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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!
Vote for Bernie in 2016!
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?"
I love reasons! Care to share?
"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
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?)
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
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.
Do you care about the security of your wireless mouse?
There is no burning. Apparently that is the key innovation. The chemical reaction between the coal dust and the rust pellets releases the CO2 in a very controlled manner with the CO2 being separated cleanly rather than mixed up with smoke aka carbon molecules. That must make the CO2 capture much much easier.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
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.
Coal is oxidized to produce CO2 and heat. That's "burning", regardless of whether you use air or iron oxides as the oxidizer.
We already burn a crap load of coal for our electricity. Wouldn't it be great if we worked to make it clean-er ( at least in terms of soot and mercury released into the air)? There isn't much on the horizon that could replace coal over night. We should try to find something will all due haste, but it wouldn't hurt to get the low hanging fruit. Its pretty much what Obama is doing now and its a sensible approach.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
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.
This wasn't your main point, I know, but I know more than one person who claims that so-called "electric cigarettes" are not unhealthy at all.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Why not just burn coal and air in an oven and capture the CO2
Because only part of the air gets converted to CO2. Most of the air is nitrogen, and only ~21% is oxygen. Even if you have complete conversion of the oxygen to CO2 (not going to happen), you'd end up with exhaust gas that's mostly nitrogen with some carbon dioxide mixed in. This nitrogen/carbon dioxide mix is difficult to deal with. To do anything with the CO2 you'd have to separate it from the nitrogen and residual oxygen, which gets complicated and expensive.
The hard part is surely the CO2 capture, not the burning.
Exactly. This new method attempts solve that by separating the CO2 generation stage from the air-using stage. If you could effectively separate them, you'll get a pure CO2 stream in one half of the reactor (which if you can keep closed you can pump off into storage tanks) and you'll keep the nitrogen/depleted-oxygen mix in the other half of the reactor, away from your pure CO2.
The way it works is to use iron oxide as an oxygen shuttle. The iron oxide pellets grab oxygen from the air half of the reactor, and are then transferred as a relatively gas-free solid to the coal half of the reactor, where they give up their oxygen to produce a relatively pure stream of CO2. The pellets are then separated from the coal ash and transferred as a relatively gas-free solid back to the air half of the reactor, where they are recharged with oxygen. If you engineer it right, you could conceivably make it a continuous feed operation, where you shuttle the iron oxide beads back and forth through airlocks, keeping most of the CO2 in the sealed reactor where it can be pumped off as a comparatively pure gas.
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! --
I think it is because when you burn in air (Mostly Nitrogen) you create NOx compounds. When you burn your exhaust gas contains lots of nitrogen which you have to remove the CO2 from to process. It seems they are using rust as a way to take the oxygen out of the air first so when it reactions with the carbon you get pure CO2 which can easily be compressed without having to deal with Nitrogen and it's oxides.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
Except that the United States has the benefit of cheap methane (CNG). Regionally, you also have cheap hydro in the NW and TV, cheap wind in the upper prairie states and cheap solar in the sun belt.
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. Last I checked, chemotherapy wasn't cheap.
And many areas in the US have restrictions on wood burning. Unless you're talking about a pellet stove with catalytic converter which is fairly darn clean as far as burnin' wood goes as is often exempt from burn restrictions.
Normal coal burning plants could collect all their exhaust as well. It would cost part of their energy output, but not all
The problem is the other gasses after passing through the combustion chamber, which you may not want to pay for compressing and sequestring. The 78% nitrogen in the atmospheric air will still be there after burning and will contribute to the increased cost.
I wonder if the extra cost of pulverizing the carbon to 0.1mm particle size is a proper offset for the CO2 separation cost from air based combustion.
Also, since the oxygen is delivered bound to iron, the total energy generated but this process will be smaller... unless (or "even if"?) you decide to reoxidize the reduced iron by burning it again
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
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.
