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Coal Is The Enemy Of All Living Things.
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Feb 28, 2024 17:43
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FMguru posted:Coal Is The Enemy Of All Living Things. We must destroy it as soon as possible so that it may not harm us. Let's burn it all down!
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Feb 28, 2024 19:25
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cant cook creole bream posted:We must destroy it as soon as possible so that it may not harm us. Let's burn it all down! Ah, the Centralia gambit.
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Feb 28, 2024 22:02
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Dameius posted:Ah, the Centralia gambit. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centralia_mine_fire
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Feb 28, 2024 22:16
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cat botherer posted:Not even an exaggeration. The Centralia fire all started with a rubbish dump in an old mine pit. In 1956, PA passed a law restricting dumps in open pit coal mines due to the risk of coal seam fires. There were issues found at the Centralia dump, so it had to be cleaned up. The city council elected to do this by... setting the dump on fire. Note that Centralia gets all the press, but there are still plenty of active mine fires across Pennsylvania alone. https://files.dep.state.pa.us/mining/Abandoned%20Mine%20Reclamation/AbandonedMinePortalFiles/Centralia/PAFireLocationMap.pdf
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Feb 28, 2024 22:38
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Grey Area posted:The magnitude of methane leaks are understated by pretty much everyone involved in the gas industry. Even with the leaks, it is still far superior the continue use of coal. The Breakthrough Foundation has a ton of excellent reporting on this very subject and another fact of the matter is it is a solvable problem via regulations.
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Mar 1, 2024 06:29
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the climate could enter a phase known to geologists and climatologists as The Coal Zone
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Mar 1, 2024 06:46
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SpeedFreek posted:There is a lot more pollution that results from continued use of coal than just CO2, the coal dust, fly ash, groundwater pollution from the ash, everything else that goes up the stack with the CO2. I'm sure someone in this thread has detailed knowledge on the effects of mining the stuff. There are no good reasons to keep operating coal plants after the 1970s. Coal plants generate at least ten times the radiation than nuclear plants do for the same amount of electricity produced. The ash contains significant amounts of arsenic, lead, thallium, mercury, thorium and uranium. Coal is bad.
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Mar 1, 2024 15:05
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Gucci Loafers posted:Even with the leaks, it is still far superior the continue use of coal. The Breakthrough Foundation has a ton of excellent reporting on this very subject and another fact of the matter is it is a solvable problem via regulations. *I remember them saying it would be impossible to build a gas turbine plant there at the time and the PR rep pulling numbers out of his rear end. Something about needing a 30" pipe at 1000psi to supply enough gas.
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Mar 1, 2024 15:42
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I'm deeply skeptical of any notion that LNG is worse than coal. Issue for me though is like how many years do you have to burn coal before pivoting to a nuclear plant before that's worse than more immediately switching to a gas plant, and operating that for the entire lifetime of the plant (50 years? more?). That's what seems more the debate, that somehow we can't build nuclear right now because Reasons so we need LNG as part of a transition. The argument against this is to just build nuclear now, and if that's not possible well continue to use coal until then. I just assume that no one is going to build a brand new gas plant and then shut it down, so any discussion around transition means kicking the notion of zero emission energy generation 50 years down the line. Or like is the issue something about non nuclear proliferation like we want to sell natural gas to countries that don't have the ability to build nuclear and we don't intend to sell them nuclear plant technology? (who is this?) Femtosecond fucked around with this message at 03:20 on Mar 4, 2024 |
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Mar 4, 2024 03:18
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I think it simply boils down to activists wanting everyone to swap to solar/wind now rather than going to gas first. Equate gas to coal and get the added benefit of linking the O&G industry to resistance of using nuclear to close down coal energy (which is an unconsolidated industry worldwide without much pull).
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Mar 4, 2024 07:47
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Electric Wrigglies posted:I think it simply boils down to activists wanting everyone to swap to solar/wind now rather than going to gas first. Equate gas to coal and get the added benefit of linking the O&G industry to resistance of using nuclear to close down coal energy (which is an unconsolidated industry worldwide without much pull). Unpopular opinion, many of these activists have zero background in energy or industrialized society and haven't been bothered to pick up a single book on the topic. Climate Change is becoming a religion. To them, O&G is just a evil boogy man and everything they do must be wrong.
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Mar 4, 2024 10:34
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Gucci Loafers posted:Unpopular opinion, many of these activists have zero background in energy or industrialized society and haven't been bothered to pick up a single book on the topic. Climate Change is becoming a religion. To them, O&G is just a evil boogy man and everything they do must be wrong. Germans just thought if they prayed away the nuclear power hard enough that they wouldn't get glassed in WWIII.
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Mar 4, 2024 10:45
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Gucci Loafers posted:Unpopular opinion, many of these activists have zero background in energy or industrialized society and haven't been bothered to pick up a single book on the topic. Climate Change is becoming a religion. To them, O&G is just a evil boogy man and everything they do must be wrong.
