It is not difficult for a practical engineer to RECOGNISE SOMEBODY ELSE'S JULES VERNE IDEA. What is difficult is to STOP WORK on a JULES VERNE IDEA, particularly if it is your own or your boss' boss idea.

Some of the best Jules Verne ideas I heard of are:

• Transport 3 million cubic metre of natural gas by Zeppelin from difficult to reach places to the industrial nations. Hundreds of thousands of pounds sterling were spent on studying how the Zeppelin could fly. No small problem on its own, as its size was : 600 m lang and 100 m in diameter. But the real problems were in safety, the question how to dock it , how to empty the ship and how to get it back empty. Impossible!!

• Transport Liquefied Natural Gas by submarine from off-shore fields. The submarine would load the LNG while laying "safely" between the legs of the platform. Crazy idea?? Not according to a shipbuilding company that spent time and money studying the possibilities.

• Transport 12 million cubic metre of natural gas by ship at a pressure of 300 bar in steel bottles with a diameter of 0.25 m. Tests were done by exploding one bottle to see whether the neighbouring bottles would get damaged. They did not!! Still the project was shelved when the promoter retired from the oil company. The mass of 180 000 bottles and the impossibility to connect all these bottles to a discharge manifold in a safe manner made this project a JULES VERNE project. As often happens with JULES VERNE ideas they come back in modified form. Also the bottle idea. People did again look at Compressed Natural Gas (CNG) but now in bottles of 40 m long and 2.3 m in diameter and of light weight non metallic material. The number of bottles required was still 2000 and the pressure was 160 bar. Mass might not have been a problem any more but what about connecting these 2000 bottles? I guess it still qualifies as Jules Verne.

• The last example is a gas line from the Middle East to Europe. Apart from a compressor station in 2000 m deep water between Egypt and Greece , building and operating long lines is possible (USA, Russia and Europe). But of course this idea is a POLITICAL JULES VERNE. Oil and gas lines passing through Middle Eastern countries and crossing borders that are now laying idle, are examples of what will happen. The same is true for a line from the middle of Africa to Europe. Still, a lot of time and money was wasted doing studies.

MORAL : AS JULES VERNE IDEAS ONLY MATERIALISE IN ABOUT HUNDRED YEARS TIME DO NOT WASTE MONEY ON THEM NOW.