I wonder how you would go separating oxygen from nitrogen before combustion, then burning the coal on pure oxygen, though I suppose that is the process described in the article.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
“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!”
We already burn a crap load of coal for our electricity. Wouldn't it be great if we worked to make it clean-er ( at least in terms of soot and mercury released into the air)?
I'm no expert on coal power plants but I'm pretty sure we already do that with scrubbers.
There isn't much on the horizon that could replace coal over night. We should try to find something will all due haste, but it wouldn't hurt to get the low hanging fruit.
Maybe not on the horizon but there is certainly something that has been around for 50+ years that could replace coal overnight. It's called nuclear power.
Its pretty much what Obama is doing now and its a sensible approach.
Is he? I feel like its more about politics than actually solving anything. Instead of pumping money into "green" start-up companies that inevitably spread the wealth among their executives and then disappear in a puff of smoke, the federal government could subsidize the building of a smelter capable for manufacturing a reactor vessel. Last I read, the only country with the facilities to manufacture those is Japan and they currently have years of back orders. I also haven't heard anything about solving the nuclear waste storage problem out of this administration. Getting the waste problem sorted out, subsidizing the construction of a facility with the ability to make containment vessels, squashing all the red tape involved with new plant construction, and decommissioning some of the older nuclear power plants is the most sensible approach to getting us away from oil and coal in my eyes.
Not only does the system cost a lot of money, it also produces less power per unit of coal.\
There's also the cost of dealing with the captured CO2 as well. If you don't want to spend even more money storing it somewhere you'll have to let it go. There's also more CO2 to get rid of, because it's a less efficient system.
It's 2.5% less efficient than a normal coat power station.
Normal plant: 36.43%
This thing: 33.93%
It actually produces 10% more power from the turbine, but the supporting pumps, fans and compressors need to be powered.
You realize that a decade ago, europe had access to cheap CNG too. And now it doesn't. And many places in Europe also have restrictions on wood burning as well, and it's now gotten to the point where local governments are no longer enforcing laws on it because the options are 'let people freeze to death' or 'let them illegally cut wood.' Just keep those ideas right going along, never mind that there's a million people in Germany that can't afford electricity because of green energy projects either. Or that people in Greece are clear cutting forests for basic fuel so they can keep warm, and cook dinner now.
Things are just peachy!
Om, nomnomnom...
Old process (burning):
Inputs: coal, air
Outputs: heat, CO2, N2, N2O
FTFY.
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.
I'm no expert on coal power plants but I'm pretty sure we already do that with scrubbers.
Scrubbers are typically only required for new plants. Existing plants have very liberal grandfather policies that exempt them. So many companies will simply upgrade existing facilities to keep the grandfather clause. It isn't unlike tearing down a house, save for one wall, then building a new house and then saying it is a 100 year-old house.
Maybe not on the horizon but there is certainly something that has been around for 50+ years that could replace coal overnight. It's called nuclear power.
Traditional nuclear power facilities are expensive. Not to mention that you have to build them in the Styx to appease the NIMBY folks, so you suffer a lot of transmission losses. Thorium reactors might offer a solution. Same with micro reactors that can use a sealed fuel container shipped from a factory. But GE and Westinghouse are still pushing for their latest super-sized traditional reactors.
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.
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.
I wonder how you would go separating oxygen from nitrogen before combustion, then burning the coal on pure oxygen,
It's actually easier to separate the CO2 after the combustion.
Liquefaction temperatures and heat capacity (how much energy to extract to lower the temperature by 1 degree at constant pressure for 1 mol of gas):
* oxygen: –182.95 C heat cap: 29.38 J/(mol x K)
* nitrogen: –195.79 C heat cap : 29.12 J/(mol x K)
* carbon dioxide: – 57 C heat cap: 36.94 J/(mol x K)
So, to separate CO2 from a mix of 78% N2 and 22 % CO2 (after burning, no oxygen) you need to cool down to – 57 C something with a (weighted) average heat capacity of 30.84 J/(mol x K).
