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New Process Takes Energy From Coal Without Burning It
rtoz writes "Ohio State students have come up with a scaled-down version of a power plant combustion system with a unique experimental design--one that chemically converts coal to heat while capturing 99 percent of the carbon dioxide produced in the reaction. Typical coal-fired power plants burn coal to heat water to make steam, which turns the turbines that produce electricity. In chemical looping, the coal isn't burned with fire, but instead chemically combusted in a sealed chamber so that it doesn't pollute the air. This new technology, called coal-direct chemical looping, was pioneered by Liang-Shih Fan, professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering and director of Ohio State's Clean Coal Research Laboratory."
Sounds nice, except for the 'combusted in a sealed chamber' bit. How is this going to scale up so they can feed 100 tons/hr through the plant cycle? That is the question.
Left MS Windows for Linux Mint and never looked back!
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Well I'll let the scientists peer review this one. But cool.
Though to debbie downer this it still doesn't bring back the virginia mountains that were destroyed for coal.
combust:
Verb
1. Consume by fire.
2. Be consumed by fire.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
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Normal coal burning plants could collect all their exhaust as well. It would cost part of their energy output, but not all
http://michaelsmith.id.au
"New technologies that use fossil fuels should not raise the cost of electricity more than 35 percent, while still capturing more than 90 percent of the resulting carbon dioxide. Based on the current tests with the research-scale plants, Fan and his team believe that they can meet or exceed that requirement"
good luck selling that
The basic idea is to burn coal with rust in an oven, then capture the CO2. Why not just burn coal and air in an oven and capture the CO2? The hard part is surely the CO2 capture, not the burning.
Al Gore said ...
The coal and oil companies have spent in the United States alone a half a billion dollars in the first eight months of this year promoting a lie that there is such a thing as "clean coal." Clean coal's like healthy cigarettes -- it does not exist. It could theoretically exist. The only demonstration plant was canceled. How many, how many such plants are there? Zero. How many blueprints? Zero.
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2008/09/28/172379/gore-clean-coal-cigarettes/?mobile=nc
How does the lack of pollution from the process compare against that generated from the acquisition of the coal?
Is it possible/practical to convert an existing coal power plant?
Is there an appreciable energy/pollution cost to produce the fine powder coal used in the process?
How much energy is consumed or how much pollution is produced in transporting the coal to the reactor?
Is the process itself efficient in regards to the energy output when compared against the total energy costs?
I'm sure there's a lot of other things that don't spring to mind instantly, but I'm certainly not an expert on any of this. Doubts notwithstanding, this is pretty cool.
Its not emission-less. If you read his presentation from 2008 you'll see that the C02 is the byproduct of the reaction that is is used to transfer heat to the steam boiler. The C02 still gets generated as before, just now it can be more readily sequestered - assuming that you want to spend the money on that part of the equation.
Coal Direct Chemical Looping Retrofit for Pulverized Coal-fired Power Plants with In-Situ CO2 Capture (PDF - but why the hell in this day and age do I need t tell you that? Can't you just look at the link?)
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So it captured 99% of the CO2 in a vessel. Great! Now what does it do with it? Vent it to the atmosphere for zero gain?
Or use some magic zero energy cost process to convert it to chalk or something? Guess the article was missing that.
This is like Sasha Cohen's Hoverboard invention - it's a plank that real scientists can figure out how to levitate. Can I have venture capital?
Maybe they can capture the carbon dioxide, but what are they going to do with it afterwards? Put it in a container and bury it underground? The carbon dioxide will still be there, and the only way to get rid of that is through another reaction, which most likely needs energy to happen.
Another important question is the efficiency. Are they able to produce the same amount of electrical energy from each ton of coal as traditional methods? If their efficiency is worse, then I am very unimpressed. If their efficiency is better, then that may be a more interesting story than that of capturing the carbon dioxide.
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Old process (burning):
Inputs: coal, oxygen
Outputs: heat, CO2
New process:
Inputs: coal, oxygen
Outputs: heat, CO2
So they found a fancy way of oxidizing coal and producing heat from that (with a reaction that sounds a bit like on in a steel mill). Probably great and highly efficient but one of the end products is still CO2 (like with good old fashioned, non-fancy, burning). This is not a closed loop, not 'green' in the sustainable sense, only in the (possibly) more efficient sense.
