These are both external combustion technologies that pre-date the
internal combustion engine and both have been used in automobiles
as recently as the 1960s. The coal can be delivered to the burner in
powder form without mixing with water. These are entirely practical and
mature technologies. I am not sure of their efficiencies, but I bet they
beat coal to oil hands down.
I'm not passing judgement about the ethics of extending the automobile
age by employing this fuel source, and I'm sure they meet none of the
current emissions standards in the US or anywhere else. However, I
expect to see them being used in the not too distant future.
Most of coal grinding schemes currently in use are primarily rather dodgy tax scams intended to gain govt subsidies.
Practically speaking, there is still an important place for coal. Logically, used to produce stationary electricity. If clean coal burning plants were actually built, CO2 properly sequestered, coal becomes more practical then ever more scarce, natural gas. With one new coal burning power plant going up in China each week, no wonder many here are frightened. Even this aberrant growth may be self regulating.
Party aperachicks, like 19th century London power elite are just as unwilling to see their children sicken and die in orange air..
Let's encourage any new technology that will afford the world truly clean (burning) coal. If we don't, WHEN (cheap) NG runs out, with little or no progress replacing aging nuclear, the air will be too dirty to hang out that wash in any case.
I keep hearing and reading people mention carbon sequestration, but I have yet to hear about a working power-plant that sequesters its carbon and is net energy positive. I have also not heard a viable plan to create said power-plant. It is possible, of course, that one exists and I just haven't heard of it, but I doubt it. If anyone has some intel for me, I would appreciate it.
Until then, any mention of carbon sequestration as a solution will be filed along with fusion reactors under "Check back in a couple of decades".
Pulverized coal (PC)is a mature technology but dealing with coal fines is quite problematic. A typical PC burner is dealing with coal ground to the point of 85% through a 200 mesh screen for an agglomerating bituminous coal. Agglomeration occurs for many eastern bituminous coals when they are exposed to the heat of the burner flame, causing the coal particles to stick together and reducing the effective surface area for the coal particle.
The coal be a slightly more coarsely ground for non-agglomerating subbituminous coals (65-70% through 200 mesh screen). But subB coals tend to be wetter and harder to grind. And they both suffer from a serious problem if the coal particles are stored...
A spark and air and...boom.
Early PC systems used a blanket of inert gas to keep this from happening. PC systems quickly adopted a direct firing with no intermediate storage (ground coal blown down the pipe to the burner). The drying/conveying air in most modern PC burner designs is about 15-25% of the stoichiometric air required for combustion. This typically keeps the possibility of explosions/fires to a minimum though pulverizer fires are remarkably common at coal-fired power plants.
Your combustion efficiency (heat to steam) depends upon design. Modern large scal esystems accomplish remarkable heat transfer effciency. It becomes more difficult with smaller sizes and lower pressures and limited superheat. In addition, the steam thermodynamic cycle has it's own limits and it won't be the >30% efficiency that we associate with modern coal-burning power plants. The combination of low heat transfer effciency and low thermodynamic stema efficiency would probably put the coal burner much lower than you might expect.
I would suspect that your conclusion makes some basic assumptions about both mining and crushing the coal that may not be correct. There have been some interesting thoughts from Russia and elsewhere on the combination that might make quite a difference in the numbers for energy costs that should be used.
I was intrigued by the comment that it might be unethical to "extend the automobile age". You mean it might be unethical to find even good solutions? Is our civilization so evil that it needs to be destroyed?
Civilisation is not evil, but your post implies that you see it as impossible without
the automobile. I see it the otherway round, if we are not do destroy civilisation through
catastrophic climate change, then the car has to go. We cannot afford to burn that much carbon,
and once oil runs short, the amount of carbon burnt will get worse as we revert down the chain
to burning coal. Renewables will never provide enough energy.
China did very well without the car until 10 years ago, India about 20 years
ago. Europe will get by if forced to do without it. I can't speak for the US, but I can't
imagine that it will by it self, reduce society back to olduvii gorge.
Civilization is not evil, but it is lethal to all life. Civilization is a natural phenomenon every bit as much as a violent volcanic eruption or a forest fire or mold on cheese or a supernova. When all the right conditions for civilization are present and the ingredients are readily available, civilization has a chance of happening. Like any other complex natural phenomenon, there is a lot of chance involved in the particulars of exactly what kicks it off, but if the conditions are right, it will
take root and grow. For moldy cheese, the conditions are cheese, the right temperature and humidity, a mold spore, and being left alone for a while. For civilization, it's
a bit more complex, but the most important ingredients are energy, the means to exploit the energy, a reproducible change in the balance of power that involves the exploitation of that energy, and the inertia of competetive escalation.
The change in the balance of power is the thing that trips it off. In the first stage of civilization, it was the beginning of food production which led to a huge boom in food supply and the density of food supply, in all likelihood in its origins an essentially random change in the ongoing evolution of cultural idiosyncracies. Most such idiosyncracies are harmless and quaint- they don't affect the balance of power. Some of them did, though, and by the time anyone noticed what had happened the process had probably been going on for a long time.
Once the population practicing the particular idiosyncracy which affected
their food supply in a positive way, and their population increased, the particular idiosyncracy was also being practiced more widely. Sooner or later this led to a population pressure which forced the paractitioners of that idiosyncracy (which for many many generations must have not seemed like anything
important to anyone) to spread out more, and since they had a more intense exploitation of the resources of the environment, over time their population prevailed over or simply outbred others - or the idiosyncracy was adopted by
the neighbors. This self-reinforcing process only became more intense over time,
but the process was very slow. It probably kicked off and died out dozens of times before ever getting out of the stone age- the technology of stone tools
was sufficient for there to be an opportunity for the past 12-14 thousand years, and the climate after the last ice age made other conditions favorable in that timeframe as well. Thousands of years later people were aware of the process and
since the total environmental impact was still minor, began to enthusiastically pride themselves on their superiority because of their set of self-reinforcing cultural idiosyncracies which affected food production. These were the first village and town dwellers.
