Slashdot Mirror
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."
Paul Lenhart writes words!
I know Slashdot posts the occasional late story, but this is over 100 years old... that must be a record.
Squeezing can only hold back your emissions for so long.
Anthracite, the cleanest-burning coal, is also called hard coal because it's the densest variety and it contains the least moisture. Lignite, the type they squeezed, is the crappiest kind of coal. It is almost half water and is quite light. How many brilliant people did it take to think "maybe if we make lignite denser and take the water out, it'll burn more cleanly!"???
ResidntGeek
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.)
...is how much energy does it take to squeeze the coal? Because if they end up having to burn 30% more coal to generate the additional energy needed to squeeze the coal, then it's not much of a gain.
Clean coal? Squeeze it, say scientists4 76492485.html 5 57913536.html
http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2004/08/03/1091
Burning coal into the future
http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2004/08/04/1091
Words to men, as air to birds.
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.
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.
Sustainability and energy independence essay
The entire process as a whole needs to be taken into account to determine whether a energy source is clean and or effecient. How much energy does it require to obtain it, refine it, ship it can be just as important as how clean it is when you burn it. Damn straight hydrogen is clean when you burn it. But how much crap did you dump into the atmosphere when you processed it?
brrrrrrrrrppp 'Ey Homer...Why don't girls like me?
Why you don't want to heat the coal: The goal of the exercise is to not waste the energy required to evaporate the moisture. If pressing removes water with less energy expenditure than heating, that's a more efficient way to do it. (If the coal can be dried with the heat from nearly-spent steam, maybe that's better - but it would take lab work to tell which method is superior, and plenty of engineering to make a machine which can uniformly heat a fine powder and then transfer it to the boiler.)
Sustainability and energy independence essay