Power to the People.

Doyle Brewington's gizmo promises cheap electricity for remote areas. Now all he has to do is make it work.

IT'S A COMMON PROBLEM FOR MANY poor Latin American countries: How do you bring electricity to remote or underserved areas easily and cheaply?

Doyle Brewington, a Houston-based engineer, thinks he has the solution: a thin metal tube that he calls "the answer to a multitude of present and future energy needs facing our global market,"

Brewington's idea seems simple. A long "Power Tube" is inserted into the ground in a geothermal field as far down as 7,500 feet. At that depth, the tube, which is filled with 50 gallons of isopentane or isobutane, encounters rock heated between 400 to 600 degrees. As the liquid heats, it boils and creates steam, which then feeds a nearby turbine to create electricity.

The Power Tube is easily installed, nonpolluting, noiseless and doesn't mar the landscape. Most important, it generates low-cost electricity. Brewington plans to lease the tube to companies, governments and communities, charging them just for the installation and a few cents per kilowatt hour. That way, he maintains full operating control over the device and can update it as new technologies are developed.

The 61-year-old Brewington claims a single Power Tube can generate 10 megawatts of electricity, enough to power a mine, a factory, even a 5,000-home community in Latin America. That means 50 Power Tubes (either dispersed in a field or stacked in rows) could produce 500 megawatts of electricity, generating energy for a city of 1.5 million inhabitants. Moreover, a single Power Tube can generate 50,000 hours of electricity, or run for about five years before being replaced. After that, the old one would be refurbished for reinstallation elsewhere.

Undoubtedly, Latin America is a readymade customer for this unique device. There are many remote areas that have little or no electricity and the region is rich in geothermal energy: Latin America boasts six geothermal fields and 39 of the world's 400 geothermal power units, including 26 in Mexico, seven in El Salvador, three in Costa Rica, two in Nicaragua and one in Argentina (currently inactive). Together, they produce around 1,094 megawatts of electricity out of the 8,148 megawatts of geothermal power generated worldwide, or about 13%. Ron DiPippo, a professor at the University of Massachusetts in Dartmouth and an energy expert, believes the region's potential could reach 5,000 megawatts.

Rocking the establishment. To make his dream come true, Brewington has solicited the help of several corporations and a New York law firm. He has enlisted U.S. technology giant Honeywell to help build the Power Tube's 76 sensors that will monitor temperature, speed, pressure, flow and seismic activity and then send the data to a satellite so it can be tracked anywhere in the world. He has also convinced Milwaukee-based Rexnord Corp. to develop generator couplings and claims the Inter-American Development Bank, the Overseas Private Investment Corp. and the Export-Import Bank have shown interest in the project. "It's going to rock the establishment," predicts Kent Thomas, a Rexnord executive.

To date, Honeywell and Rexnord are the only firms to show any interest in the unorthodox gizmo. Professor DiPippo, who says the Power Tube is not a new idea, has examined it but refuses to release his findings. John Rowley, a retired scientist at Los Alamos who is considered the father of geothermal drilling, says the device looks good on paper, but questions whether Brewington can produce a working model. In his defense, Brewington, who has been awarded four patents on the Power Tube since he began the project seven years ago, claims a Los Alamos computer simulation has given his invention a 72% efficiency rating.

Brewington is an articulate, soft-spoken man with a mane of white hair and a preference for collarless shirts. Like many inventors, he has an unconventional background.

He was born in Guatemala to missionary parents and lived in Central America until returning to the U.S. to attend high school. After graduation, he served in the U.S. Air Force before entering Seattle Pacific College. He later returned to Central America as a project consultant and teacher while studying electrical engineering at the Universidad de San Carlos in Guatemala City.

In the 1970s, he worked as a senior developmental engineer at Honeywell, before becoming a full-time consultant in the United States and Central America. He is currently marketing director for the Houston-based ESOR Consulting Engineers, which designs and builds water treatment plants and develops roads, highways and subdivisions.

A self-described "environmentalist" and "self-taught" geothermal engineer, Brewington came up with the tube idea after witnessing a power plant in El Salvador pollute a local water supply with arsenic and a Guatemala facility spew acid rain. "The depth of our wisdom and the level of our intellect can be measured by our respect for the environment," he says, repeating a saying that's printed on Power Tube literature.

In the meantime, Brewington is busy developing a working prototype--a smaller, one megawatt-version of the real thing. He plans to test it in the basement of an undetermined Houston office building within the next six months and then take another 18 months to work out the bugs. By 2002, he hopes to manufacture the Power Tube somewhere in Central America, possibly Costa Rica. "One third of Costa Rica is national parks. So obviously they're very conscientious about their ecology." he says.

If he does get the tube to light up as advertised, he will still face the daunting task of convincing bank bureaucrats and venture capitalists to finance what some see as fringe science.

"His biggest hurdle is it's unconventional," says retired scientist Rowley "If it weren't, he would get a lot more people to listen."

                            ELECTRICITY ACCESS
                              % OF POPULATION
CHILE              95.0
CUBA               95.0
COSTA RICA         94.7
MEXICO             94.7
ARGENTINA          94.6
URUGUAY            94.2
BRAZIL             92.0
VENEZUELA          90.7
COLOMBIA           84.8
DOMINICAN REPUBLIC 82.0
PARAGUAY           79.0
ECUADOR            78.8
EL SALVADOR        68.3
PANAMA             68.2
BOLIVIA            60.4
NICARAGUA          55.8
HONDURAS           51.5
PERU               50.9
GUATEMALA          49.1
HAITI              34.0
SOURCE:OLADE