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
...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.
Because we're not going to replace our power infrastructure overnight. Unfortunately we're doing very little to move off of fossil fuels at all. But even when we get off the mark, it's going to be a lengthy process, not an overnight conversion. Cleaning up legacy powerplants is a good thing, even if it isn't the final goal.
I wonder how much it would cost to migrate off of fossil fuels. Last year we spend $8.5e9 on the Iraq war, during a relatively slack economy with a huge deficit, and barely batted an eyelash. (and the job/cost isn't done, yet.) I doubt that amount of money would do the job, but it would sure make a dent in it, or at least in moving off of mideast oil and cleaning things up.
This needs to be a National Priority. If not for the cleanup, at least moving enough off of mideast oil to reduce/eliminate our dependence. The other night, NPR/Marketplace had an article on the stability of regional players. Our addiction to fossil fuels (gasoline in particular) has blinded us to the risks of our dependence on mideast sources.
(I saw a link that let my bypass registration, though it informed me that, "I need to register soon.")
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
First, you don't need to believe in man made climate change to consider less pollution "good". Also, I agree that we should be moving to non-polluting (or as nearly as possible) energy sources, but that isn't going to happen until clean energy sources are reasonably cost competitive on a scale that allows similar capacity. So realistically the two options are: keep burning coal the old way until alternatives are adopted; or burn significantly cleaner until alternatives are adopted.
My favorite quote of all time comes from the economist, "the entire western economy is a call option on the house of Saud." If that isn't a scary thought I don't know what is. There was an excellent article on Slate the other day that put this same idea in quite a few more words (summary that Osama wants the oil under Saudi Arabia and Iraq, and the regime we have been supporting for the better part of 50 years is currently tottering).
Unfortunately I know of nothing with the energy density of fossil fuels. Find something that approaches the production cost and energy density of fossil fuels and you will be richer than Bill Gates.
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
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