New energy technology that doesn't have us filling our tanks with zebra dung distillate or paving Nebraska with solar collecters;
In basic ways, Alex Fassbender's breakthrough in clean-coal technology retains James Watt's methodology from the 18th century. You pulverize coal into particles as fine as talcum powder, then burn it in a furnace surrounded by pipes filled with water. You direct the steam into turbines that spin to produce electricity. In other basic ways, though, it is very different. For one thing, there's no smokestack.Mr. Fassbender is the American engineer whose invention - as tested last year in the federal government's energy labs in Ottawa - delivered clean electricity at a lower cost than the inventor himself had expected. Code-named TIPS (Thermo-energy Integrated Power System), the technology strips coal of its pollutants and captures its carbon emissions in power plants a 10th the size of conventional plants.
More - a little red meat for the engineering types: PRESSURIZED OXY-FUEL COMBUSTION FOR MULTI-POLLUTANT CAPTURE.
It's a form of gasifier.
Gasifiers can be used to extract combustible HCs out of anything that has Hydro Carbon Base while producing minimal pollution.
We have home grown developers of the same type of technology that have been at it for 30 years!
No matter how wonderful Fassbender's technology is he still won’t be allowed to break the Law. The Second Law of thermodynamics limits the efficiency of a cycle. This law can’t be repealed even by the activist judges on the SCC.
Wiki
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_engine
“The efficiency of various heat engines proposed or used today ranges from 3 percent [1](97 percent waste heat) for the OTEC ocean power proposal through 25 percent for most automotive engines, to 45 percent for a supercritical coal plant, to about 60 percent for a steam-cooled combined cycle gas turbine. All of these processes gain their efficiency (or lack thereof) due to the temperature drop across them.”
This 21 first century desire to hide CO2 away is becoming a fetish similar to the Victorians insistence on concealing the limbs of both ladies and furniture. Hiding limbs was more financially feasible though.
NOTE
Sorry about the lost comments - in deleting the double post, I inadvertantly removed the wrong one, including the comments thread. Feel free to repost them.
my apologies on the double post.....I thought I had avoided it....must have clicked the wrong button with the wrong tab open...there are usually many tabs up and going.
Anyway...essence of my message was that Western Civilization, or any civilization for that matter, has generally progressed through technological improvements. Those improvements are rarely centrally directed and rely on open markets for ideas, goods and services.
Assuming for the moment that this isnt cold fusion again, this is an indicator that we will pull ourselves out of whatever muck we have apparently thrown ourselves into.
Sounds pretty attractive, small local power generating stations using doemstically produced raw inputs and generating little if any ill effects. No LNG terminals required, saves nat gas for home heating and means there is no need for nuclear, with all its unintended consequences.
Sometimes the new spin on old technology is the best way to go.
I hope it is true.....
Maybe a quick note to Duhlton McSquinty about the Nanticoke coal fired generator would be in order eh? Be a hell of a lot cheaper to upgrade that than building a new nuke plant.
I've been wondering about this kind of technology lately. If you can gassify garbage with a plasma flame, should it not be 'way easier to do it with coal?
One more thing, this technology or another like it actually makes the electric car practical. We can even burn the brown coal from the Maritimes that normal coal fired generator plants don't want due to the sulpher content.
Can't wait to see the ecoweenies lining up to denounce it.
"Coal, EEEEWWWW!"
The paper was a good read (except I recommend the PDF version at Kate's link). If it works out it should / will be part of the solution (the solution to what is left open).
Any increase in efficiency is a good thing whether its goal is to reduce CO2 (it can't since higher effieciency = more CO2) or just squeezing out the most from the resource (it can).
If we increase coal plant efficiency, more of the hydrocarbon is converted to heat and CO2, less to CO and other crap. Such increases would have to be coupled to carbon capture and sequestration if the goal was to reduce CO2 emmisions.
It may be cheaper to build and run the nuke plant.
Ottaw will never go for this, Alberta's second most abundant non-renewable resource is coal! Ontario is already having trouble swallowing the imperceptible power shift that's been occuring over the last 10 years. This would be the nail in the coffin.
They likely won't qualify to get funding from the Green Technologies fund because they were going to do the development anyway. Kind of like how the Oil companies were going to pump CO2 into the ground to help push out the oil anyway, so a recent article said that they should not qualify for green funding. -- John M Reynolds
...won't fly, no one can make money at this.
The article references the sequestration point...whether feaible or not I am not qualified to judge.
But the promise of the article, if I read it correctly, is high effeciency power plant that can be kept small, it's secret sauce is high pressure which it leverages in a number of ways to extract more energy from the coal AND to sequester the CO2 in liquid or gaseous form.
Thats the promise in the article. WHether it is accurate or note is another matter, a higher paygrade is required to evaluate.
Unlike those loverly compact flourescent bulbs that are the magical solution (not!) anything the coal industry does is inherently evil so anything they say or do is not in keeping with the lefty/greenie agenda. Kind of like the nuclear industry, forever labeled with the China Syndrome. Like the cure for cancer, getting the world a bit healthier and energy efficient will not be done with one single simplistic "cure".
Vitruvius, Vitruvius! Wherefore art thou, Vitruvius?
My completely uninformed take on this is the following bit of pessimism...years and years ago, "they" said nuclear energy would be outrageously inexpensive and the ultimate solution for our power needs. Ya, right.
I'll play the wait and see game on this one. Anything that sounds too good to be true, usually is.
Well, unlike Romeo, do not expect Vitruvius to deny his namesake ;-) The TIPS stuff looks good. That's how we make slow, steady process, decade by decade, century by century. (Note that John is correct, read the PDF as the HTML scales poorly.)
As Matt Ridley wrote in 2003: "For the past century the world has got steadily better for most people. You do not believe that? I am not surprised. You are fed such a strong diet of news about how bad things are that it must be hard to believe they were once worse. But choose any statistic you like and it will show that the lot of even the poorest is better today than it was in 1903. [...] All this has been achieved primarily by that most hated of tricks, the technical fix. By invention, not legislation."
www.ihsresearch.com
An excellent post. leads to this page as well.
nrcan.gc.ca/es/etb/cetc/cetc01/htmldocs/Successstories/
new_high_efficiency_alternative_clean_coal_power_generation_tech_e.htm
http://tinyurl.com/359w83
= TG
Harness HOT AIR it would make AL GORE and the eco-wackos very usful