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East Texas Getting Compressed Air Energy Storage Plant
First time accepted submitter transporter_ii writes "A compressed air energy storage (CAES) plant was first built in Germany in 1978, but East Texas will be the site of one of the world's first modern CAES plants. How does it work? A CAES power generation facility uses electric motor-driven compressors (generated by natural gas generators) to inject air into an underground storage cavern and later releases the compressed air to turn turbines and generate electricity back onto the grid, according to the plants owner. The location near Palestine, Texas was selected because of its large salt dome, which will be used to store the compressed air. The plant is estimated to cost $350 million-plus, and will create about 20 to 25 permanent jobs."
Anybody knows how efficient is that? As compared with storage in water reservoirs for example?
Rome taught me patience and assiduous application to detail. Virtues which temper the boldness of great, general views.
Sounds like a lot of hot air.
It's bad for crab people, but I don't think they'll be able to use this one. The whole environmentalist movement was conceived by the underground crab people as a way to destroy humanity's industrial capabilities and thereby facilitate the crab people's takeover of the surface world. So, ironically, the environmentalists can't bring up the thread to subterranean crab people as this would mean admitting to existence of the conspiracy.
When your compress air it heats up, increasing the pressure and making it harder to compress more air.
After it's been in the ground for a while it cools back down to ambient temperatures.
Then when you're extracting it the air is expanding which makes it cool down and reduces the pressure, therefore reducing the practical energy you can get out of it.
This is basic stuff you learn in Chemistry I.
Square feet?
Cubic yards?
Kilowatt-hours?
Bottles of Lone Star BBQ Sauce?
Ping-pong balls?
Dollars?
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Likely not...earth is not a really good conductor of heat and the air temperature in caves tends to vary only slightly over the year.
More importantly, I don't get why anyone would advertise that 350M is being spent to create 20 "permanent" positions. That's 17.5M per fulltime job!
Every expression is true, for a given value of 'true'
This is located 30-50 meters or more in the ground. Season do not impact that low. However, what does is that compression heats the air, while the ground will take it from it. That is where you lose your efficiency.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
This sounds like an interesting energy storage system. Storage is exactly what is needed to make solar energy generation practical for use when the sun is not shining at night. That idea gets me excited.
Generating the energy to fill the storage with compressed air by burning Natural Gas (NG) seems stupid to me. It is more efficient to just leave the energy stored as NG. Converting that to compressed air and then again to electricity adds a middle step that adds inefficiency.
CASE = CAES Acronym Spelling Error
It's not a job creation scheme, it's supposed to make money for some power company. The jobs are being mentioned to make the locals feel better about having this thing nearby.
"It would make more sense to me to store energy from the many Wind Farms, which are horribly inefficient (and costly) in a grid system."
I agree. Up here in the Northwest, we have a ton of wind farms that are intentionally idled when our Cascades reservoirs are full and they have to dump water--they don't want to waste the energy stored in the form of water but are perfectly willing to power-down huge wind farms that are producing electricity at the same time. This technology would solve that problem for both hydroelectric and wind farms--they could both use this storage technology provided it was centrally located and both had access to it.
It's all about the money and hamstringing the new guy on the block, so I assume that is the reason natural gas is the selected means of generation. Now all I have to wonder about is whether or not the folks doing this also patented the technology. If they did, that does not bode well for the alternative energy market as this technology would solve most of their problems, provided it could be reproduced on a large scale and not just where salt domes exist. For those of you that don't know, Texass is littered with salt domes that have already been pumped dry--they once held oil. Never thought I'd see the day when they started pumping money back down those holes.
or the most unique way to asplode a salt dome yet invented
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I hope, at least, that using CAES is more efficient than just burning the natgas and twirling the turbines with that. (I doubt that but I'm no energy expert.)
It can be more efficient if wasted power generated is less, because power demand is highly variable. Burning straight up natgas may lead to waste, if not all the power generated is required. With CAES, all the output can be stored until needed, as long as there are no "leaks" in the underground cavern, and the rate of pressure loss isn't too high.
With CAES, the power generation output can possibly be more easily reduced, during off-peak hours, to match the demand, with less loss in efficiency, and without having to shutdown/fire up a certain number of natgas generators based on demand.
