Two years ago Bruce Marshall was kicked back on his couch with his feet on the coffee table watching a National Geographic show, when he came up with what he thinks is the solution to the world's energy crisis.

"In seconds it was like one of those V-8 commercials where it smacks you in the forehead," said the Santa Paula resident.

The TV show talked about hydrothermal vents, the smoke stack-like features on the ocean floor where water that is superheated in the earth's crust spews from chimneys that sit near tectonic plate edges.

His first thought was that it was a shame they couldn't capture all that energy. The second was: "Why not?"

Before long, he invented the Marshall Hydrothermal Recovery System, a relatively simple concept on how to capture the energy that he believes is many times stronger than nuclear energy and could power the world in a completely clean and renewable way. He has shopped his patented idea around, and several energy and mechanical engineering professors have said the theory is feasible.

A challenge but possible

John Bowers, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at UC Santa Barbara, said there are obstacles to Marshall's proposal, such as the corrosive gasses and the challenge of operating in the deep seas. But it doesn't mean it's not possible.

"It is certainly a major engineering challenge, but not a physical impossibility," he said.

A major oil company has flown Marshall to Texas to explore the concept.

"There is nothing to stop it from being done, it's just a matter of people wanting to make it happen," said Marshall, 57. "It's a matter of vision, and in a lot of cases some people don't have the vision to be able to appreciate what this means."

Marshall realizes he might seem like an unlikely candidate to come up with such a big idea. He's a former television repair person with a degree in psychology and a few classes in engineering. But he's a man who is intently focused and talks passionately about his concept with a voice that's worn rough by cigarettes.

The greatest ideas in the world are often the simplest ones, he said, and this is both simple and great.

Technology exists

His plan marries existing technology used in offshore oil drilling and geothermal energy recovery.

A massive cone is used to cap the vents, where a mineral-rich stew spews forth at more than 700 degrees. That liquid is transported through pipes to the surface, where the heat is turned into energy using existing geothermal technology. Valuable minerals in the liquid could be extracted and mined, and the steam produced during the process could be turned into fresh water in an inexpensive desalinization process.

A second option, Marshall said, is a closed system, where a pipe passes over the vent, heating the interior liquid but keeping the vent flow out of the pipe.

After mulling over the idea for about a year, Marshall drew up plans and took out a patent last year — the first to propose how to make energy from the vents, he said.

Over the past two years, he's been working on getting his idea to the right people. He's spent hours and more than $25,000 coming up with a Web site, hiring an animator to help make a video about the project and going to energy conferences to shop the idea around. From his home computer at the foot of his bed, he built a computer program to run the numbers on how much energy could be gained from using a pipe 10 feet in diameter.

He said just one vent could produce more than four times as much energy as a nuclear reactor.

He thought some of the big oil companies would be interested in the idea, so he sent an e-mail to one of the biggest ones around. He shared the e-mails with The Star but didn't want the company named.

The e-mail worked.

Oil company looks, balks

A few weeks later he got a response from the company, saying it wanted to discuss the idea with him in Texas. He and his wife flew down for a few days and met with some development scientists, who decided to spend $10,000 on computer modeling, then another $10,000 for further testing, he said.

Modeling showed that a 12-inch pipe could yield 83 megawatts of power — and Marshall is proposing using pipes that are 10 times that big.

Ultimately, the company told him the minerals coming from the flumes would clog the pipes, and it abandoned the idea, but Marshall thinks that's a minor obstacle. Not only would the closed system get around that problem, but he also thinks that by injecting bubbles into the pipe, the solids would be carried away in the open-pipe method.

Others who have looked at the idea also said it has promise.

Jake Ward, an editor at the magazine Popular Science, has looked over Marshall's plan and said the idea has potential.

Aravinda Kar, a professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Central Florida, agrees, saying the principles of the idea are solid. He said it would just take someone with the willingness to sink the millions into the project to make it work.

"It's similar to nuclear power, which is power that is good and doesn't cause pollution, but gas is so cheap that nobody wants to invest in that area," he said "It's the economics. The engineering problems are there, but those can be solved."

Mike Kelly, an adjunct professor at the University of Missouri, Kansas City, who teaches transmission theory, saw Marshall's idea on an energy chat room.

"I think it's a revolutionary application, absolutely," he said. "It's definitely a worthwhile venture."

Heavy load on the grid

The biggest obstacle Kelly sees is putting that much power into the grid. Most power systems couldn't handle having so much energy thrust into them, and new infrastructure would have to be designed to handle such a heavy load.

But if the biggest problem is that there is too much energy, that's not only a relatively easy fix, but a worthy one, Marshall said.

He knows if someone develops his idea, he stands to make many millions of dollars. But he also hopes that it can better the world.

"I would really like to see that I've made a difference and me being on this planet will make a difference for people for the next 100 years," he said.

Now someone just needs to see how big this is, he said.

"I'm a little guy in a little town with a great big idea," he said. "I feel like I'm sitting on a keg of dynamite."

On the Net: http://www.marshallsystem.com.