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Power Plant Fueled By Nut Shells
sbszine writes "The Sydney Morning Herald is running an article about a green power plant that runs on the discarded shells of macadamia nuts. The power plant, located in Gympie, Queensland, is expected to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by around 9500 tonnes in its first year of operation."
It's a trick. It reduces 'potential emissions'.
It's like when I break into your house and leave gifts. I could have robbed you blind. Aren't you glad I'm such a nice guy?
How much energy goes into getting the nuts out of the shells in the first place? I remember going to a macadamia nut farm in Hawaii once. They had a prize of a lifetime supply of macadamias if you could get a nut out of a shell without using a saw. I tried smashing it with a rock with no luck. Apparently, no one had ever collected the prize.
I'd like to know too.
This article is entirely too vague... frustratingly vague.
The first thing I thought was that they would burn the shells. But, how would that help? You're still putting CO2 into the atmosphere. Maybe the macadamia nuts burn clean?
those same nuts needed the co2 when growing.
so there's no 'extra' co2 introduced from millions of years back like when you burn oil/coal.
so it does reduce the total amount of co2 coming to the atmosphere, provided that somebody plants some more of those nuts(and doesn't chop some rainforest/something else that binds huge amounts of it to plant those nuts for few seasons and then chop more of rainforest).
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
The Macadamia nut power idea is cute, but I assume (missed it in the article) that they are just using the local excess biomass. Must be a big Macadamia industry nearby.
how would you transmit the power back to earth? Pay to have batteries shipped over? Or maybe invent that wireless power supply that i've been hankering for all these years?
Wrong wrong wrong. A nut grows in a single season. The carbon in the nut can only come from CO2 in the atmosphere. Therefore burning nuts is carbon neutral over a single nut-growing season.
Similarly, I fail to follow your example of a plant in a box. OK, while the seeds are actually aflame CO2 will be produced faster than it's being absorbed. But overall, the amount of carbon in the system is constant: anything which is not in the plant is in the atmosphere. Therefore so long as you burn the plant no more quickly than it grows, you'll never end up with a higher CO2 concentration than when you started.
Your argument only applies if you start burning something which has been growing for decades -- eg old-growth forest -- in which case you're releasing CO2 that took decades to remove from the atmosphere. But so long as you burn material grown only over, say, the last year -- eg fast-growing bamboo -- then the net amount of CO2 released into the atmosphere over that year must be zero.
The author of this post asserts his moral rights.
It could be relative to conventional power generation, or it could be "greener" since the waste doesn't need to be dumped, which will probably result in it (1) decomposing, (2) creating more greenhouse gases and (3) not being very productive as opposed to being fuel for power generation.
--- root@127.0.0.1
It doesn't matter if you put CO2 into the atmosphere with this process because it's the same CO2 the plant fixed from the atmosphere while it was growing. The net effect of the grow/burn cycle is zero, from our point of view.
Contrast with Oil and Coal where you're putting CO2 into the atmosphere that was fixed out millenia ago.
The real problem is that fossile fuels are very cheap compared to non-fossile fuels, such as solar, wind, and hydro energy. Although these are free, large installations are needed to harvest them. And to construct those installation you need energy. And most of the time this energy comes from fossile fuels. These kind of installations are often more like batteries than like clean sources of energy, because often it cost more energy to produce them than that they will produce during their lifetimes, otherwise alternative sources of energy would have been cheaper than fossile energies.
There is no unsolvable problems putting the solar panels up there, the issue is how to route the power cable back to earth.
I think the point is that it has been built by a company that processes macadamia nuts. So they were producing the shells anyway. Now they are using the shells to power their plant and also to export power to the national grid. Seems very cool to me.
Reality is defined by the maddest person in the room
The main advantage in this case is that they were already growing the macadamia nuts in the area, and they were already shelling them. The shells were then, previously, just being discarded. Because the "fuel" for this power plant was previously considered "waste", the result is much more efficient economically then a lot of things.
Think of it like this:
macadamia = shell + nut
Old equasion:
profit = sale of nut - disposal of shell
New equasion:
profit = sale of nut + electricity generation from shell
This, of course, assumes that the electricity produced from the shells can be sold at a profit that is greater than the cost of disposing of the nuts. From everything I've heard here, the power plant is relatively inexpensive to construct ($3 million), as such, the cost of electricity generation probably won't be that great. However, we'd need more data to say that for sure.
As an added bonus, the CO2 output is neutral over a single year. Ie: shell takes 1 year's worth of CO2 in as it grows, we then burn it, and 1 years worth of CO2 is released. Comparatively, coal takes in X number of years (thousands of years ago), we burn it, and it releases it into the atmosphere now, resulting in a gain in CO2 in the atmosphere.
Keep in mind that this means we won't be powering the entire country with macadamia nut shells. This plant only powers 1200 homes. The brilliant aspect of this is that its powered off of waste that was already present in the region. This would be similar to a facility that produces corn creating a power plant next to it that is fueled by corn husks and the unedible parts of the corn. Its simply just a comparative advantage. Its fuel that you have here and now, so there are little to no transportation costs. Even if another biomass is more efficient, you'd have to transport it to the generation facility, decreasing its overall efficiency.
Ideally, for something like this, you'd build lots of smaller facilities, wherever burnable bio-waste is produced. 1200 homes here, 1200 homes there, mix it with some solar and wind generation, and other alternative energies, and eventually the fossil fuel habit might be kicked.
In fact, why aren't we trying to replace 3rd world drug crops with biomass fuel crops? Support poor farmers, reduce dependence on imported oil, benefit the population as a whole rather than the drug cartels and the oil company executives...oops, there went the economies of Florida and Texas. Why don't I think it's going to happen? Because biomass is good for the public, but it's bad for the bushes.
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
But when I have to choose from nut shells or coal, the choice is easy but in fact there's a lot more options to choose from and ignoring them - is utterly stupid.
0x or or snor perron?!
Oh come on!
The article (you've read it, right?) was about burning macadamia nut shells. Which means "waste" used for CO2 neutral energy production.
What's wrong about that?
Bye egghat.
-- "As a human being I claim the right to be widely inconsistent", John Peel
I think you're missing a fairly big hole in your arguement. Burning the nut shells will release C into the atmosphere, so will the rotting process. However burning the shells will mean that you will need to burn less oil and coal (C removed a very long time ago when there was a greenhouse effect in place due to the high levels of CO2 in the atmosphere) so you are reducing the overall amount of C released by putting the inevitable release of C due to the nut shells to use and reducing or eliminating the need to burn oil and coal.
If we assume that qualtity of C released from the nut shells (N) is the same for both burning and rotting, that the quantity of C removed from the atmosphere growing the nuts (P) is costant in both cases (we are talking about using a waste product of an existing industry here, not about growing the nuts as a fuel source) and the the burning of the nuts will provide the same energy as burning oil and coal that would release a quantity of C we label F then the quantity of C released to the atmosphere (A) will be for each scenario):
Rotting: A=(N+F)-P
Burning: A=N-P
Stephen
"Don't write down to your readers, the only people less intelligent than you can't read" - Sign on Newspaper Office Wall
But I now know several people with fatal allergies to tree nuts. So I wonder - what is the effect on any allergic people nearby of vaporizing nut shells and injecting the vapor into the atmosphere?
sPh