To separate the oxygen from a mix of 78% N2 and 22% O2 you need to cool down to –183 C something with an average heat capacity of 29.18 J/(mol x K).
So starting from a temperature of 20C, from the same volume of gas mixture, the energy to get 22% of CO2 after combustion versus to one get 22% of oxygen before combustion is in a ratio of approx 4/10.
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
I'm not sure I follow your reasoning so let me paraphrase: There were no clean coal plants in 2008, therefore these folks shouldn't even try.
I get it that the old gasification and flue cleaning efforts are proving to be duds. But Ohio State's effort is not so much an ill-conceived megaproject trumpeted by vested interests, than it is good basic science.
This is nice, we have the opportunity to capture all produced CO2. But what are we going to do with it?
"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.
Chill mate.
My point in reply to PP: "combustion does not require fire"
(as I'm growing old, I don't feel the same geekish urge to be absolutely exact - sometime I don't feel the need of being right)
.
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
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.
I also wondered if the CO2 could be used directly by filtering the particles out and feeding the exhaust has through greenhouses. You would need hundreds of kilometres of greenhouse obviously.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Mostly because air is only partly oxygen. Those other parts lead to other combustion products that should be dealt with (plus the coal isn't 100% carbon) and the vast majority of the air comes right back out. The point is maintain near perfect control over the combustion and it's output (both gas, ash, and heat.)
Note: I would point out... replace the carbon (coal) with aluminium, and you've got thermite.
Coal is oxidized to produce CO2 and heat. That's "burning", regardless of whether you use air or iron oxides as the oxidizer.
Ummm, sorry, I'm gonna have to go with the Ph.D. in Chemistry on this one buddy, and he says it's NOT burning. I would not call your comment, Informative. Uninformed, but not informative. Ooo, that's a t-shirt right there...
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.
Because scrubbers are widely used in the USA you can look at Beijing's crappy air and smirk, instead of dealing with something worse at home due to a higher coal sulphur content.
The US nuclear lobby ate it's young and will keep on doing it, so you are going to have to wait to see what India does with Thorium unless you can get people with a vested interest in Uranium to stop interfering.
Bulk CO2 capture is a cryogenic process. Flue gas temperature is likely around ~300-500C. If you wanted to remove 90% of the CO2 you would need to cool the flue gas to about 10K, that is a lot of energy. Only the non CO2 portion of the (now cryogenic) flue gas can be used to pre-cool the hot flue gas.
Yeah but you're not like, burning it with FIRE, man, you're burning it with iron! And the iron is recyclable, unlike fire.
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.
My understanding was that burning involves fire aka heat and light radiation so a more intense reaction. The description in TFA was that of chemical combustion but with only heat radiation confined to the oxidized iron pellets. "Burning" is probably just an imprecise term whether used by laymen or by experts.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
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.
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.
I also wondered if the CO2 could be used directly by filtering the particles out and feeding the exhaust has through greenhouses. You would need hundreds of kilometres of greenhouse obviously.
Better still: algae ponds - being more primitive (with lower specialized morphology), the rate of conversion to biomass higher. Additional minor advantage: even if only slightly, CO2 dissolves in water - easier to contain than in a pure greenhouse.
As one effect of the introduction of carbon tax in Australia: such projects become viable.
Long time though until such projects would become mainstream, even if (quoted from the last link):
CSIRO suggests 100 square kilometres of algal ponds could provide all of Australia’s fuel needs
(100 sq.km = a square 10 km on the side. The size of the brown coal deposit being mined in open pit fashion in Latrobe valley: 50 km long, between 8 and 16 km wide > 400 sq km)
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
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.
Glucose is oxidized in your body to produce carbon dioxide and heat. We typically don't refer to that as "burning". It's a very similar concept.