From there, the escalation of civilization has progressed, and from a very early time people were aware that by playing that game they were living beyond their means and only postponing the day of reckoning at the cost of making the reckoning worse when it finally came. Sumerian philosophers five and a half thousand years ago were lamenting this in their mythologies of the origins of cities (which were the protoype for later mesopotamian mythologies of the conquerors of the sumerians, who are the ancestors of the present inhabitants,
and the cultural progenitors of the modern-day dominant religions) and recognized the inescapable 'deal with the devil' that they had entered. For it is true that
while that escalatory game is being played, there is no escape- everyone present has to play or be out-competed by someone who does. Since then there have been countless attempts to hold back the process or mitigate its awful and destructive effects, but of course we all know that at the very best those attempts have turned into moral admonitions and the rest flat out failures.
Only when the game itself starts to run out of fuel does the whole thing start to break down and alternatives begin to for the first time present any kind of opportunity at all. The viable long term strategy for H. Sapeins is, and will remain, a hunter-gatherer lifestyle.
Civilization, like any other positive feedback loop, is a self-correcting phenomenon. We have the blessing and the curse of living in the interesting times where we get to observe the natural processes of conservation take their due. Driving hybrid cars and recycling won't do anything to change the matter, and
moral arguments don't really have anything to do with what's essentially a physics problem. PO is only one of the parameters which are contributing to the
new regime of the escalation game having entered the conditions for collapse, but
it is a significant one and worth discussion. Investing in renewables without leaving the technological paradigm behind is a shortsighted and failure-prone approach (though stocking up on canned foods and building a bunker in wyoming is equally shortsighted and failure-prone.. both are extremes.) The real 'renewables' are the ones that have been here long before civilization and will be here again long after even an archaeologist would have a hard time finding any evidence of civilization's rise and fall.
Sir! Lay down that keyboard and step away from the computer! It is a product of... civilization.
You can pick up your stone tools at the local center for de-civilisation. Your clothing will be replaced with a decency loin fur for the beginners. Please do not complain to the attendant about the fleas in the fur, they are perfectly normal. So is an initial allergic reaction and the rash that usually follows. Once you survive both, have your tape worms implanted and get used to the other natural parasites, your immune system will rapidly learn to adapt to the host of diseases that are common in de-civilised people. Your life expectancy will not decrease by more than 40 years if you are 30 years of age or younger.
Lessons in how to distinguish edible maggots from poisonous ones will be held next full moon. Until then you are well advised to starve because you will not receive any form of medical treatment from now on. Please do not eat any types of red berries, no matter how hungry you are. Most types of tree bark is safe to eat, albeit not very nourishing, some are medicinal and you will figure out the ones from trees to avoid all by yourself. Please try to remember what poison ivy looks like. We had a very unfortunate case of a person filling up on it last year. Very tragic... we all remember the muzzled screams of the suffocating young man all too well.
The center for de-civilisation is proud to announce its annual success figures. Over 31% of all participants have learned in time to hunt small animals before they died of protein deficiency last summer. Of all surviving participants in the program the oldest is 42 years of age and going strong (he lost only a couple of toes to frostbite last year). And even though he lost all his teeth to scurvy last recently and has a hard time chewing raw meat, he is very hopefull to make it through summer and probably even survive until next spring.
The center for de-civilisation has decided not to allow the annual meeting of hunter-gatherers any longer because they violated the statutes. Some of them have been seen building shelters from natural materials.
You can pick up your stone tools at the local center for de-civilisation. Your clothing will be replaced with a decency loin fur for the beginners. Please do not complain to the attendant about the fleas in the fur, they are perfectly normal. So is an initial allergic reaction and the rash that usually follows. Once you survive both, have your tape worms implanted and get used to the other natural parasites, your immune system will rapidly learn to adapt to the host of diseases that are common in de-civilised people. Your life expectancy will not decrease by more than 40 years if you are 30 years of age or younger.
De-civilization is a process which future humans will undergo by necessity, not choice. I don't imagine that many will survive the process because technological civilization has destroyed, degraded and polluted all of the ecosystems which formerly made life possible in the pre-industrial age.
Such is the price humankind will pay for the foolish, destructive and failing experiment in civilization. When the bill becomes due billions will die. Such is fate of humankind.
I stil find it amusing that people, like IP, use such pathetic arguments. The idea that arguing against the prevalent society requires that you argue from the position of someone who has already formed that other society is logically retarded. It is like saying that we cannot argue global warming unless everyone who is against it gives up any and all carbon production first.
As a member of western society, I swim in tech everyday. I am assaulted by it at every turn. An alternate society does not exist yet. That does not mean that tech is okay because we MUST use it to make our points.
You may as well tell American revolutionaries to stop busting King George's chops until you already have a country.
I stil find it amusing that people, like IP, use such pathetic arguments. The idea that arguing against the prevalent society requires that you argue from the position of someone who has already formed that other society is logically retarded. It is like saying that we cannot argue global warming unless everyone who is against it gives up any and all carbon production first.
As a member of western society, I swim in tech everyday. I am assaulted by it at every turn. An alternate society does not exist yet. That does not mean that tech is okay because we MUST use it to make our points.
You may as well tell American revolutionaries to stop busting King George's chops until you already have a country.
My point was that the poster that I was replying to seemed to be suggesting that, for ethical reasons, we might not even want to determine whether a technology was a good one because maybe we should have the objective to end the age of the automobile. This to me is a kind of Eager Doomer mentality. I have read this kind of thinking often here so I am sort of picking an argument because I think this kind of talk does more than almost anything else to marginalize and discredit the Peak Oil "movement". I do not think the mainstream community is going to take us seriously if we seem to be cheering for and working towards the end of civilization.
