Fifty Degrees Below - Kim Stanley Robinson [162]
And in they would go, for a workout that now had the two of them wandering semi-autonomously; they had got past feeling they needed to team up to be friendly, and merely did their own things in such an order that they were often in the same room, and could sometimes talk, or help out with weights or holding ankles. Then it was off to the showers and the daily blessing of hot water running over him. Presumably on the other side of the wall Diane was doing the same under a shower of her own. By now Frank could visualize pretty well what Diane would look like. She would look good. Probably this didn’t matter. It only made him worry about Caroline and what might have happened to her.
But he worked every day with Diane, and he couldn’t help but admire how skillful she was, and determined. They were entering the final stage of arrangements for the North Atlantic intervention, and Diane now devoted a good part of every day talking to the people running the various parts of it. The International Maritime Organization was in charge of shipping; UNEP was making arrangements for salt; the big four re-insurance companies were providing or raising most of the funding. Wracke and the Corps were providing engineering and logistics.
There were some 3,500 oil tankers in operation around the world, they had learned, and about thirty percent of those were still the older single-hulled kind that were legally required to be replaced. Five hundred Very Large Crude Carriers were identified by the IMO as being past due for retirement and potentially available for sale or lease, and as the alternative to a deal would be either the breaker’s yard or legal complications, the ship owners were being very accommodating. These old single-hulled VLCCs had an average capacity of ten million tons, small compared to the Ultra Large Crude Carriers now replacing them, but taken altogether, enough to do the job. The real problem here would be maintaining oil supplies at an adequate level with so much shipping taken out of transport all at once, but plans were being made to build up reserves, speed the construction of new double-hulled ULCCs, and return some of the superannuated fleet to oil transport once the salt operation was done.
So shipping capacity was not proving to be the choke point on the operation. More difficult was coming up with enough salt. Five hundred million metric tons turned out to be equal to about two years of total world production. When the working group first learned this they wondered if the project was impossible, at least in the time frame Diane was calling for. But Diane ordered the group to find out how quickly supplementary salt production could be ramped up. It soon became clear that the 225 million tons a year was more a matter of demand than supply; the salt industry in the Caribbean alone had years of salt dried in the pans ready to go, and the hardrock mines of New Brunswick and the rest of Canada also had a huge inventory, although it was more difficult to speed up extraction there than in the salt pans. In general there was a much greater productive capacity than was needed. Annual supply of highway rock salt in the U.S. only amounted to thirty million tons a year. So there was excess salt, ready at hand in almost every drying pan and hardrock mine on the planet.
So the plan was physically possible, and the winter’s unprecedented harshness meant it was now greeted with cries of hope and anticipation, rather than the raised eyebrows and shaking heads that had met it the previous summer. Indeed the futures market in salt had already jumped, Frank was interested to learn; prices had shot up five hundred percent. Fortunately enough futures had been bought by Swiss Re to bypass this inflation. Already production had been amped up, and the full complement of salt would be ready later that year, at about the same time the fleet of tankers would be ready to be filled. As far as Diane could tell, the project