What is the advantage?
It is to store the power: currently, there are no batteries capable of doing that. A major problem with the power generated from solar panels and any kind of turbine (wind, for example) is that it will be lost if you don't use it on the same turn.
I am not sure if that's what you asked, because your point may also be "why they are burning the natural gas to run this power storage facility, since power is already stored in the gas and they can burn it when they need it". In that case, it could be a matter of money: the gas is available now, and it is cheap. So maybe they want to store that energy as fast and cheap as possible, and sell it as pricey as possible later. I don't know.
The three laws of thermodynamics:(1) You can't win. (2) You can't break even. (3) You can't even quit.
I'm thinking if this system accidentally vents, it'll be the biggest fart in history.
Wait till some PHB builds a system like this in coal fire country. Centralia PA.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
It's not (really) about the jobs. It's about spending public money to make some wealthy people that much wealthier. Yes, I said public money. If history is any indicator (an it usually is) the expense of providing the additional municipal services this project will require will fall to the taxpayers and not to the plant owners. In fact, those owners will probably get a tax break for creating all those jobs. You don't really buy all that bullshit about the payback from giving government handouts to "job creators", do you?
I did some looking around at this about a year ago and it turns out that the compressed air expands and therefore cools so much that unless you preheat it everything will ice up. In fact the recovery unit is typically a NG turbine. Exhaust heat from the turbine preheats the compressed air which is then mixed with NG and fed into the turbine to get boosted combustion. Much more efficient than compressed air alone.
uh oh, somebody's being case sensitive
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
This isn't a government make-work program. It's a project intended to serve an actual purpose, with the creation of permanent jobs as a nice side effect. The 'goodness' and cost-effectiveness of the job will be whether it reduces the ratepayer's bills, and/or increases utility profits (not sure of the regulatory structure out there), and/or increases the reliability of the grid.
If it could do those things and employ zero people, it would still be a good expenditure.
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
Dividing the cost of the construction by the number of employees doesn't give you the cost of the jobs. Or any meaningful information, for that matter.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
I just want to add something that might be escaping some people.
Most natural gas generators on the scale of a public utility use a turbine engine which means that it's efficiency concerning getting work from the fuel used is pretty much in a narrow spot close to peak production. If you wind it down to generate less electricity it becomes less efficient and degrades the engine components faster so it's avoided. If you keep it in it's peak range but turn the generation down, you are being almost as wasteful as if the machine was producing full bore all the time whether it was needed or not.
This is even true for traditional internal combustion engines like in your car or motorcycles where it is geared so that your cruising range is between a certain RPM in order to take advantage of it. Outside that range is a little less efficient but isn't as pronounced as it is when you are dealing with an engine producing thousands of horsepower to drive gigantic generators.
What this compressed air storage does is allow the generation to be controlled by something that can be turned up or down easily as demand increases or decreases (compresses air) and the natural gas portion of it operates in the peak efficiency range of converting fuel to useful work when it is running.
how much of this translates into savings or overall efficiency improvements is something I don't know, But it seems to be enough (on paper at least) to throw millions of dollars at.
It makes no sense. Natural gas turbines are dirt cheap compared to other forms of power generation and natural gas is way too expensive to waste on compressing air. Gas turbines are also quite small, the world's largest turbine seems to be 340MW. Since they start up and shut down rapidly (tens of minutes), they are easy to regulate: you just turn the off when they aren't needed.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
The advantage to CAES energy storage seems to be in allowing the energy producer to maintain a lower peak capacity. During times of low demand he produces a surplus of energy, some portion of is stored as compressed air. During times of high demand this stored energy is released and used to augment what his production apparatus can natively provide.
That's all well and good. What confuses me is that this thing in Texas is going to be powered by natural gas. I had thought one of the main advantage of natural gas for electricity product was its ability to power gas turbines, which can be "spun up" (or down) fairly quickly in order to satisfy periods of high demand. How does natural gas powered CAES storage compare to simply having a larger installation of gas turbines, some portion of which will only be selectively spun up during peak demand?