I can see the value in a smaller population but I am not about to work to enable a big die-off. I am not about to dismiss mitigations that might preserve many aspect of life as we know it now. I do not think it is time to man the lifeboats. If we do not all hang together, we will all hang separately.
I'm sick of these "Eager Doomers" too. Not to straw man, but the "Eager Doomer" position sounds a lot like the Khmer Rouge ideology whose goal was to get rid of industrial society and modern influences, and to go back to a society based on self-sufficient subsistence agriculture. They actually tried to implement it -- by whatever means necessary. Not pretty, but after the regime collapsed, Pol Pot insisted the whole thing didn't work because of "errors in the implementation". Might have even muddled along if they hadn't been so dumb to attack Vietnam. If it had we would have been able to send all the "Eager Doomers" to live there.
Yeah, let's keep that automobile alive. Let's put ALL the ancient carbon sinks back into the atmosphere. Let us not be too eager to get away from a species killing technology. There are still a few years left in our poisonous paradigm.
I also find it amusing that these people who chide the so-called "doomers" believe that civilization must contain automobiles, or computers, or chocolate or whatever particular particular element they have arbitrarily decided constitutes "civilization."
Nature will reign us in. That is a fact. Sure, we can help make it particularly bloody by extending the poisonous paradigm. Nature does not care. The environment is the environment is the environment. Question is, do we want an environment that will prove a blessing to humanity or one that only harbors roaches living off the detritus of our failed species?
You make your choice obvious with every tech worshipping comment you make.
Its just the typical desire to see the transition between one age to another. I expect many people will be disapointed in fifty years to see even more automobiles than there are today.
I'm afraid I see a lot of wishful thinking going on... we are not even close to an oil scarcity problem yet and we see people dismissing many potentially feasible (and dirty!) alternatives (CTL, methanol, PC, tar sands, oil shale etc.). With the (should I say "naive") assumption being that when oil becomes scarce, people are simply going to choose to walk away from their cars and MacMansions in favour of becoming organic farmers. Not going to happen.
Yours is a weird comment. You hate coal, yet you are burning several lbs. of it every time you turn on your computer for a couple of hours. What do you do that for? Why don't you have solar panels? They will still allow you to turn your computer on and you wouldn't be burning any coal, at all.
And why do you want to burn books? They have a very low heat content and are much more useful as insulation material for your home. If you want to destroy them, at least do it in a way that makes sense.
I would (almost) NEVER burn books ... but others certainly will!
Even major eco-warriors take low cost flights ... and I am no better.
If the people who care nevertheless use tons of energy and natural resources then the human race has no chance ... the aware & caring souls will use quite a lot ... and the "masses" will gobble up EVERYTHING else.
Be honest: how many people do you know have given up almost all energy & resource consumption?
Even if you know 3 or 4, they are the amazing exceptions.
To keep my family healthy I am prepared to use energy & resources.
Maybe not much ... but probably way too much for a healthy global future ...
It is going to be tough. If we make wise decisions we can have a pretty good outcome. I am not predicting that we will. The kind of political leadership we have had recently does not inspire optimism. But, I can envision a world that I will be glad to leave to my children. I am in favor of working toward the best possible outcome.
Yeah, let's keep that automobile alive. Let's put ALL the ancient carbon sinks back into the atmosphere. Let us not be too eager to get away from a species killing technology. There are still a few years left in our poisonous paradigm.
I also find it amusing that these people who chide the so-called "doomers" believe that civilization must contain automobiles, or computers, or chocolate or whatever particular particular element they have arbitrarily decided constitutes "civilization."
Nature will reign us in. That is a fact. Sure, we can help make it particularly bloody by extending the poisonous paradigm. Nature does not care. The environment is the environment is the environment. Question is, do we want an environment that will prove a blessing to humanity or one that only harbors roaches living off the detritus of our failed species?
You make your choice obvious with every tech worshipping comment you make.
I see you save a lot of effort by using the same posts several times.
I realize that I should resist the temptation to respond to your incoherent, angry rants.
My thought is first you evaluate a technology and see if it is effective and clean. Then you decide whether you are going to use it. Would you object to a zero carbon vehicle, like one that ran on batteries and used a nuclear or solar power plant to charge it?
I am chiding doomers for not having an open mind about what might be the best possible outcome for humanity and the planet. You seem to be against civilization, however you define it. I think there is a lot of good in it that we should continue to build on.
Yes, I am a fan of technology. I want to insure a good life for my kids. It also appears that I differ from you in that I do not hate humanity.
Amazing. Its like some people never heard of nuclear power or any other fossil alternative.
I have heard of nuclear power. I oppose nuclear power.
The other fossil alternatives are also really bad ideas, too. Humankind needs to live without because otherwise Nature will exterminate the primate pest and move on without remorse.
I was only wondering about the slight off-centeredness of your post, not about your true intentions. People who really burn books talk differently.
There is nothing inherently bad about low cost flights. First of all, there is no other way to get from A to B in an energy efficient way if A and B are separated by an ocean. Secondly, most planes are reasonably fuel efficient these days. Way better than most American cars, anyway. And if you look at the total amount of CO2 generated by aviation, FOR NOW it is being dwarfed by the amounts used for electricity generation and heating. Obviously, you want to start saving where saving makes the most sense. Aviation won't be the right choice. This does not mean that at some point in the future we do not have to offset the CO2 from aviation. We do, but only after we are done with the easier stuff.
"Be honest: how many people do you know have given up almost all energy & resource consumption?"
Nobody. And I am not looking for those. I want everybody on average to conserve a couple of percent a year. That's the key to the solution: make small changes at a time, beginning with the most obvious and the easiest to fix problems.