This process is basically iron refining from oxide then (to be implemented) using the pellets of hot iron to boil water. Not what I would call thermodynamically efficent. It also looks likely to suffer from the jamming issues that have plagued pebble bed reactors. Note that, critically, they have not shifted the heat to a medium that would allow electricity generation. Iron pellets aren't going to power turbines any time this century.
Me too. Reasons are the best.
Of course I'm skeptical of anything that's "new & improved" because everything from soap to breakfast cereal has been labeled as such. But there is always hope ... and change ... oh well, that ruins that.
The researchers are about to take their technology to the next level: a larger-scale pilot plant is under construction at the U.S. Department of Energy's National Carbon Capture Center in Wilsonville, AL. Set to begin operations in late 2013, that plant will produce 250 thermal kilowatts using syngas.
From 25 kw to 250kw
Sounds like they're scaling it up.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
So the CO2 san be safely captured and preserved for future generations on this planet.
In the early 90's I remember reading a Poular Mechanics or maybe Scientific America talking about cheapest ways of getting hydrogen for fuel cells. One method mentioned was using coal in a Sloth Pit. Something about adding water with it and shacking it to release hydrogen gas or something.
Reading between the lines the difference is you aren't getting air into the reactor. So you don't have to heat and separate the Nitrogen. It says the iron pebbles are exposed to air in the reactor but I don't think that is entirely accurate. I think they are exposed after they give up their oxygen to the carbon and are still hot but outside of the actual reactor. This would provide an easy way to chemical way to separate the oxygen from the nitrogen. So the only gaseous byproduct is pure CO2 not CO2 mixed with Nitrogen which is harder to process.
I could be wrong.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
The Iron Oxide beads are mined and processed, using coke and various other carbon-creating materials.
To adequately measure the GHG (or climate change gasses) we have to consider the cradle to grave carbon impacts of all the constituent components, from mining to use to final process to usage.
This might be useful in crowded Chinese cities, where the source pollution is high at point of use (e.g. home and industrial heating and power usage), but does nothing per se to alter the total environmental impact of the use of coal itself.
Kind of like how electric cars, if run off of coal or oil power plants, do nothing to reduce emissions, except at point of vehicular usage.
The problem we all face, both in China and the rest of the industrialized world, is that we are overloading our GLOBAL systems with too much carbon or fossil fuel emissions. It doesn't matter if we do it in the coal regions of the US or China, it still puts too much energy into the climate systems, and accelerates extreme weather conditions worldwide, such as massive storms, dust bowls growing to TX CA and FL, and things like that.
Nice try. Good for a polluted Chinese city choking on its own pollution, but not good enough to deal with the source PROBLEM.
(caveat - based on my reading of the various papers by Chinese scientists in peer-reviewed journals and their own internal numbers, which we all know they fudged)
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Expensive system that does not scale to commercial power size at all.
And right there.. first word... expensive... means we won't do it.
money > all
Polluted air is cheap. (for the power companies direct profits) They only do what they are forced to do.
Theres dozens of ways to make coal burning 100% clean. BUT they all have the same problem.
More expensive than doing it the plain ol burning way. And we won't do any of them at all outside of lab table examples.
What we NEED to invent is a new human who gives a fuck about more than profit right now at the cost of everything else long term.
And replace all of our politcians and ceos with them.
Good luck with that tho. That'll take a few hundred years to even get going.
This is bullshit because of reasons. Also, "clean coal" lol.
It seems there are deniers on both sides of the environmental debate. Sorry if science and engineering trump your politics.
The principle is similar to that of using pure oxygen to combust coal - the CO2 produced is nearly 100% - which simplifies carbon capture compared to the 20%CO2 / 80% N2 mixture typically got from burning in air. (see also ie google "pure oxygen carbon capture")
Instead of using pure O2 they use iron(III)oxide as the oxidant. The reduced iron(III)oxide (as Fe(II)oxide or Fe) can be re-oxidised by air in a separate chamber.
The actual process seems to have been very poorly communicated to the journalist (and in general) -possibly because english is the inventor's second language?
As others above I would doubt the overall efficiency would be as good as current methods - the system is complex - and seems to need energy extraction from both gaseous extracts from both the "reducer" and "oxidiser" chambers (eg see "Process Flow Diagram" in http://www.netl.doe.gov/publications/proceedings/09/CO2/pdfs/5289%20Ohio%20State%20chemical%20looping%20(Li)%20mar09.pdf ) - not my problem thankfully.
