4.5 Costs and Financing

 

 

4.5 Costs and Financing

 

4.5.1 Costs

 

The cost of producing the plastic can probably be brought down to 0.5 cents/SF or $140,000/sq. mi. This is $9.4 billion annually for 67,000 sq. mi. of coverage. The cost of installation is estimated at 25% the cost of the plastic or $35,000/sq. mi. The cost of the installed plastic is thus $175,000/sq. mi. or $11.7 billion/yr. The annual cost of monitoring is estimated at around 5% of the cost of the installed plastic or $8750/sq. mi. or $586 million/yr. for 67,000 sq. mi. Of this, $300 million is for monitoring equipment and the rest for labor. In all these cost estimates, it is assumed the use of the land is free.

 

Maintenance costs are estimated by assuming geovacs can be built that cover 500 SF/min or 7.2 million SF/10 days operating 24 hours per day. To cover 67,000 sq. mi. per year every 10 days would require 260,000 geovacs per year. At an estimated cost of $5000 each, this is $1.3 billion/yr. or around 11% of the cost of the installed plastic. An additional $0.7 billion per each year of 67,000 sq. mi. installed plastic will cover the cost of the operation and maintenance of the geovacs. Note that it is unlikely that the geovacs will have to operate continuously or over the entire area of coverage. These estimates address the worst case.

 

The total annual cost in dollars of plastic, installation, monitoring and maintenance can be estimated as follows:

 

Cost/sq.mi Cost/yr (67,000 sq. mi.)

Plastic 140,000 9,400,000,000

Installation 35,000 2,300,000,000

Monitoring 8,750 586,000,000

Maintenance 30,000 2,000,000,000

Total 214,000 14,286,000,000

 

The total of around $14 billion represents the cost of installation, monitoring and maintenance for the first year for a 67,000 sq. mi. covered area. Annual costs thereafter will just include some of the monitoring and maintenance costs, since some of these shown above are due to capital expenditures. The recurring costs due to labor associated with maintenance and monitoring are estimated to be around $1 billion/yr. per 67,000 sq. miles covered. In addition, the plastic cover may have to be completely replaced every 10 years and the geovacs and monitors every 30.