Installing CFLs is one of those things that everybody could do right away and it would save massive amounts of energy.
Turn the power settings on your computer on and disable that stupid screen saver... your LCD does not burn in like your CRTs did and will be turned off anyway once the power saving scheme kicks in.
How about dring clothes on a line in summer?
Increasing the tire pressure in your car?
Drive at the speed limit and not 5mph faster?
Then, check your apppliances. How old is the fridge? Old enough to be an energy hog?
How about using a fan instead of the AC in summer?
How about better insulation for the home? A new, more efficient car? And so on... I know that the doomer scenario of pillaging hordes is more attractive than people actually saving energy the right way, but that is not what we need to be interested in. Compare that to religions. How useful are those which preach that the end is near, the rapture will occure next Tuesday and that you better kill yourself now because death by a flaming sword will be so much more painful than the poison "the leader" will give you?
If we had nothing but the things under control that come almost for free, like the CFLs, the clothes line, tire pressure and speed limits, we would be saving 10%+ of energy easy at home and on the highway. The less modest investments in efficiency and conservation can buy us another 20+%, albeit at a much higher price. Finally, investment in renewable generation will get us another 30% down from where we are and will save disproportionate amounts of carbon.
We are not stuffed. We just have to learn to pay attention to how we are doing things.
I, for instance, just got my Kill-A-Watt. Tonight I will make quantitative measurements where I used to guess what my consumption was.
A local environmental group I'm on the board of decided to purchase a bunch of these sort of meters to lend to folks. We looked at the "Kill-a-Watt" but found a similar device, the EM100 by "UPM Products", to be a better choice in our opinion.
One of the big advantages is that the EM100 has a small battery in it so that it retains its stored data even if unplugged or if there is a power failure during recording. With the "Kill a Watt" you need to get down on your hands and knees to read it while its still plugged into the wall, or it forgets. Also a somewhat nicer set of functions.
The EM100 is sold at "Canadian Tire" stores if you are up this way (Canada), web info for them is here:
I think the really bad phase of peak oil re-adjustment will start when people stop discussing when the ship will sink, what pieces of their luggage they're going to bring with them, and how to do the back stroke and start discussing who they're going to kick out of the lifeboat. ;)
I'm afraid I see a lot of wishful thinking going on... we are not even close to an oil scarcity problem yet and we see people dismissing many potentially feasible (and dirty!) alternatives (CTL, methanol, PC, tar sands, oil shale etc.). With the (should I say "naive") assumption being that when oil becomes scarce, people are simply going to choose to walk away from their cars and MacMansions in favour of becoming organic farmers. Not going to happen.
If humankind chooses this path it is certain that Homo sapiens will go extinct. Not that I have any objections to that ...
Human kind does not "choose" paths. In the grander scale of things human kind evolves, just like any other species on this planet. If it reaches the limits of its ecological niche it will adjust one way or another. You say it will do it by going extinct - that's fine for me, if you can live with that thought. But there are examples when species have adapted and you still have to convince me why humans are not one of those species. Ecological history shows quite the opposite actually - that we are the most adaptable species that has ever lived on this planet. Just consider what we have achieved for mere 10,000 years.
What we are doing here is nothing else but trying to increase our personal and collective adaptivity level. The goal in the end is to reduce the impact and try to avert the worst possible scenarios... not that I believe that discussions on the internet can do it, but it is much better than nothing.
Your constantly expressed hatred towards humans is the most distructive thing I've seen on this blog recently. In the grander scale of things we are not "good" or "bad" species, we just "are" species. Mother nature is patient and will survive even if we indeed fail.
Human kind does not "choose" paths. In the grander scale of things human kind evolves, just like any other species on this planet. If it reaches the limits of its ecological niche it will adjust one way or another. You say it will do it by going extinct - that's fine for me, if you can live with that thought. But there are examples when species have adapted and you still have to convince me why humans are not one of those species. Ecological history shows quite the opposite actually - that we are the most adaptable species that has ever lived on this planet. Just consider what we have achieved for mere 10,000 years.
I see what humankind has done over the last ten thousand years and it looks like a catastrophe to me. Humans have destroyed, depleted, polluted and degraded the Earth in a fashion which will make life extremely difficult over the next several centuries.
As to the question of humankind's ability to adapt: Human's don't adapt. Humans modify the environment to suit our own whims and desire for comfort. Have you noticed all of the air conditioners, automobiles, grocery stores and restaurants? These are all evidences that humankind simply cannot survive without the technological crutch. When all of these things are gone it is difficult to imagine how humankind will survive. I suspect that we won't, but we'll have to see about that.
What we are doing here is nothing else but trying to increase our personal and collective adaptivity level. The goal in the end is to reduce the impact and try to avert the worst possible scenarios... not that I believe that discussions on the internet can do it, but it is much better than nothing.
I don't imagine that this is the case. It appears to me that more than anything else people on The Oil Drum are seeking to protect their careers and investments. Adaptability, survivability and sustainability are not the primary concern especially in threads such as these.
Your constantly expressed hatred towards humans is the most distructive thing I've seen on this blog recently. In the grander scale of things we are not "good" or "bad" species, we just "are" species. Mother nature is patient and will survive even if we indeed fail.
Homo sapiens are a terrible species. Homo sapiens are a plague upon the Earth. Homo sapiens have polluted the entire globe. Homo sapiens have driven numerous species to extinction.
Yes, humankind is evil. The worse sort of biological evil that this world has ever experienced over the last six hundred million years. But this is a mistake which Nature can, and will, fix.
Two things come to mind.
Steam engines.
Stirling Engines.
These are both external combustion technologies that pre-date the
internal combustion engine and both have been used in automobiles
as recently as the 1960s. The coal can be delivered to the burner in
powder form without mixing with water. These are entirely practical and
mature technologies. I am not sure of their efficiencies, but I bet they
beat coal to oil hands down.