Carbon Dioxide has lots of industrial uses. It makes a good solvent. This sounds like it will lend itself to easy cleaning of sulfur and metals rich coal. If this process becomes a cheap way of making industrial CO2, I will consider it successful.
“Unfortunately, it also produces carbon dioxide, which is difficult to capture and bad for the environment"
Without carbon dioxide, the carbon cycle wouldn't exist and all plants and animals would die.
Will it restore the ground where it was extracted from? Or even better, it would save a step or two to just extract the heat from the coal that's already burning..
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Last I checked, burning is combustion.
Nor do I understand what the hell is advantageous about it. They admit to oxidiation of the hydrocarbons (ie, burning), heating it to high temperature, and the release of CO2 gas. So exactly what is so great about it?
Coal isn't clean though. This would clean up the side of the equation where you're burning it. But, it would do absolutely nothing for the mining aspect of it. Which is a huge mess as it stands. If you want to burn things for energy, you're better off starting with something like trees which are mostly carbon neutral as it is.
Sure, it's technically clean if you ignore the incredible damage that it reeks on the landscape, but it's definitely not clean in a practical sense.
Coal is only cheap when you exclude the environmental and related health costs. The heavy and radioactive metals expelled as particulate matter are a major source of cancer. The nitrogen oxides expelled are a major contributor to acid rain. People are sorta forgetting those issues in the whole CO2 debate.
And other people are sort of ignoring that the excitement over this potential new process is in part based on the claim that it will not expel the radioactive metals and the nitrogen oxides.
You are offering denier logic. You merely deny the possibilities of science and engineering to hold onto a different set of political beliefs.
All else is BS.
In an electric power market that substantially depends on wind, what happens during periods when winds are calm? Does the instantaneous price of electric power double?
mmm, oatmeal reason cookies.
"Conversion of chemical species" is just another term for "reaction", and "production of heat" through a reaction is the same thing as "exothermic", and a shorter term for "chemical reactions between a fuel and an oxidant" is "oxidation". Thus to put it even shorter: combustion is exothermic oxidation.
Maybe it will. I haven't read the article but there have already been trials where coal is burnt in-situ via using horizontal drilling and air injection. Apparently that works so long as you have full control of all the air getting in.
Also, (as I keep telling the fanboys here of 1970's nuclear who don't have the merest clue about developments since), there is not really such a thing as a "clean" industrial process - that's just stupid PR. All you can do is aim for less impact so you get a net benefit.
Those trials were about burning coal underground (yes, scares me too) and nothing to do with this process BUT we shouldn't rule out the possibility of this new idea having the reaction happen underground if it's better in the long run than digging it up.
This is nice, we have the opportunity to capture all produced CO2. But what are we going to do with it?
One method mentioned was using coal in a Sloth Pit.
I wonder what the World Wildlife Fund and other organizations would say about that, given that two species of sloth (Bradypus pygmaeus and B. torquatus) are on IUCN's Red List as endangered.
From TFA:
No other lab has continuously operated a coal-direct chemical looping unit as long as the Ohio State lab did last September. But as doctoral student Elena Chung explained, the experiment could have continued.
“We voluntarily chose to stop the unit. We actually could have run longer, but honestly, it was a mutual decision by Dr. Fan and the students. It was a long and tiring week where we all shared shifts,” she said.
Fan agreed that the nine-day experiment was a success. “In the two years we’ve been running the sub-pilot plants, our CDCL and SCL units have achieved a combined 830 operating hours, which clearly demonstrates the reliability and operability of our design,” he said.
His entire staff of grad students manned the thing and kept feeding it coal for a week and it ran nonstop the whole time, and could have kept going. So this appears to be a solved problem.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
Damn!
Now President Obama's "green" campaign contributors won't have a piggy morally-bankrupt to draw from.
It's always windy somewhere.
True, you can't comb the hair on a coconut. But one problem with relying on wind elsewhere involves transporting the power across hundreds of km or miles and across state and national borders.
A great day for white ethnically-curious females everywhere.
Actually capturing is the key. A carbon capturing plant is always going to be less efficient than a non-capturing plant. Try looking at it this way:
36.43% Non-capturing plant
29.14% Post-combustion capturing plant (36.43/1.25)
33.93% This thing
It only cleans up the burning side if we have something to do with all that CO2 that this process produces.
Does that mean we can use all our produced CO2 for FRACKING?