The bit about natural gas in the submission is simply wrong. There happens to be a natural gas power plant somewhere nearby, but the two facilities have nothing in common. It is unlikely that the storage facility will be storing power while the natural gas power plant is providing it.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
Oh, uninformed twats all up in this thread; surprise, surprise.... (chiefly referring to submitter and GP)
First some links (as opposed to URLs as text -- this is 2012, learn HTML or GTFO):
EPA application you didn't link. A good read that should have been in TFS.
The company building it.
The gear to be used.
Okay, the submitter clearly got confused, but I think differently. Possibly from this sentence of the EPA application:
A natural gas fired reciprocating engine will power an emergency electric generator rated at 740 ekW, necessary to support starting the plant when power from the grid is unavailable (“black start”).
The other possibility is because it's a natgas-fueled hybrid CAES rig, which concept is apparently very difficult for a certain class of mushbrain to grasp.
This plant uses only electricity from the grid to compress air. Could well be from natgas (which is damn cheap these days, and less CO2 than oil or coal), but if so it'll probably be a modern combined-cycle plant with high efficiency. Could also be nuclear, hydro, wind, or coal.
It DOES, however, use natgas to run -- rather than simply blowing compressed air down to atmospheric in a turbine, they use the stored compressed air in a Brayton cycle. A conventional gas turbine exhibits low load range (typically can't run less than 50% of maximum power), because the compressor is designed for specific conditions; throttle it back, and you lose efficiency rapidly, and eventually it stops working completely.. With a hybrid CAES plant, though, the gas is pre-compressed, so you just add heat (burn natgas) and expand w/ reheat. This allows scaling to very low power output. (In this particular case, the very high storage pressure (1900~2830 psi) actually means they can put another turbine before combustion, blowing the air down to around 800 psi.)
Best i can tell is that they buy electricity during non-peak, and use that to compress the air so that it can be released against to drive the turbines during peak. Almost as if they are acting as electricity speculators (buy low, sell high).
More like cross-border arbitrage than speculation IMO; even though peak and off-peak pricing aren't set simultaneously, they both usually move slowly compared to the diurnal alternation of the two. So to me, rather than considering it a single market with wild periodic swings, it's useful to treat it as 2 (or many) concurrent markets, of which you can only trade in one at any given time.
It's not a job creation scheme, it's supposed to make money for some power company. The jobs are being mentioned to make the locals feel better about having this thing nearby.
Yeah, because what could possibly go wrong with a bunch of high-pressure air pumped into an underground cavern?
Think of the jobs... Forget Lake Peigneur.
East Texas: infinite demand for cool air 9 months of the year.
Not really speculators. Electric utilities have several rates it costs them for the power they generate or obtain and sell to the consumer. They are classified as base, peak, and overages of either.
They determine their base usage which can be done relatively easily and purchase or generate that much plus 10 or 15 % (I forget what the demand surplus by law was last time I checked but this is needed at all times to avoid brownouts and so on). They only purchase or produce enough energy to supply this needed amount the majority of the time. Excess energy is either sold to other utilities or not purchased. This is the cheapest rate by far because it can be purchased by long term contracts and the generation facility can be running at max performance at all times.
The next rate is the peak usages which is similar to the base but only applies during the peak times electricity will be used. It's a bit more expensive because peak times are generally within hours of each other all across the nation. This means that an electric producer somewhere has to have generating capacity on standby for these times and not in use for others. Of course if you have generating capacity and the investment needed to procure it, maintain it, and transmit it, you would do it all the time to get the benefits of economic of scale (producing 1000 units for sale with the same devices instead of 100 units). But because this is only needed for a relatively short period of time, the generation costs lost by not being needed the other times is recaptured in the increased pricing for the peak costs. This is also subject to long term planning so long term contracts can secure cheaper prices then the third type of energy, the overage type.