I'm not passing judgement about the ethics of extending the automobile
age by employing this fuel source, and I'm sure they meet none of the
current emissions standards in the US or anywhere else. However, I
expect to see them being used in the not too distant future.
My initial reaction to the "new" fuel (coal) was to post something to do with Choo Choos: http://www.internationalsteam.co.uk/trains/newsteam/modern12.htm
Most of coal grinding schemes currently in use are primarily rather dodgy tax scams intended to gain govt subsidies.
Practically speaking, there is still an important place for coal. Logically, used to produce stationary electricity. If clean coal burning plants were actually built, CO2 properly sequestered, coal becomes more practical then ever more scarce, natural gas. With one new coal burning power plant going up in China each week, no wonder many here are frightened. Even this aberrant growth may be self regulating.
Party aperachicks, like 19th century London power elite are just as unwilling to see their children sicken and die in orange air..
Let's encourage any new technology that will afford the world truly clean (burning) coal. If we don't, WHEN (cheap) NG runs out, with little or no progress replacing aging nuclear, the air will be too dirty to hang out that wash in any case.
I keep hearing and reading people mention carbon sequestration, but I have yet to hear about a working power-plant that sequesters its carbon and is net energy positive. I have also not heard a viable plan to create said power-plant. It is possible, of course, that one exists and I just haven't heard of it, but I doubt it. If anyone has some intel for me, I would appreciate it.
Until then, any mention of carbon sequestration as a solution will be filed along with fusion reactors under "Check back in a couple of decades".
http://usinfo.state.gov/gi/Archive/2004/Dec/15-595073.html
Weyburn, Saskatchewan, whose CO2 comes from:
http://www.dakotagas.com/
which is a gasification plant, but in principle no difference from a gasification power plant like
http://www.netl.doe.gov/technologies/coalpower/cctc/summaries/wabsh/waba...
So the technology exists. There are about 20 operational IGCC power plants in the world. What remains is to hook the pieces up.
It might be 20+ years from universal use, but it's 10 years or less from practical wide scale deployment.
Fusion by contrast is 50 years out. Even the advocates think it is 50 years out.
Pulverized coal (PC)is a mature technology but dealing with coal fines is quite problematic. A typical PC burner is dealing with coal ground to the point of 85% through a 200 mesh screen for an agglomerating bituminous coal. Agglomeration occurs for many eastern bituminous coals when they are exposed to the heat of the burner flame, causing the coal particles to stick together and reducing the effective surface area for the coal particle.
The coal be a slightly more coarsely ground for non-agglomerating subbituminous coals (65-70% through 200 mesh screen). But subB coals tend to be wetter and harder to grind. And they both suffer from a serious problem if the coal particles are stored...
A spark and air and...boom.
Early PC systems used a blanket of inert gas to keep this from happening. PC systems quickly adopted a direct firing with no intermediate storage (ground coal blown down the pipe to the burner). The drying/conveying air in most modern PC burner designs is about 15-25% of the stoichiometric air required for combustion. This typically keeps the possibility of explosions/fires to a minimum though pulverizer fires are remarkably common at coal-fired power plants.
Your combustion efficiency (heat to steam) depends upon design. Modern large scal esystems accomplish remarkable heat transfer effciency. It becomes more difficult with smaller sizes and lower pressures and limited superheat. In addition, the steam thermodynamic cycle has it's own limits and it won't be the >30% efficiency that we associate with modern coal-burning power plants. The combination of low heat transfer effciency and low thermodynamic stema efficiency would probably put the coal burner much lower than you might expect.
We've been through this on another thread.
The short answer is: No.
External combustion engines do not beat the combined mine to wheels efficiency of a CTL machine.
On top of that there is the mechanical handling of raw coal vs. the convienience of liquid fuels.
Plus the localised pollution control aspect. Coal burning is much better off done at centralised plants with emission controls.
Andy
I would suspect that your conclusion makes some basic assumptions about both mining and crushing the coal that may not be correct. There have been some interesting thoughts from Russia and elsewhere on the combination that might make quite a difference in the numbers for energy costs that should be used.
I was intrigued by the comment that it might be unethical to "extend the automobile age". You mean it might be unethical to find even good solutions? Is our civilization so evil that it needs to be destroyed?
Civilisation is not evil, but your post implies that you see it as impossible without
the automobile. I see it the otherway round, if we are not do destroy civilisation through
catastrophic climate change, then the car has to go. We cannot afford to burn that much carbon,
and once oil runs short, the amount of carbon burnt will get worse as we revert down the chain
to burning coal. Renewables will never provide enough energy.
China did very well without the car until 10 years ago, India about 20 years
ago. Europe will get by if forced to do without it. I can't speak for the US, but I can't
imagine that it will by it self, reduce society back to olduvii gorge.
Civilization is not evil, but it is lethal to all life. Civilization is a natural phenomenon every bit as much as a violent volcanic eruption or a forest fire or mold on cheese or a supernova. When all the right conditions for civilization are present and the ingredients are readily available, civilization has a chance of happening. Like any other complex natural phenomenon, there is a lot of chance involved in the particulars of exactly what kicks it off, but if the conditions are right, it will
take root and grow. For moldy cheese, the conditions are cheese, the right temperature and humidity, a mold spore, and being left alone for a while. For civilization, it's
a bit more complex, but the most important ingredients are energy, the means to exploit the energy, a reproducible change in the balance of power that involves the exploitation of that energy, and the inertia of competetive escalation.
The change in the balance of power is the thing that trips it off. In the first stage of civilization, it was the beginning of food production which led to a huge boom in food supply and the density of food supply, in all likelihood in its origins an essentially random change in the ongoing evolution of cultural idiosyncracies. Most such idiosyncracies are harmless and quaint- they don't affect the balance of power. Some of them did, though, and by the time anyone noticed what had happened the process had probably been going on for a long time.
