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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."
...sometimes a volt.
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DRM is like antifreeze, to the MPAA/RIAA it's sweet, to the consumers it's poison.
My guess is that they would burn the shells of these nuts, right? This produces carbondioxide, so how does this reduce CO2?
The power plant, located in Gympie, Queensland, is expected to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by around 9500 tonnes in its first year of operation.
In an unrelated story, macadamia nut consumption is up 10,000%
...after trying to harness the power of looney, wacky, zany, or crazy, they succeeded only in making use of nutty power.
"Why Subscribe?" Good question...
we could develop a plant that converted empty XXXX (local QLD beer) cans into usable power. Now that'd be something! Well, it'd ease my concience anyway...
Nutshell Power in a Nutshell.
I'm guessing it'd have a monkey on the cover. Or perhaps, sticking with the power plant theme, a picture of Homer Simpson eating nuts.
I know I'd pay good money for that book.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
yes, this assumes that the grid is not already running at close to capacity. . . As we know, it is pretty rare to start up another power plant if there is no need for it. . . ;)
So the "savings" is kind of like the recording industry's / BSA's claims of "losses", a great way to get rid of nuts though. Has anyone seen "Equilibrium" by the way?
Granted, it beats burning coal or the many other alternatives, but I suppose gold plating it makes the 3 mill a lot easier to swallow.
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Unlike the thousands of tonnes of domestic rubbish we throw into huge steaming pits every day.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
It would be nice to know what the cost efficiency of this plant is... seeing as how this has always been the big problem with "green" power.
Also, is there any inherent advantage to using macadamia nuts rather than some other biomass?
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.
How did they get the technology to split the nut?
Watch this process turn your garbage into oil.
vampirical
Nearly thirty posts and no Simpsons joke yet? You guys are slipping.
... macamadamia nuts
Mmm
Of course, natural decay of the shells would release the CO2 in any case.
Who would believe in penguins,unless he had seen them? Conor O Brien - Across Three Oceans
My understanding is they had an existing facility that shells and cans macadamia nuts, and previously the shells were just being discarded as waste product. Someone had the bright idea to use the waste shells as fuel for a power plant. Basically, they just turned an expense (waste disposal) into a profit (electricity generation). And the facility only cost $3 million to create. All in all, I think this was an absolutely brilliant move.
This is the scene. I'm a young boy, 8 years old, in Dar-es-Salaam, capital of Tanzania. On the horizon sits a squat building with a tall tower, belching some kind of gray-white smoke.
"Mummy, what's that?"
"It's a power plant, Heirony"
"What does it burn, Mummy?"
"Caschew nut fruits, Heirony"
The caschew nut grows as a small nut on a huge fruit which is rich and oily. For each of those tiny caschew nuts, a fruit weighing perhaps 500gr is grown, harvested, and then discarded.
In Tanzania in 1970, and probably still today, these fruits were dried and then burnt for power. Glad to see that some third-world technology had finally made it to the rich west.
Ceci n'est pas une signature
So, in a Nut shell, there's a lot of energy.
There are two kinds of people in the world: Those with good memory.
All this makes more sense than GWB's hydrogen economy, which needs electricity to make the hydrogen. As electricity generation is about 30% efficient, there's not much point in using biomass to produce hydrogen for fuel cells - you might as well stick biodiesel straight in the car.
When I am king, you will be first against the wall.
Not true. Extreme heat destroys dioxins. They are often created by partial combustion {think bonfire}. What is basically going on in a fire is two processes. Pyrolysis is the fuel being decomposed into simpler chemicals, almost always incomplete fragments {sometimes even individual atoms} which will bond with whatever is nearest to hand {strictly speaking, nearest to valence electron?} as soon as they cool down enough. Pyrolysis consumes energy in breaking chemical bonds. Oxidation is the simpler chemicals reacting with oxygen. This gives out energy. Oxygen is chemically very horny and also will try very hard to avoid having to share with anything else. The pyrolysis products undergo some further decomposition as the oxygen atoms each try to grab something for themselves. Since the oxidation puts out more energy than the pyrolysis required, the fire stays alight. But you have to put some energy in {typically from a match} to start the pyrolysis, otherwise you would get spontaneous combustion.
Now, in a bonfire or badly-designed furnace, the pyrolysis products cool and recombine into literally goodness-knows-what and escape before they get a chance to combine with oxygen. This is where incineration can fail. Large lumps of fuel, and mixed fuels, all exacerbate the problems.
In a well-designed furnace, the fuel is finely-divided and the air supply forced {an unattended fire will tend to produce only as much energy as it needs to stay alight; this may mean partial combustion with great quantities of chemicals being released. A fan requires energy, but MOTN the energy gain from fetter combustion is greater than the consumption of the motor}. If the fuel is very heterogeneous, the pyrolysis phase of the reaction can be completed separately in by heating the fuel in an airless chamber {consuming energy} and the pyrolysis products burned later {releasing more energy than it took to do the pyrolysis}. By adjusting the temperature and pressure you can select whether the intermediate product is a gas, a light liquid like petrol or a heavy liquid like diesel fuel. This has the advantage that you know how long is the longest carbon chain in the fuel for the next stage, and there is no way that the products can contain sny longer carbon chains. The disadvantage is that it distributes the high-temperature processes, thereby creating more opportunities for heat leakage.
As for the "plastics" argument, it's a red herring. Upstream segregation could be used to separate plastic from the waste being used for energy recovery, if you were really concerned. But I can't see how it would not be better to extract energy from plastic that has already been used for something, than to use up energy burying that plastic in landfill and digging up more fossil fuel just to burn for energy. Over time, as fossil fuels became more expensive, plastics would begin to be made from plants anyway. Not to mention that lanfills also produce dioxins, albeit more slowly, and organic matter in landfill decays to CH4, which, molecule-for-molecule, is a better heat trap than CO2. The real problem is ignorance of the First Law of Thermodynamics. We've already had people bitching about CO2 emissions like they don't know where the carbon in a plant comes from, and if people can't appreciate the First Law as it applies to the tangible form of matter, how can we suppose they can appreciate it as applied to energy?
Of course, I'm with you about reduction. My ex's daughter was raised in reusable cotton nappies, so will be my niece at least while she is stopping with me. I avoid single-serving packs whenever possible. I wipe my nose on yesterday's T-shirt, and I put my sandwiches straight in my lunchbox without using a polybag {in the absence of a satisfactory explanation as to how wrapping food in plastic saves me from risking cancer by letting it touch plastic}. I don't use sanitary towels either, but only for The Reason That Does Not Count.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!