For a fuel that requires little or no processing it's extremely energy dense. Ultimately the problem wouldn't be with the process but the budget minded power companies. There's a reason "clean coal" is like bigfoot, largely a myth. Clean coal would cost more money reducing profits. It's the reason the industry doesn't remove mercury and coal dust from the exhaust, reduced profits. They even had a government mandate and the still waited until the deadline and are now saying it's too hard. The process can trap 99% of the CO2, the trick is keeping the power companies from not releasing it into the atmosphere to save money. White Diesel is a great source of fuel and second only to natural gas for being a clean fossil fuel but it involves stripping of the CO2 and you are faced with the same problem. Sequestration isn't as simple as it sounds. Compressing huge amounts of CO2 gas takes energy and the underground storage areas don't tend to be near power plants. When you start burning more coal just to store the CO2 from the last batch the efficiency goes way down. If the existing plants had been positioned and built with all this in mind we wouldn't have all these problems. Now there are no cheap and easy solutions. Personally I prefer using algae or greenhouses to store the CO2. Try this approach, pump the CO2 into large cheap greenhouses that grow Kenaf, it's related to hemp but totally legal and interchangeable with industrial hemp. Use as much as industry needs for fiber and seed oil then turn the rest into biochar, a good one to read up on if you aren't familiar. The char can be mixed with farmland improving the soil and it'll absorb the excess fertilizer reducing run off and reducing the amount needed to grow food. The carbon is stored for thousands of years, if not millions. The power companies get to make extra money off the Kenaf and they greatly reduce the CO2 and mercury released. The Mercury will get trapped in the char and the CO2 will be stored as solid carbon. These days they try to solve everything with technology when mother nature has been doing it for billions of years.
Obama won't like it because it's not made of fairy dust and rainbows. He wants a magical solution where the only output is spring water and sunshine.
Organization? You must be joking..
CO2 into Cement
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
If the CO2 were accidentally released, that'd be a lot like the other option - power plants that release it on purpose. You know, the way we've been doing it since the discovery of fire.
There is one similarity with nuclear waste, though. You're probably aware that nuclear plants generate dangerous waste. You're probably also aware that nuclear plants generate a significant amount of waste. What they didn't tell you is that it's two different kinds of waste! Nuclear does NOT generate much dangerous waste. There's a few pounds of dangerous stuff which can be easily encased in heavy steel and buried two miles deep, and then there's a bunch of low level waste you could earth for breakfast. (It'd be safer than what RMS eats, anyway.) So nuclear waste is purely a POLITICAL problem, a made up issue. There's no technical problem at all. In that sense, it's the same as sequestered CO2 - a political problem, not a safety problem.
Clean depends on the definition. There is a waste product associated with every kind of industrial process and every kind of energy production. But the forms of the waste are not all the same nor are they equivalent. Many time people equate the term clean to the quantity of carbon produced during the energy production. If this new technology is viable and it actually contains 99% of the carbon that is a HUGE development. The mining process could be improved and much of the eye sore can be avoided if you don't strip mine. I think there is a town in Pennsylvania that has been "on-fire" since the 50s or 60s because an underground coal fire was not contained.
GENERATION 27: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
is called combustion. Just because it is in a box, does not mean it happens magically.
I've always been confused by "Carbon Neutral" propaganda. For example, we have always had the same amount of carbon in the environment. Just over the years it's been sequestered into oil/coal/etc. However, now if it's been out of commission for thousands of years and it's somehow out of the equation. So burning oil/coal/etc is just normalizing the balance.
Additionally, if we are truly talking about "zero carbon balance" why is the largest contributor to global warming from cow emissions bad? Carbon in = carbon out. This is as "Carbon Neutral" you can get but 'OMG, methane from cows is bad.'
Hence PR bullshit and a barrier to communication instead of normal language. Just treat such statements as a red flag to indicate that you cannot take the speaker at their word and need a second opinion - the word "clean" is only ever in there to mislead, if it wasn't you'd see "less pollution than X" instead of misleading bullshit.
Of course things can be improved but whenever you see "clean" the objective is to improve the perception instead of the reality. One of the places I visited for work was a power station where water was injected into the exhaust to give it a nice fluffy white "clean" look to impress the people in a nearby town, but the place was no less polluting than more remote power stations that didn't bother. In a truly comical stuffup that trick combined with a scrubber failure one night produced nitric acid fog that condensed on hundreds of cars in the town and cost the power authority a fortune in costs to get them all repainted.