Once the population practicing the particular idiosyncracy which affected
their food supply in a positive way, and their population increased, the particular idiosyncracy was also being practiced more widely. Sooner or later this led to a population pressure which forced the paractitioners of that idiosyncracy (which for many many generations must have not seemed like anything
important to anyone) to spread out more, and since they had a more intense exploitation of the resources of the environment, over time their population prevailed over or simply outbred others - or the idiosyncracy was adopted by
the neighbors. This self-reinforcing process only became more intense over time,
but the process was very slow. It probably kicked off and died out dozens of times before ever getting out of the stone age- the technology of stone tools
was sufficient for there to be an opportunity for the past 12-14 thousand years, and the climate after the last ice age made other conditions favorable in that timeframe as well. Thousands of years later people were aware of the process and
since the total environmental impact was still minor, began to enthusiastically pride themselves on their superiority because of their set of self-reinforcing cultural idiosyncracies which affected food production. These were the first village and town dwellers.
From there, the escalation of civilization has progressed, and from a very early time people were aware that by playing that game they were living beyond their means and only postponing the day of reckoning at the cost of making the reckoning worse when it finally came. Sumerian philosophers five and a half thousand years ago were lamenting this in their mythologies of the origins of cities (which were the protoype for later mesopotamian mythologies of the conquerors of the sumerians, who are the ancestors of the present inhabitants,
and the cultural progenitors of the modern-day dominant religions) and recognized the inescapable 'deal with the devil' that they had entered. For it is true that
while that escalatory game is being played, there is no escape- everyone present has to play or be out-competed by someone who does. Since then there have been countless attempts to hold back the process or mitigate its awful and destructive effects, but of course we all know that at the very best those attempts have turned into moral admonitions and the rest flat out failures.
Only when the game itself starts to run out of fuel does the whole thing start to break down and alternatives begin to for the first time present any kind of opportunity at all. The viable long term strategy for H. Sapeins is, and will remain, a hunter-gatherer lifestyle.
Civilization, like any other positive feedback loop, is a self-correcting phenomenon. We have the blessing and the curse of living in the interesting times where we get to observe the natural processes of conservation take their due. Driving hybrid cars and recycling won't do anything to change the matter, and
moral arguments don't really have anything to do with what's essentially a physics problem. PO is only one of the parameters which are contributing to the
new regime of the escalation game having entered the conditions for collapse, but
it is a significant one and worth discussion. Investing in renewables without leaving the technological paradigm behind is a shortsighted and failure-prone approach (though stocking up on canned foods and building a bunker in wyoming is equally shortsighted and failure-prone.. both are extremes.) The real 'renewables' are the ones that have been here long before civilization and will be here again long after even an archaeologist would have a hard time finding any evidence of civilization's rise and fall.
Sir! Lay down that keyboard and step away from the computer! It is a product of... civilization.
You can pick up your stone tools at the local center for de-civilisation. Your clothing will be replaced with a decency loin fur for the beginners. Please do not complain to the attendant about the fleas in the fur, they are perfectly normal. So is an initial allergic reaction and the rash that usually follows. Once you survive both, have your tape worms implanted and get used to the other natural parasites, your immune system will rapidly learn to adapt to the host of diseases that are common in de-civilised people. Your life expectancy will not decrease by more than 40 years if you are 30 years of age or younger.
Lessons in how to distinguish edible maggots from poisonous ones will be held next full moon. Until then you are well advised to starve because you will not receive any form of medical treatment from now on. Please do not eat any types of red berries, no matter how hungry you are. Most types of tree bark is safe to eat, albeit not very nourishing, some are medicinal and you will figure out the ones from trees to avoid all by yourself. Please try to remember what poison ivy looks like. We had a very unfortunate case of a person filling up on it last year. Very tragic... we all remember the muzzled screams of the suffocating young man all too well.
The center for de-civilisation is proud to announce its annual success figures. Over 31% of all participants have learned in time to hunt small animals before they died of protein deficiency last summer. Of all surviving participants in the program the oldest is 42 years of age and going strong (he lost only a couple of toes to frostbite last year). And even though he lost all his teeth to scurvy last recently and has a hard time chewing raw meat, he is very hopefull to make it through summer and probably even survive until next spring.
The center for de-civilisation has decided not to allow the annual meeting of hunter-gatherers any longer because they violated the statutes. Some of them have been seen building shelters from natural materials.
:-)
Hello IP,
De-civilization is a process which future humans will undergo by necessity, not choice. I don't imagine that many will survive the process because technological civilization has destroyed, degraded and polluted all of the ecosystems which formerly made life possible in the pre-industrial age.
Such is the price humankind will pay for the foolish, destructive and failing experiment in civilization. When the bill becomes due billions will die. Such is fate of humankind.
David Mathews
http://www.geocities.com/dmathew1
I stil find it amusing that people, like IP, use such pathetic arguments. The idea that arguing against the prevalent society requires that you argue from the position of someone who has already formed that other society is logically retarded. It is like saying that we cannot argue global warming unless everyone who is against it gives up any and all carbon production first.
As a member of western society, I swim in tech everyday. I am assaulted by it at every turn. An alternate society does not exist yet. That does not mean that tech is okay because we MUST use it to make our points.
You may as well tell American revolutionaries to stop busting King George's chops until you already have a country.
Sad, sad monkey.
I stil find it amusing that people, like IP, use such pathetic arguments. The idea that arguing against the prevalent society requires that you argue from the position of someone who has already formed that other society is logically retarded. It is like saying that we cannot argue global warming unless everyone who is against it gives up any and all carbon production first.
As a member of western society, I swim in tech everyday. I am assaulted by it at every turn. An alternate society does not exist yet. That does not mean that tech is okay because we MUST use it to make our points.