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Mar 4, 2024 13:37
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Gucci Loafers posted:Unpopular opinion, many of these activists have zero background in energy or industrialized society and haven't been bothered to pick up a single book on the topic. Climate Change is becoming a religion. To them, O&G is just a evil boogy man and everything they do must be wrong. thats not even a remotely unpopular opinion thats basically conventional american wisdom it is also (and by 'it' i mean 'you'), THE PROBLEM
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Mar 4, 2024 14:31
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cat botherer posted:I mean, climate change is an existential crisis for the continuance of modern industrial society. O&G is absolutely a boogeyman, although there’s other boogeymen as well. Climate Change is a existential crisis for the entirety of humanity along but that isn't the point. The point is the the energy transition is going to be complicated. I'd greatly prefer Nuclear with renewables over gas but that isn't happening.
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Mar 4, 2024 14:42
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Femtosecond posted:I'm deeply skeptical of any notion that LNG is worse than coal. Issue for me though is like how many years do you have to burn coal before pivoting to a nuclear plant before that's worse than more immediately switching to a gas plant, and operating that for the entire lifetime of the plant (50 years? more?). My local utility was building new coal plants in the last 20 to 30 years that are all being shut down now so shutting down a power plant before EOL is a thing. They insisted that building those plants would keep rates lower than if they built any other type of power plant and that's why I pay about double what they do in a neighboring state that is about 50% nuclear powered. Electric Wrigglies posted:I think it simply boils down to activists wanting everyone to swap to solar/wind now rather than going to gas first. The economics of wind and solar are unique too, if there was a buildup of nuclear power it would never become cheaper or more efficient to build with knowledge and experience like solar and wind power has.
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Mar 4, 2024 14:51
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Gucci Loafers posted:Climate Change is a existential crisis for the entirety of humanity along but that isn't the point. The point is the the energy transition is going to be complicated. I'd greatly prefer Nuclear with renewables over gas but that isn't happening. Nonetheless, coal is dying in favor of gas anyway, because it's cheaper now even when ignoring externalities.
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Mar 4, 2024 15:57
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The thing about fossil gas in Europe is that russia had managed to establish itself as THE gas supplier in people's minds. And now that their reputation has tanked, fossil gas' reputation has tanked by association. There are people trying to use the LNG rebrand as means of disentangling the association, but it is slow going.
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Mar 4, 2024 16:40
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Mar 18, 2024 00:54
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Speaking of reinventing the wheel... Hydrogen adoption will cost Europe, US more than $1 trillion https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/ceraweek-hydrogen-adoption-will-cost-europe-us-more-than-1-trillion-2024-03-18/  HOUSTON, March 18 (Reuters) - Europe and the U.S. will have to spend in excess of $1 trillion for building infrastructure to enable widespread use of hydrogen fuel, an executive at Mitsubishi Heavy Industries (7011.T) A wholesale move to hydrogen will need significant new demand, which could only come with investments in infrastructure to reduce the cost. European and U.S. governments will have to make that investment, Emmanouil Kakaras, an executive vice president at Mitsubishi said in an interview on the sidelines of CERAWeek by S&P Global energy conference. "If you count the funding to bridge the gap, you will easily get to $1 trillion," said Kakaras. European governments have committed $750 billion and with the U.S. Inflation Reduction Act funding for hydrogen projects, it could be enough to make the transition to clean fuels from fossil fuels happen, he said. New infrastructure for the use of hydrogen in Europe will spur wider adoption by 2035, and if combined with carbon capture and storage in the U.S. to offset greenhouse gas emissions, the energy transition could be realized, he said. In contrast, Saudi Aramco CEO Amin Nasser at the same conference said the world would be better off it were to focus on reducing carbon emissions from oil and gas rather than shift to other energy sources and technologies. "The current transition strategy is visibly failing on most fronts," said Nasser. "Despite its significant long term potential, hydrogen still costs in the range of $200 to $400 per barrel of oil equivalent, while oil and gas remain much cheaper."
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Mar 20, 2024 04:33
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Never understood this hydrogen obsession. Didn't we already figure out how to work with methanol one hundred years ago and that's much safer and easier to handle than gaseous hydrogen? You have half the energy density of fossil fuels with methanol but at least you have something that's liquid at atmospheric pressure and even water soluable so it's safer than petrol/diesel. Plus you don't need to dismantle and rebuild the last century of petrochemical infrastructure because of a buzzword.
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Mar 20, 2024 11:40
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Hydrogen might have legs as a replacement for current jet fuel, but even then the lower specific energy is a problem.