The problem is that the system has changed since the carbon was taken out of the system. Reintroducing it in such massive quantities over such a short period of time changes things too rapidly for species to adapt to.
Methane emissions are a very serious problem as well, but that has fuck all to do with power generation. You can use methane to produce power, but that's got nothing to do with being carbon neutral.
Coal mining is one of the worst in that respect. Coal is so common in parts of the world, that it's economically feesible to just tear out the entire mountain, rather than dig through it to find coal, because most of the mountain is coal.
There are many labs working on chemical looping combustion. Most have not gotten to "burning" coal yet. They are starting with natural gas to prove the process. Usually they will use two to three fluidized bed beds reactors to convert the fuel and oxygen (from the air) to CO2 and water. The trick, as I see it, is to find/develop, the oxygen carrier. Most so far have been Fe, Mn, or Cu based. Raw minerals have been tried for the carrier but they break down, both from attrition and from the chemical conversion of adding and losing the oxygen. You might get 20 loops out the material before you lose the material in the cyclone separators. They have also tried the putting the oxygen carrier on ceramic carriers. This seems to survive longer, but the cost is higher. The models I have seen suggest that if you need to sequester CO2 and you are burning coal this has real economic advantages over oxy-fuel combustion or integrated gasification combined cycle power systems. Then if you are going to move the CO2 any distance you will still need to clean up and dry the CO2 stream if you are going to pipeline it, but while we continue to use fossil fuels we need to be smart how we use it.
I've always been confused by "Carbon Neutral" propaganda. For example, we have always had the same amount of carbon in the environment. Just over the years it's been sequestered into oil/coal/etc. However, now if it's been out of commission for thousands of years and it's somehow out of the equation. So burning oil/coal/etc is just normalizing the balance.
No, no, no! You missed the biggest sink for carbon. The one that is orders of magnitude greater than all the others put together: limestone (60 million gigatons vs the 720 gigatons in the atmosphere and the 38,000 gigatons in the oceans). If you think that normalizing the balance with all of the carbon that has been taken out of the environment is a good thing, then you must be from Venus.
Fire is the rapid oxidation of a material in the exothermic chemical process of combustion
Regardless of possible merits, my bull-Shih detector screams bloody murder. Does the good prof possess also some degree in biomolecular linguistics or is he just so good at marketing?
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They just burn it with pure oxygen instead of with air. The innovation, and it is an innovation IMHO, is that they used iron to capture and transfer the oxygen. This prevents the forming of NOx, which is a good thing. ...
This means they can burn the coal hotter without emitting dangerous amounts of NOx.
1. They let iron pellets rust. Or they buy rust in the first place.
2. They put the rust pellets into the chamber with coal dust.
3. They ignite the mixture (this requires a bit more heat than usual burning. At least 1566 ÂC or 2850.8 F)
4. The coal dust pulls the oxygen out of the rust and binds it with the carbon into quite pure CO2.
5. Heat (a lot of it)
6. Use the heat in a default thermoelectric power plant.
7. The pellets can rust again, to capture oxygen.
8.
9. Profit.
If they would combine it with an iron smelting plant then the energy required in step 4 to pull the oxygen out of the rust would not be wasted. Then the iron pellets are one of the end results. Of course, then you'd have to emit step 7.
To me this seems familiar. If I am correct this is the way Thermite works, just with aluminium powder instead of coal dust.
Well, I might have a way, but it only works on a semi spherical planet in a vacuum.
Can they take the waste and make Diamond/Zircon out of it?
Just wondering.
I'm here for the experience, not the Hyperbole.
n/t
Agreed, but even "less pollution than X" can be misleading. It is difficult to compare different types of pollution on an apples to apples basis. For example, how much carbon released into the atmosphere given a certain amount of cyanide that seeps into the ground from cyanide heap leaching? But at least that discussion would get the facts on the table. I would argue that the word "clean" isn't always used with a negative motive, but it is likely that the person using it doesn't have an in-depth enough knowledge of the subject to say anything else (in which case maybe they shouldn't be talking). Remember Hanlon's razor, "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."
GENERATION 27: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
That's a point, but clean as in "clean coal" and nuclear have most definitely been applied frequently with intended malice.
Sounds nice! But can it be put into use on a large scale?
I agree that it happens and by people who do know better.
GENERATION 27: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
It's too bad the Sand N|gger in Chief closed all the coal mines in the USA.
