Stories tagged with "town gas"

A Little History of the Affordability of Domestic Energy in Great Britain

Posted by Euan Mearns on June 12, 2008 - 9:55am in The Oil Drum: Europe
Topic: Economics/Finance
Tags: coal, domestic fuel prices, electricity, gas, oil, rpi, town gas [list all tags]

This is a Guest Post by Bob Everett. Bob is Lecturer in Renewable Energy at the Open University in Milton Keynes, UK.


Domestic energy is getting expensive, but what does that mean compared to the situation in our parents' or grandparents' days? Should we grumble?

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Burning coal in place or in-situ gasification

Posted by Heading Out on March 5, 2006 - 1:01am
Topic: Supply/Production
Tags: australia, china, coal, gasification, tech talk, town gas, united kingdom, united states [list all tags]

Grin - well Yankee has suggested that we need more information on coal gasification and so, after threatening to do this a couple of times, today, having talked a little about surface gasification I thought I would move to the subject of in-situ gasification of coal. That would allow, if successful, that we would burn the coal in place, underground. This might have the advantages of not requiring the surface plant and impacts that a conventional coal mine would need, and it might also provide some useful way of getting to otherwise unavailable deposits such as those under the North Sea. Most particularly it would remove the need for all the grimy gas works that were dotted over Europe and North America until natural gas came along to clear the air. It is a subject that the Chinese are looking into
The Chinese government has authorized an underground coal-gasification project in Lineng of Shandong Province recently. This is a model project combining in-sit-coal gasification and gas-fired power generation.
, as well as being of interest to the British, the Australians and ourselves, to name but a few.

This is another in the weekend technical talks that pop-up at frequent intervals on this site, It fits in with a series on coal technology that is listed at the end of the post, and more particularly is related to other ways of generating fuel from coal other than just burning it in a boiler to generate steam. As with a number of ideas that are getting more discussion (such as the injection of carbon dioxide back into the ground, and the use of pulverized coal in diesel engines) it is not particularly new, but since it is now getting more attention, the post will attempt, in a relatively simple manner, to explain what it is all about. For those more knowledgeable please do comment, as should those who find the explanation not totally clear.

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Clean fuel from dirty coal?

Posted by Heading Out on February 27, 2006 - 1:53am
Topic: Supply/Production
Tags: coal, coke, fischer-tropsch, montana, tech talk, town gas, wyoming [list all tags]

Part of the problem with coal is that, when it was first grown (as in the peat bogs back when) the region was occasionally inundated with floods, and, as the Hurricanes showed last year, this carried mud and sand into the bog. Over the passage of time, as the bog turned from peat to brown coal, and then into coal itself, these dirt bands turned into sandstone, mudstones and other rocks. The layers are often found inter-layered within a coal seam, either as very thin stringers, or as partings that can separate a single seam into layers that end up several feet apart. The bedding planes and vertical joints (referred to as cleat) provide the permeable paths through the coal, and are often partially filled with additional minerals that deposit out of the water that percolated through the coal at one time. This can also introduce lenses of pyrite and calcite, so that coal is not the simple carbon lump that people often anticipate.

This is another in the short technical posts that show up at weekends, dealing with one aspect or another of fossil fuel production. Given that, as Super G noted the Governor of Montana was on 60 minutes tonight, it seemed like a good time to return to a coal-related theme. A list of related posts will be appended at the end of this one, and relate to the mining of coal, either on the surface or from underground, though it is the surface mining of coal, that currently entices the Montana Governor. It should be noted that the adjacent state of Wyoming produces around 400 million short tons a year of coal, about ten times the current production from Montana.

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