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Mar 20, 2024 12:01
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breadshaped posted:Never understood this hydrogen obsession. Didn't we already figure out how to work with methanol one hundred years ago and that's much safer and easier to handle than gaseous hydrogen? I agree to a large extant although hydrogen is better suited to take advantage of natural gas (not LNG) infrastructure. I think the EU already blends in some gaseous hydrogen? If you have methanol, how complicated is it to convert to kerosene for jet fuel?
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Mar 20, 2024 12:05
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I think it's because it's the easiest energy to generate from surplus wind power, power fluctuations from which is gonna get crazier and crazier and in need of being used on something. It's a nice way for some to try and square a circle. I could perhaps see it not being entirely nuts if you stored it where it was generated and used it to generate power when the wind wasn't blowing. Then there's also the idea of turning hydrogen into methane for use in the existing gas grid. Pilot project starting up on that south of me in Kristinestad, Finland.
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Mar 20, 2024 13:03
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His Divine Shadow posted:I think it's because it's the easiest energy to generate from surplus wind power, power fluctuations from which is gonna get crazier and crazier and in need of being used on something. It's a nice way for some to try and square a circle. I could perhaps see it not being entirely nuts if you stored it where it was generated and used it to generate power when the wind wasn't blowing. That's a good point on how it might become dispatchable demand (which is super sensitive to capital and fixed operating costs as well if used to soak up short lasting peaks in surplus generation). Each extra step (power to H2, H2 to methanol, methanol to kerosene/petrol) either needs surge between each stage or simply adds an extra hurdle to being utilised as dispatchable demand. H2 from wind would just be a big load of anodes and cathodes in river water, right?
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Mar 20, 2024 13:10
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That's ze German's plan for decarbonization, IIRC. Build more natural gas infrastructure now and then at some point switch over to using "green" hydrogen
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Mar 20, 2024 13:37
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mobby_6kl posted:That's ze German's plan for decarbonization, IIRC. Build more natural gas infrastructure now and then at some point switch over to using "green" hydrogen Oopsy, the cheapest way to make hydrogen at scale is natural gas, tee hee. Crazy how this happened while the tech was being fully backed by the natural gas lobby.
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Mar 20, 2024 14:00
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breadshaped posted:Never understood this hydrogen obsession. Didn't we already figure out how to work with methanol one hundred years ago and that's much safer and easier to handle than gaseous hydrogen? Lots of industrial processes need hydrogen specifically and that's where most of the green hydrogen production will initially go, so you would convert it to methanol only for transport and long term storage and then convert it back anyway. The problem with the conversion process is that it's a very immature, inefficient and capital intensive technology. You want to avoid it at any cost if possible. Especially for storage, there has been a lot of very promising research progress on storing hydrogen at scale so it's not the huge problem anymore that it seemed 10 years ago. There has also been some very interesting publications on new approaches to methanol conversion that are much more practical, but IIRC all of it is currently at the lab experiment stage. It could maybe become more viable in the future though. The timescales of decarbonization are so incredibly tight that you gotta work with what you have now or in the very near future. We are talking about just ~20 years here. Mature and scalable processes for producing, transporting and storing hydrogen already exist, so that what everyone is using to plan with. mobby_6kl posted:Build more natural gas infrastructure now Kinda the opposite. Most of the gas infrastructure in the country is for heating homes and is planned to be dismantled. Luckily it's not a huge effort and mostly amounts to remodeling, i.e. removing chimneys and gas pipes in indoor rooms and sealing everything up.
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Mar 20, 2024 14:54
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GABA ghoul posted:Kinda the opposite. Most of the gas infrastructure in the country is for heating homes and is planned to be dismantled. Luckily it's not a huge effort and mostly amounts to remodeling, i.e. removing chimneys and gas pipes in indoor rooms and sealing everything up. I think he meant for power generation, gas turbines would work excellently with hydrogen I would have thought.
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Mar 20, 2024 15:12
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GABA ghoul posted:The problem with the conversion process is that it's a very immature, inefficient and capital intensive technology. You want to avoid it at any cost if possible. Especially for storage, there has been a lot of very promising research progress on storing hydrogen at scale so it's not the huge problem anymore that it seemed 10 years ago. There has also been some very interesting publications on new approaches to methanol conversion that are much more practical, but IIRC all of it is currently at the lab experiment stage. It could maybe become more viable in the future though.
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Mar 20, 2024 15:12
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Electric Wrigglies posted:I think he meant for power generation, gas turbines would work excellently with hydrogen I would have thought. Yes. quote:Germany is set to hold auctions to support the construction of new gas-fired power plants in the short term, which would then be converted to run on hydrogen in the mid-to-late 2030s, the ruling coalition said. The plants are considered crucial to guarantee electricity supply security as the share of intermittent renewable energy increases and coal is phased out quote:FRANKFURT, Sept 20 (Reuters) - A new liquefied natural gas (LNG) terminal at Mukran on Ruegen Island in the German Baltic Sea should be operational from the first quarter of 2024, Gascade, the pipeline firm building its onshore connection, said. Obviously home heating and industrial uses have a different situation.