TFA I notice is awful light on the details about what EXACTLY if left after this chemical burning, is it a paste, a gel, powder?
The coal and iron oxide are heated to high temperatures, where the materials react with each other. Carbon from the coal binds with the oxygen from the iron oxide and creates carbon dioxide, which rises into a chamber where it is captured. Hot iron and coal ash are left behind. Because the iron beads are so much bigger than the coal ash, they are easily separated out of the ash, and delivered to a chamber where the heat energy would normally be harnessed for electricity. The coal ash is removed from the system.
Coal isn't clean though. This would clean up the side of the equation where you're burning it. But, it would do absolutely nothing for the mining aspect of it. Which is a huge mess as it stands.
It also produces a huge amount of ash and CO2 that used to go up the chimney. Probably some other byproducts, too. What are we going to do with that?
No sig today...
The cleanest coal would be pure carbon. To extract the chemical energy from it youcombine it with Oxygen and produce CO2
Whether you call that process 'burning' or not (like is putting hydrogen into a fuel cell to extract its chemical energy called burning? no, but you get the same result)
So what do you do with the Carbon Dioxide? The cheapest (in both economicas and energy terms) is just to release it into the atmosphere. but that will lead to global warming.
You could compress it and store it underground, but that uses up a lot of the energy that you got in the first place..
You could disolve it in the oceans (and end up with acidic oceans with no fish.
We need to find a place to put all that CO2
I love reasons! Care to share?
samzenpus
Wreaks Reeks. Although I'm sure both apply :p
(1.21 gigawatts) / (88 miles per hour) = 30 757 874 newtons
1) There is too much CO2 by coal plants produced in the US to be used that way
2) even for the few megatons used that way today , what guarantee do we have that we are not setting us up for the same tragedy as lake Nyos down the line ? In 100 Year down the line ?
Second The particulate oxidation using rust balls and powdered coal still happens at high temperatures and it still produces gaseous carbon dioxide. We might as well burn them using atmospheric oxygen for all that trouble. The carbon sequestration process requires carbon dioxide to be captured and sequestered using the same procedures. This process of taking atmospheric oxygen, creating rust balls, reducing them (reduce = (! oxidize)), is too much of work with too little to gain.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Centralia pa, i think it's still burning
Charging EV with coal just became a clean alternative.
Oups.
Wind? "It'll spoil our view and kill the birds!"
I have to give it to the detractors on this one, wind turbines are unsightly and noisy. Sure, when it's only three stark white turbines on a hilltop in the distance there is a grace and novelty that makes it somewhat attractive.
But when it's a field of turbines such as this it's VERY ugly. Also, with each turbine putting out ~50dB(A) or more at 100 meters, that becomes quite the cacophony
I'm all for wind, but NIMBY. You're welcome to snuggle up to a wind farm if you wish, though.
This idea has been around for a long time.
http://repository.icse.utah.edu/dspace/bitstream/123456789/9946/1/Lewis%20Gilliland%202665972.pdf
That prof didn't "pioneer" chemical looping.
Centralia Pennsylvania
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centralia,_Pennsylvania
--- If the bible proves the existence of God, then Superman comics prove the existence of Superman.
Nothing has been said about the radionuclides and mercury that won't be released by this process.
love is just extroverted narcissism
Well, I'm fairly sure that other resources (petroleum, uranium, etc) are also fairly environmentally damaging to mine. Coal isn't going away any time soon, so this at least cleans up part of the equation.
> But the majority of electricity usage occurs at exactly the same point in the day when solar power is the most abundant That's very interesting. I would have thought that around noon, when the solar power is most abundant, most people would be at work or school, so they wouldn't be using electricity at home. In my house, we use electricity early in the morning getting ready for work and around dinner time. So roughly around sunrise and sunset, when solar is pretty much useless.
I think there is a town in Pennsylvania that has been "on-fire" since the 50s or 60s because an underground coal fire was not contained.
The town is "centralia, Penn. There are others too.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centralia,_Pennsylvania
Where does the huge amount of iron oxide come from? It is necessary for the reaction.
John W Wittenberg
Fort Wayne, IN
I might add (I am replying to myself) how much oxygen is in a kilogram of iron? What I am getting at is that TONS of iron oxide are need for a few hundred pounds of coal. One iron atom per molecule of oxygen, FeO2! Iron is much heavier than air so my guess is the cost to supply the iron oxide, transportation cost that is, wow! Does not seem economical.
we can continue mountain top removal?