You may as well tell American revolutionaries to stop busting King George's chops until you already have a country.
Sad, sad monkey.
My point was that the poster that I was replying to seemed to be suggesting that, for ethical reasons, we might not even want to determine whether a technology was a good one because maybe we should have the objective to end the age of the automobile. This to me is a kind of Eager Doomer mentality. I have read this kind of thinking often here so I am sort of picking an argument because I think this kind of talk does more than almost anything else to marginalize and discredit the Peak Oil "movement". I do not think the mainstream community is going to take us seriously if we seem to be cheering for and working towards the end of civilization.
I can see the value in a smaller population but I am not about to work to enable a big die-off. I am not about to dismiss mitigations that might preserve many aspect of life as we know it now. I do not think it is time to man the lifeboats. If we do not all hang together, we will all hang separately.
I'm sick of these "Eager Doomers" too. Not to straw man, but the "Eager Doomer" position sounds a lot like the Khmer Rouge ideology whose goal was to get rid of industrial society and modern influences, and to go back to a society based on self-sufficient subsistence agriculture. They actually tried to implement it -- by whatever means necessary. Not pretty, but after the regime collapsed, Pol Pot insisted the whole thing didn't work because of "errors in the implementation". Might have even muddled along if they hadn't been so dumb to attack Vietnam. If it had we would have been able to send all the "Eager Doomers" to live there.
LOL.
Yeah, let's keep that automobile alive. Let's put ALL the ancient carbon sinks back into the atmosphere. Let us not be too eager to get away from a species killing technology. There are still a few years left in our poisonous paradigm.
I also find it amusing that these people who chide the so-called "doomers" believe that civilization must contain automobiles, or computers, or chocolate or whatever particular particular element they have arbitrarily decided constitutes "civilization."
Nature will reign us in. That is a fact. Sure, we can help make it particularly bloody by extending the poisonous paradigm. Nature does not care. The environment is the environment is the environment. Question is, do we want an environment that will prove a blessing to humanity or one that only harbors roaches living off the detritus of our failed species?
You make your choice obvious with every tech worshipping comment you make.
Its just the typical desire to see the transition between one age to another. I expect many people will be disapointed in fifty years to see even more automobiles than there are today.
I second that.
I'm afraid I see a lot of wishful thinking going on... we are not even close to an oil scarcity problem yet and we see people dismissing many potentially feasible (and dirty!) alternatives (CTL, methanol, PC, tar sands, oil shale etc.). With the (should I say "naive") assumption being that when oil becomes scarce, people are simply going to choose to walk away from their cars and MacMansions in favour of becoming organic farmers. Not going to happen.
Do I hate coal? Yes.
Would I use a coal powered car to go to work? Probably not.
Would I use a coal powered car to go on holiday? Maybe.
Would I drive a coal powered car to take my wife to hospital? Yes.
Would I drive a coal powered tractor on my farm? Yes.
Would I operate a coal powered generator to run my PCs & run my wife's washing machine? Yes.
We may do it slowly ... but we WILL burn ALL the coal ... and chairs and park benches ... and books ...
Yours is a weird comment. You hate coal, yet you are burning several lbs. of it every time you turn on your computer for a couple of hours. What do you do that for? Why don't you have solar panels? They will still allow you to turn your computer on and you wouldn't be burning any coal, at all.
And why do you want to burn books? They have a very low heat content and are much more useful as insulation material for your home. If you want to destroy them, at least do it in a way that makes sense.
I would (almost) NEVER burn books ... but others certainly will!
Even major eco-warriors take low cost flights ... and I am no better.
If the people who care nevertheless use tons of energy and natural resources then the human race has no chance ... the aware & caring souls will use quite a lot ... and the "masses" will gobble up EVERYTHING else.
Be honest: how many people do you know have given up almost all energy & resource consumption?
Even if you know 3 or 4, they are the amazing exceptions.
To keep my family healthy I am prepared to use energy & resources.
Maybe not much ... but probably way too much for a healthy global future ...
We are so stuffed!
Amazing. Its like some people never heard of nuclear power or any other fossil alternative.
Heavily emotionally invested in the Eager Doomer mentality.
Yeah right, it's all smooth sailing from here huh! ;)
It is going to be tough. If we make wise decisions we can have a pretty good outcome. I am not predicting that we will. The kind of political leadership we have had recently does not inspire optimism. But, I can envision a world that I will be glad to leave to my children. I am in favor of working toward the best possible outcome.
LOL.
Yeah, let's keep that automobile alive. Let's put ALL the ancient carbon sinks back into the atmosphere. Let us not be too eager to get away from a species killing technology. There are still a few years left in our poisonous paradigm.
I also find it amusing that these people who chide the so-called "doomers" believe that civilization must contain automobiles, or computers, or chocolate or whatever particular particular element they have arbitrarily decided constitutes "civilization."
Nature will reign us in. That is a fact. Sure, we can help make it particularly bloody by extending the poisonous paradigm. Nature does not care. The environment is the environment is the environment. Question is, do we want an environment that will prove a blessing to humanity or one that only harbors roaches living off the detritus of our failed species?
You make your choice obvious with every tech worshipping comment you make.
Cherenkov,
I see you save a lot of effort by using the same posts several times.
I realize that I should resist the temptation to respond to your incoherent, angry rants.
My thought is first you evaluate a technology and see if it is effective and clean. Then you decide whether you are going to use it. Would you object to a zero carbon vehicle, like one that ran on batteries and used a nuclear or solar power plant to charge it?
I am chiding doomers for not having an open mind about what might be the best possible outcome for humanity and the planet. You seem to be against civilization, however you define it. I think there is a lot of good in it that we should continue to build on.
Yes, I am a fan of technology. I want to insure a good life for my kids. It also appears that I differ from you in that I do not hate humanity.