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Mar 20, 2024 15:21
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cat botherer posted:Yeah, large-scale stationary hydrogen storage isn't nearly as problematic. Combined-cycle natural gas plants could also be converted, which would reduce costs a whole lot. The key issue it seems is relatively low round-trip efficiency. Electrolysis tops out at 80%, and then you've got maybe 60-70% for CC generation, so under 50%. That's still potentially compelling due to the problems and expense of of Li-ion batteries. However, with the recent success of much cheaper sodium-ion batteries in China, that advantage might erode. No kind of battery can ever get close to the cost of hydrogen for long-term storage. Batteries are great for smoothing out a few seconds of fluctuation, passable for minutes, and with heroic effort and expense can do for hours. (Quiz: if you used all the money used to build OL3 (the stupendously expensive new Finnish nuclear reactor) instead to build grid-scale battery of equivalent power at the lowest cost per Wh that any grid scale battery project has ever been completed, how long would the battery last? Last I checked, 25 hours. Probably a bit longer now, grid scale battery projects are constantly trending cheaper.) European renewables have supply fluctuations that need to be smoothed out over the scale of three months. It is actually possible to build hydrogen generation infrastructure that will store that much energy, it never will be with batteries. Batteries + solar works just fine in California, where a study found that they only need storage for 3 hours. Tuna-Fish fucked around with this message at 15:24 on Mar 20, 2024 |
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Mar 20, 2024 15:22
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cat botherer posted:Yeah, large-scale stationary hydrogen storage isn't nearly as problematic. Combined-cycle natural gas plants could also be converted, which would reduce costs a whole lot. The key issue it seems is relatively low round-trip efficiency. Electrolysis tops out at 80%, and then you've got maybe 60-70% for CC generation, so under 50%. That's still potentially compelling due to the problems and expense of of Li-ion batteries. However, with the recent success of much cheaper sodium-ion batteries in China, that advantage might erode. Someone may have asked this previously and I missed it, but can you expand on this? I feel like I've been hearing about great new battery technology that's just around the corner for the past 10 years - is this real, or is it more vaporware?
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Mar 20, 2024 15:33
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Yes sodium-ion batteries are real and in mass production by CATL. There are several lithium near equivalents already in mass production.
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Mar 20, 2024 16:27
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https://www.catl.com/en/news/6201.html#:~:text=In%202021%2C%20CATL%20launched%20its,transformative%20role%20of%20battery%20recycling. Edit and the new EV auto platforms are “chemistry agnostic”, that’s not in that article but it’s easy to find “One of the strong points of the Ultium platform is that it’s chemistry-agnostic and it can take pouch, prismatic, or cylindrical cells” Bar Ran Dun fucked around with this message at 16:32 on Mar 20, 2024 |
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Mar 20, 2024 16:28
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cat botherer posted:That's still potentially compelling due to the problems and expense of of Li-ion batteries. However, with the recent success of much cheaper sodium-ion batteries in China, that advantage might erode. Not even sodium-ion batteries are ever going to be competitive for long term grid scale storage. Production capacities just can't scale up enough to meet global demand. For large scale & long term battery storage only redox flow batteries seem feasible on a global scale. Some versions like the iron redox flow one have AFAIK no production or resource bottlenecks. You can churn them out with early 20th century industrial technology in any quantities in any part of the world. Despite all this, they are still probably going to be less competitive than hydrogen. But then again, grid scale storage is gonna be a wild mixture of many different technologies and implementations adapted to specific niches. Ironically there has been very little deployment of redox flow batteries in Europe because there is almost no demand for long term storage right now. In the well integrated grid it's almost always better to just export excess renewable overproduction to other parts so that they can curtail gas or coal generation there. The US has seen much more deployment of them and has more experience with the technology due to their lovely grid.
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Mar 20, 2024 16:51
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Tuna-Fish posted:It is actually possible to build hydrogen generation infrastructure that will store that much energy
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Mar 22, 2024 00:35
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Endjinneer posted:What form does this storage take? I was under the impression that hydrogen is a fucker to store.
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Mar 22, 2024 01:13
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DTurtle posted:Up to a certain percentage (I've seen conflicting numbers from 8 - 50%), hydrogen can simply be stored together with natural gas. My guess is that that percentage is dependent on the material, etc. used. To store even higher percentages without refitting the entire natural gas infrastructure, hydrogen could be combined with CO2 in order to produce methane - obviously with further conversion losses. I think a lot of that sort of thing depends largely upon how much leakage the operator is willing to tolerate. Fossil gas already has significant issues with gas escaping from their infrastructure (both in the distribution piping and from the building endpoints), and hydrogen is even more prone to leaking.
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Mar 22, 2024 04:00
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