Squeezing Coal To Reduce Emissions

sbszine writes "Australian newspaper The Age has an interesting story on squeezing coal before burning it in order to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The process, discovered by Victorian scientists, is expected to make brown coal (lignite) burn 30% cleaner. Good news, as Australia is the world's number one exporter of coal."

Comments

Question

[jarran]

Who, exactly is touting this as good? If you believe in man made climate change, 30% less damaging than coal just isn't good enough. We need to be moving away from fossil fuels, not finding marginally less damaging ways to burn them.

And if you don't believe in mad made climate change, why bother? It's going to be less efficient, and therefore will create even more nasty emissions other than CO2, which isn't the only pollutant released by coal burning.

(No, I haven't RTFA, as it requires registration.)

Re:Question

[scorp1us]

I completely agree with you.

Why is ti so hard to make artificial plants, and not the plastic kind?

A plant consumes CO2, produces O2 and converts sunlight to energy. Why can't we do all that, but change the chemical to eletrical energy?

That way the moer enery we make, the more we clean out the greenhouse gasses. And I'm sure we could scale it down to household size and let the general public both supplement their power usage and help clean the atmosphere at the same time.

Seems like a win-win to me.

Re:It makes perfect sense...

[GigsVT]

Burning stuff doesn't usually produce nasty stuff... as long as your burn it completely. Most of the problems result when you burn something and it doesn't burn well. Partial combustion is a big cause of a lot of emissions.

Re:stop-gap

[be951]

And the only choice which is ready *today* is nuclear...

The only barrier to more widespread adoption of solar is the cost.

But if we go full-speed immediately to develop enough nuclear capacity to COMPLETELY eliminate our dependence on petro sources which are actually or potentially volatile or unreliable -- e.g., the Middle East...

I doubt it would help much, because we don't use a lot of oil (relatively speaking) for electic generation. Coal is the big player there. Most of our oil consumption is for transportation -- something for which both nuclear and solar are poorly suited.

the fact is, the fanatical Islamics wouldn't care enough to leave their region to bother us, if we were COMPLETELY disengaged from their part of the world -- which we COULD be, if not for our petro-addiction.

I could be mistaken, but I thought the big issue most Islamic extremists hate us for (or at least cite most often) is our support of Isreal.

Look at the energy balance

[Engineer-Poet]

Removing the moisture from lignite removes a lot of inert (non-combustible) material from the fuel. This is matter that you'd have to heat up in the process of combustion, reducing your gas temperature and cutting the amount of heat you can recover from the gas (you can't get useful energy from condensing the water, it condenses at a far lower temperature than you need to generate steam).

This doesn't reduce the carbon emissions per unit of carbon, but it does increase the recoverable energy per unit of carbon. Greater efficiency means less fuel has to be burned for a given amount of output. This reduces net CO2 emissions.

Re:Look at the energy balance

[Marxist Hacker 42]

What if instead we ground it up, heated it to 101C, cooled it down, then fed the powder to the furnace- wouldn't the extra surface area both enable more mostiure to leave AND insure a more complete burn?

Re:Look at the energy balance

[GodsMadClown]

Grind the coal up? Been there, done that...

I used to be a lab monkey at a coal-fired power plant in Baltimore.

They pulverized the coal before feeding the furnace, both for ease of handling and for more complete combustion. We used to run tests on the lubrication of the pulverizer units. You think the oil in your '88 Olds gets dirty? Try using it to lubiricate a coal pulverizer.