Hello Deakin,
I have heard of nuclear power. I oppose nuclear power.
The other fossil alternatives are also really bad ideas, too. Humankind needs to live without because otherwise Nature will exterminate the primate pest and move on without remorse.
David Mathews
http://www.geocities.com/dmathew1
I was only wondering about the slight off-centeredness of your post, not about your true intentions. People who really burn books talk differently.
There is nothing inherently bad about low cost flights. First of all, there is no other way to get from A to B in an energy efficient way if A and B are separated by an ocean. Secondly, most planes are reasonably fuel efficient these days. Way better than most American cars, anyway. And if you look at the total amount of CO2 generated by aviation, FOR NOW it is being dwarfed by the amounts used for electricity generation and heating. Obviously, you want to start saving where saving makes the most sense. Aviation won't be the right choice. This does not mean that at some point in the future we do not have to offset the CO2 from aviation. We do, but only after we are done with the easier stuff.
"Be honest: how many people do you know have given up almost all energy & resource consumption?"
Nobody. And I am not looking for those. I want everybody on average to conserve a couple of percent a year. That's the key to the solution: make small changes at a time, beginning with the most obvious and the easiest to fix problems.
Installing CFLs is one of those things that everybody could do right away and it would save massive amounts of energy.
Turn the power settings on your computer on and disable that stupid screen saver... your LCD does not burn in like your CRTs did and will be turned off anyway once the power saving scheme kicks in.
How about dring clothes on a line in summer?
Increasing the tire pressure in your car?
Drive at the speed limit and not 5mph faster?
Then, check your apppliances. How old is the fridge? Old enough to be an energy hog?
How about using a fan instead of the AC in summer?
How about better insulation for the home? A new, more efficient car? And so on... I know that the doomer scenario of pillaging hordes is more attractive than people actually saving energy the right way, but that is not what we need to be interested in. Compare that to religions. How useful are those which preach that the end is near, the rapture will occure next Tuesday and that you better kill yourself now because death by a flaming sword will be so much more painful than the poison "the leader" will give you?
If we had nothing but the things under control that come almost for free, like the CFLs, the clothes line, tire pressure and speed limits, we would be saving 10%+ of energy easy at home and on the highway. The less modest investments in efficiency and conservation can buy us another 20+%, albeit at a much higher price. Finally, investment in renewable generation will get us another 30% down from where we are and will save disproportionate amounts of carbon.
We are not stuffed. We just have to learn to pay attention to how we are doing things.
I, for instance, just got my Kill-A-Watt. Tonight I will make quantitative measurements where I used to guess what my consumption was.
Where did you get your Kill-A-Watt?
Easy find. Try Google.
A local environmental group I'm on the board of decided to purchase a bunch of these sort of meters to lend to folks. We looked at the "Kill-a-Watt" but found a similar device, the EM100 by "UPM Products", to be a better choice in our opinion.
One of the big advantages is that the EM100 has a small battery in it so that it retains its stored data even if unplugged or if there is a power failure during recording. With the "Kill a Watt" you need to get down on your hands and knees to read it while its still plugged into the wall, or it forgets. Also a somewhat nicer set of functions.
The EM100 is sold at "Canadian Tire" stores if you are up this way (Canada), web info for them is here:
http://www.upm-marketing.com/products/ProductDisplay.cfm?CFID=225336&CFT...
I think the really bad phase of peak oil re-adjustment will start when people stop discussing when the ship will sink, what pieces of their luggage they're going to bring with them, and how to do the back stroke and start discussing who they're going to kick out of the lifeboat. ;)
Hello LevinK,
If humankind chooses this path it is certain that Homo sapiens will go extinct. Not that I have any objections to that ...
David Mathews
http://www.geocities.com/dmathew1
David,
Human kind does not "choose" paths. In the grander scale of things human kind evolves, just like any other species on this planet. If it reaches the limits of its ecological niche it will adjust one way or another. You say it will do it by going extinct - that's fine for me, if you can live with that thought. But there are examples when species have adapted and you still have to convince me why humans are not one of those species. Ecological history shows quite the opposite actually - that we are the most adaptable species that has ever lived on this planet. Just consider what we have achieved for mere 10,000 years.
What we are doing here is nothing else but trying to increase our personal and collective adaptivity level. The goal in the end is to reduce the impact and try to avert the worst possible scenarios... not that I believe that discussions on the internet can do it, but it is much better than nothing.
Your constantly expressed hatred towards humans is the most distructive thing I've seen on this blog recently. In the grander scale of things we are not "good" or "bad" species, we just "are" species. Mother nature is patient and will survive even if we indeed fail.
Hello LevinK,
I see what humankind has done over the last ten thousand years and it looks like a catastrophe to me. Humans have destroyed, depleted, polluted and degraded the Earth in a fashion which will make life extremely difficult over the next several centuries.
As to the question of humankind's ability to adapt: Human's don't adapt. Humans modify the environment to suit our own whims and desire for comfort. Have you noticed all of the air conditioners, automobiles, grocery stores and restaurants? These are all evidences that humankind simply cannot survive without the technological crutch. When all of these things are gone it is difficult to imagine how humankind will survive. I suspect that we won't, but we'll have to see about that.
I don't imagine that this is the case. It appears to me that more than anything else people on The Oil Drum are seeking to protect their careers and investments. Adaptability, survivability and sustainability are not the primary concern especially in threads such as these.
Homo sapiens are a terrible species. Homo sapiens are a plague upon the Earth. Homo sapiens have polluted the entire globe. Homo sapiens have driven numerous species to extinction.
Yes, humankind is evil. The worse sort of biological evil that this world has ever experienced over the last six hundred million years. But this is a mistake which Nature can, and will, fix.
David Mathews
http://www.geocities.com/dmathew1