengers daily, in a one-hour trip.
The German Transrapid Maglev system uses conventional electromagnets, not superconducting ones. Instead of four inches, Transrapid clearance is only 3/8th inch, necessitating accurate, expensive guideways. Since electromagnet levitation is inherently unstable, it requires rapid and continuous control of magnet current to be safe.
The race to a practical first-generation Maglev System is over, and the U.S. lost. This is hardly surprising. Japan and Germany have each invested several billion dollars on Maglev development, while total U.S. funding for Maglev R&D has been only a few million dollars.
However, the race is not over yet. Japanese and German systems have expensive guideways, and only carry passengers. Very few U.S. routes have sufficient passenger revenues to pay system costs. To avoid costly subsidies, a less expensive second-generation system with much greater revenue is needed. Our new second-generation Maglev 2000 System has a prefabricated guideway costing half as much as first-generation systems and carries trucks and other freight.
Intercity trucking is big business. Of the more than $1 trillion the U.S. spends annually on transport, $300 billion goes to intercity trucks – five times that spent on intercity air passengers. Many Interstates carry more than 15,000 trucks daily, with average haul distances of about 500 miles. Three thousand trucks per day on Maglev would equal the revenue from 150,000 passengers, and payback construction cost in four to five years. Traffic congestion and accidents would drop, fuel consumption and highway damage would decrease, and air quality improve. Truckers would drive loads to the nearest station, to be carried at low cost by Maglev for hundreds of miles in a couple of hours.
With our colleague, James Jordan, we have proposed a 16,000-mile National Maglev 2000 Network built alongside the interstate highways, an idea of the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan. It would connect metropolitan regions into a seamless web serving 90 percent of the U.S. population, with 70 percent living within 15 miles of a Maglev station, from which travelers could go anywhere in the U.S. in a few hours. The network would be built in 20 years for only $20 billion per year. It would save hundreds of billions of dollars annually, create hundreds of thousands of new manufacturing jobs, and provide a major export industry.
The U.S. almost got back into the Maglev race in 1990. Sen. Moynihan led the way in the Senate, which passed a billion-dollar Maglev R&D program. Unfortunately, it did not pass the House.
More recently, the U.S. has reentered the race, but in a peculiar way. Instead of seeking to develop a U.S. second-generation system that would be cheaper and technically superior to the first-generation German and Japanese systems, the U.S. Maglev program has become a contest for intercity routes on which the German Transrapid System will be built. This policy is very unfortunate. First, it will establish a de-facto standard gauge that prevents new and better Maglev technologies from evolving. The impetus will be to keep building more of the same. Second, it will kill the development of a major new U.S. industry that would generate hundreds of thousands of new manufacturing jobs and billion of dollars per year in exports. Third, it will not significantly reduce oil imports – a key goal for the next generation system.
At the end of his 1989 Maglev essay in Scientific American, Sen. Moynihan wrote, “Fifteen years from now, when you settle into your seat for the one-hour run from Chicago to Detroit, have a look under your seat cushion. My sincere hope is that you will not find a small tag that reads -Maglev: Invented by American scientists, made in West Germany.”
We share Sen. Moynihan’s hope and his vision. It is late, but the U.S. can still get back into the real Maglev race, if it acts now to take the lead again to develop the next-generation Maglev system.
If the U.S. does not act, the Germans and the Japanese will adopt the U.S. technology strategy and win the second-generation race.
(James Powell and Gordon Danby are the inventors of superconducting Maglev. They received the Benjamin Franklin Medal in Engineering in 2000 for their invention “using superconducting magnets and subsequent work in the field.” They are directors of the MAGLEV 2000 of Florida Corp.)