The overage type of energy a utility needs to purchase is all amounts of energy in excess of the base or peak estimates not covered by an existing contract and is purchased as needed when needed. This is the most expensive because someone has invested in a generation facility that doesn't make much money unless utilities plan poorly or something happens outside their control or expectations. This down time is also recaptured in the pricing. An example of when this is needed is when there is a heat wave and not only is everyone running their Air conditioners set on max, but they are turning on fans and everything else they can think of to keep cool. Perhaps a sale on plug in electric cars added to the load for a specific utility in a short period of time on top of that and everyone plugs in when they get home from their 9-5 job. Or there is a rash of burglaries and everyone is increasing their outside lighting and leaving more lights on at night in order to avoid being a victim. Whether the utility is on base or peak at the time, the amount of excess or overage capacity that needs to be available is purchased as needed and at the highest prices they have to pay for electricity to sell to their consumers.
All that is figured into your rates when you get a bill and isn't really obvious. The term overage might be the wrong term to use (I'm thinking it might be something else but am too lazy to look it up). Some utilities separate peak rates from base rates and charge more for peak to give you an option of trimming your usage during the peak. But buying on base rates and reselling on peak or even overage rates is sort of how the entire electrical utility industry operates except energy storage techniques haven't traditionally made it practical. It is the same concept except that the source fuel is separate by a conversion factor (natural gas or coal converted to electricity to be stored as compressed air to be converted back to electricity) instead of being converted to electricity only once.
This type of pricing to the utility is also something that makes the usage of solar and wind power difficult to use. Maybe if this project proves useful and profitable, alternative energy could use compressed air storage to store it's production and sell in the same ways to get around the problems of compet
Iknowrite?
For a second there, I thought they had a winner, after all, they have a large amount of compressed gas already milking idiotic patents in the region... Storing the energy from all the East Texas patent lawyers might prove a great way to harvest alternative energy sources and reduce corporate trolldom!
Sadly, I fail to see how these efforts won't be thwarted by the same patent lawyers.
Actually, as long as the ground is going to be on fire for a few hundred years and there's nothing you can do to stop it, might as well find a way to extract the energy. Has anyone looked into extracting geothermal energy from underground coal fires?
Being US President gives you a fair statistical chance of spending the rest of your life in the job.
Please consider this account deleted, I just can't be bothered with the spam anymore.
Someone mod this up. You'd have to be retarded to use natural-gas-generated electricity to operate an electric compressed air storage plant. The submitter just made that up.
Texas has a relatively de-regulated electric grid with a lot of wind capacity. Prices fluctuate wildly. This facility will use renwable wind and solar energy to compress air at times when it is cheap. Then, at times when electricity is expensive, the air will be used to operate a natural gas turbine and generate electricity.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
It's a reasonable explanation with one caveat: use solar/wind for air compression power needs and it becomes massively more efficient.
That said, I see this as something similar to electric vehicles. Sure the EV's are initially run on coal fired plants, but now that the consumption is in electric you can switch the plant and make them much much greener.
Step 1 of a multi-step process.
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
I just realized that ultimately any municipal services provider is fully funded by the taxpayer.
Oh my god. That means Walmart is also taxpayer funded since taxpayers buy all their products! We must put an end to this!
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
Considering the chain of events that happened at that lake, what could have possibly gone right?
I don't think it's fair to compare this scheme to complete idiots just because salt is involved.
Sort of. One of the coal seam gas ideas is to put in a horizontal bore, start a fire at one end and pump air in from the other. Incomplete combustion means that the gas that comes out can be burnt to drive a power station above ground, plus the gas is already hot. The idea is that the coal is burnt out in a gallery around the horizontal bore because that's the only place that air is supposed to be. There's been some tests that worked as planned.
I don't know enough about to to know if it's a good idea or a way to start an unextinguishable fire.
With no lake above the salt mine any new oil wells would just punch a hole in the ceiling of the mine that would have to be patched. While their is a small creek that passes above the retired salt mine, I highly doubt anyone would choose to drill in the middle of a creek when they could move 100 meters in almost any direction and have an easier time of it.
In addition, it isn't like they are pumping natural gas or other volatile chemicals that could cause a problem via explosion through a puncture- it is air, and at 60 to 70 bar is unlikely to cause any problems when there is almost 4000 feet of rock on top of it.
That said, the giant swirly that was Lake Peigneur was epic.