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a youtube comments section scrolling - forever.
is called combustion. Just because it is in a box, does not mean it happens magically.
Did Siri learn to be rude or did a human being just fail the Turing test?
CSIRO suggests 100 square kilometres of algal ponds
A tiny fraction of our existing stock of algae lakes, algae rivers, etc.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
You realize that a decade ago, europe had access to cheap CNG too. And now it doesn't.
Access to natural gas in Russia? Not access to natural gas within EU borders? That is hardly comparable to the quantities of natural gas that the US has within its US borders.
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.
CSIRO suggests 100 square kilometres of algal ponds
A tiny fraction of our existing stock of algae lakes, algae rivers, etc.
Count this river out, though
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
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?
Troll 2.0 Fear my asocial networking!
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.
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.
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
Access to natural gas in Russia? Not access to natural gas within EU borders? That is hardly comparable to the quantities of natural gas that the US has within its US borders.
How's those lack of drilling permits, and cockblocking of things like Keystone XL working out for you guys these days anyway? Oh right...enjoy those soaring energy prices.
Om, nomnomnom...
Just think it through for a few seconds and you'll realise that two sources of CO2 have been reduced to one.
In the first instance, 50 tons of CO2 comes out of the coal and goes up the stack. Then another 50 tons of CO2 comes out of some other source and is released into the atmosphere by the other industrial process. Total CO2 released into the atmosphere: 100 tons.
In the second instance, the 50 tons of CO2 that would have gone up the stack is held back, then released later by the other industrial purpose. Total CO2 released into the atmosphere: 50 tons.
(1.21 gigawatts) / (88 miles per hour) = 30 757 874 newtons
Wreaks Reeks. Although I'm sure both apply :p
(1.21 gigawatts) / (88 miles per hour) = 30 757 874 newtons
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
Good thought. But sadly, this won't replace those dirty coal plants over night either. Power companies will have to make large investments to either build new plants or convert existing plants to this technology. And the only thing big companies like to spend money on is their shareholders.
Access to natural gas in Russia? Not access to natural gas within EU borders? That is hardly comparable to the quantities of natural gas that the US has within its US borders.
How's those lack of drilling permits, and cockblocking of things like Keystone XL working out for you guys these days anyway? Oh right...enjoy those soaring energy prices.
The US populace has no idea about what drives its energy costs. Keystone won't solve shit - it will however make a bunch of oil execs very rich, at the possible expense of thousands of kilometers of natural water resources. Oil is fungible - it makes no difference if it's refined in Canada or the US - the pipeline is purely about American oil interests getting to refine Canadian crude, as opposed to canadians, europeans, arabs or the chinese.
Demand is going up because demand is going up - keystone won't make a dent. But it might just end a bunch of important ecosystems.
Charging EV with coal just became a clean alternative.
Oups.
Soot and mercury are irrelevant. If we don't control CO2 emissions nothing else matters.
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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.
That's kind of crazy.
http://www.psr.org/news-events/press-releases/coal-pollution-damages-human-health.html
Coal pollution negatively affects lungs, heart, and nervous system of the human body. That matters. What you are proposing is akin to saying that the police shouldn't investigate any robberies at all, because there are murders to solve.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
When you burn stuff you get a lot of stray heat, random bits of stuff going up with all the hot air, etc.
This controlled oxidization process gives you fairly pure CO2 rising off the top and most of the heat concentrated in the iron beads, which you can then remove from the reactor and suck the heat out of. The CO2 without all the crud in it is easier to capture. Plus the reactor is sealed, except for the gas removal. You don't need to be spraying air (which is mostly nitrogen) into it, which makes capturing the CO2 much simpler.
No, what I'm saying is that the murder problem is so bad if we don't focus on it we're all going to be dead anyway. All the coal pollution in the world doesn't mean shit next to world wide war for arable land.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
> 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.
