70 comments on Kyoto, Canadians, Energy and the Environment
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That's a great idea, Bunion.
But I've thought of a potential problem : Transmission of gas (whether NG or air) has an energy cost too, because of friction with the pipe.
This needs to be carefully modelled to see if compressed air is viable... The techniques of compression, transport and storage are mature, because they are applied to NG. Whether they remain viable with compressed air, which has a much lower energy content, is the question. Or would you need much greater pressure in order to obtain a viable energy medium? In which case, new types of infrastructure would be required.
I am not at all technically minded and wouldn't even know how to start modelling this.
Why would the energy content of compressed air be lower than the energy content of compressed NG? I would have thought that compressed air would have a higher energy content than compressed NG (at the same pressure) simply by virtue of being a heavier gas.
This site (http://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~matti/ise2grp/energystorage_report/node7.html#S...) suggests that air is pressurised to about 75 bar. I know that the National Transmission System (onshore) in the UK operates at up to 85 bar, and a rudimentary Google search suggests that offshore NG pipelines operate at higher pressures, so I don't see any direct issues there.
It seems that there is already a company planning to work in this direction in Canada(http://www.energybulletin.net/11252.html) - interesting to note a direct reference to in-pipe storage.
I also know of a company in the UK that plans to install mini-turbines within the onshore system to decompress gas from the high pressure system to allow it to flow into lower pressure networks and indutrial facilities. Frustratingly I cannot remember the name of the company and am having difficulty finding it by Google search. Off the top of my head, they were suggesting something like 2000 MW of generation potential just in the onshore system alone, simply by using turbines to decompress the gas through deceleration, rather than decompressors which consume energy.
If anyone has the technical ability I would be very interested to see if this idea warrants further investigation.