I'm just thinking along the lines of 70 bar (1000psi), working its way into places that people didn't know connected to the salt mine, say places underneath big sources of water...
All pipelines leak, even the ones that carry volatiles like natural gas - it's just the economics of lost product cost vs maintenance cost. Can't imagine anyone in that industry getting too worked up about a little leaking air. And, judging by the Lake Peigneur training and effective evacuation, I'm guessing everybody in charge figured that was going to happen sooner or later.
In North/Central Florida, we get sinkholes from over-pumping of the aquifers, Houston has had whole neighborhoods sink into Galveston bay from industrial scale water extraction. This is just another way to create "acts of God" risk for the insurance industry to deal with.
There seems to be some confusion in the thread. This isn't some new/offbeat method to generate power. It's an old/offbeat method to store power. Many power plants use methods for storing power when demand is low. Most pump water uphill and use the potential energy to meet a rising demand. Some efficiency is lost but it allows them to keep generating power (read cash) until the power can be sold. On a side note: Utilities count the stored power as actual assets on their balance sheets.
We really need your help
http://www.gofundme.com/help-sherry
Obviously.
Nobody wants to live near this thing. In the beginning this will mean protests, which will create jobs in the DIY market for all the picket signs. This will also create jobs in the riot control business and hospitals. In the end, people will just move. Moving companies will be able to create hundreds of jobs. And those people will have to move to newly build houses, which is several thousand more jobs. The old houses will have to be destroyed, which creates a multitude of jobs in the demolition industry. All this bad press will have to be covered as well, so a few dozen journalist jobs, some additional printing press jobs and a couple more paperboy jobs. Any damages caused by it will have to be paid out, so that's jobs for lawyers (on both sides), insurance companies and accountants. Since the government will want to tax that money, expect the IRS to create a few additional jobs as well.
So in the end everything works out just fine.
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It's a large battery for unstable renewable energy sources. Got it.
Well, that solves the energy storage problem for renewables, at least for localities that have suitable geological structures. I'm also going to assume that the efficiency for these wind turbines is top notch, and losses due to transmission are minimal.
When I first read the article & summary, I thought I was going to have a stroke. For a brief moment, I pictured them burning natural gas to store compressed air in the cavern. I wondered how bad the efficiency of their gas turbines would have to be, at less than full tilt, for them to consider this a good idea.
I am John Hurt.
Indeed - I would be very happy if the modern world could work and produce food, energy, houses, bikes, cards, with the creation of *no* permanent positions. That way I could enjoy the fruits of that labour without having to go to work every day. The concept of job creation being a good thing is fundamentally wrong. It is bad that this project creates jobs, it would be much better if it could be done without people having to monitor/fettle it all the time. Then those people could spend time playing pool and running up mountains instead. The idea that somehow having someone staring at a computer screen creates wealth is madness.
One of our patients works at a underground CNG storage field, the pressure used is 15,000 psi. The school for operating the compressors is a full two week long. We have numerous CNG storage fields, several salt mines and numerous brine wells, not to mention oil and gas wells in our area. This is old proven technology there should be no surprises other than human error.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
I worked on a gas pipeline in the 70's. Since the terrain was uphill and downhill, one could not test the 40 inch diameter pipes (1 meter diameter) with water, as the pressure would not be evenly distributed. One had to pressurize the pipe to 1035psi. Normal operation was around 935psi.
The 1 mile section of pipe was laid open pit, awaiting the pressure test. The test was using natural gas and was going fine until a longitudinal weld gave way. In a fraction of a second, at a speed of a race car, the split went along the pipeline, as if a scissors was cutting it open, without having to move the scissor's jaws. And the damn thing caught fire. People from hundreds of miles on both sides of the pipe saw the large 1 mile flare. More than 1 mile of pipe had to be replaced. No lives were lost. By the way, first there was frost as the gas expanded and dropped in pressure, then it was followed by extreme heat as the gas burned away. Losses included widlife, and trees.
So accidents with pressurized caverns can also blow, and when it does, if the pressure is high enough, the result could appear as a localized volcano, spewing debree onto homes, cars, people.
Just an interesting bit of my past working experience.
Leslie Satenstein Montreal Quebec Canada