The big difference here is that in the new process the CO2 is conveniently separated which takes a lot of the difficulty out of sequestration.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
If we could find a way to convert bitterness and butthurt into fairy dust and rainbows, you could single-handedly save the planet!
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Yeah, what I'm saying is that even in a bad area like Detroit the majority of the population isn't killed despite the rampant murders. Global warming is bad, but not that bad. Even if it were, as I said in my first post we cannot eliminate our dependance on coal within the next 10 years. So, lets try and reduce its impact as much as possible while working as much as possible to make sure we do go off coal in 10 years. We can do both.
Also, there is no war. There is no credible threat of war. You sound as crazy as the yk2 doomsday folk. If I didn't understand the science, and based my opinion of global warming based off of your ramblings I would think it was all crap.
In summary, YOU ARE NOT HELPING. Please return to reality.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
You really think we can relocate millions of people in a time when resources of all types, but especially arable land, will be dwindling without precipitating a major conflict? You're the one who needs to return to reality.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
... at the possible expense of thousands of kilometers of natural water resources.
And we have someone sucking right at the talking points of whatever they want. Useful tip, there are so many pipelines crossing that aquifer now, and some of them are nearly 50 years old. More personal research vs reading what someone tells you would do you good.
Never mind that it's cheaper to refine crude when it's nearby compared to shipping it across the Atlantic. And safer, or that we have a larger strategic oil reserve than unfriendly countries you buy from now. Yep, full on smrt with that one.
Om, nomnomnom...
I wonder how easy it is to separate the iron pellets from the coal ash at the scale of a large power plant, which is about one million pounds of coal per hour.
Access to natural gas in Russia? Not access to natural gas within EU borders? That is hardly comparable to the quantities of natural gas that the US has within its US borders.
How's those lack of drilling permits, and cockblocking of things like Keystone XL working out for you guys these days anyway? Oh right...enjoy those soaring energy prices.
Natural gas prices in the US were pretty low, and inventories pretty high, last I heard.
... there is quite a difference between being dependent upon your own government, which you can change, compared to a foreign government that you can not change and are at the mercy of. Plus you've moved the goal posts a bit since much of what you refer to is not natural gas.
As for the permits and such
That link is not even relevant to the discussion. An appeal to authority is still a logical fallacy. What if he said that water was flammable if you stare at it long enough? Would that be true too? After all he is an authority so it must be.
This is the attitude that impeded science in the dark ages. It must be pointed out and ridiculed in every instance, not modded +4 informative.
So, in your world every chemical reaction is burning? Interesting place. And, saying something is a logical fallacy and then using one to support your argument is both an argument from ignorance and a self-refuting idea.
Thanks for playing, though.
you're arguing over fucking semantics man, who cares what you call it, the chemical reaction sure doesn't.
I don't think you know what the definition of semantics is, or you are using the same other-world dictionary that the commenter above used to define a chemical reaction, i.e., it's all burning.
"Combustion (pron.: /kmbs.tn/) or burning is the sequence of exothermic chemical reactions between a fuel and an oxidant accompanied by the production of heat and conversion of chemical species. The release of heat can produce light in the form of either glowing or a flame. Fuels of interest often include organic compounds (especially hydrocarbons) in the gas, liquid or solid phase."
By the definition of "Combustion" or "Burning" I will call BS on "this is not burning." The process described here oxidizes coal. He's breaking the initial chemical bonds of coal and adding an oxygen molecule to the carbon atom. For you non-scientific types, oxidation == burning.
This article suggests he's doing it more efficiently and creating less byproducts, such as CO, NOx, etc and making more CO2, which is then captured. It is still "burning" coal.
This process still doesn't address what material has the highest energy/density ratio. That is an exercise for the reader.
Well, an understanding of a chemical reaction would be necessary for you to call BS on my statement, or that of the researchers in question. Not all chemical reactions are combustion/burning. As in, not all rectangles are squares.
Oh, and here's an example oxidation that's not burning, Einstein.