Hatfield "Clean Coal" Power Plant Goes into Administration.

The "Powerfuel" company that owns Hatfield Colliery in Yorkshire has entered administration due to lack of investment. The intention was to improve the mine and develop a "clean coal" power plant based on the integrated gasification combined cycle (IGCC) principle, with carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) technology. In IGCC, the coal is not burned directly as it is in normal coal-fired power plants, but is converted into synthesis gas. Impurities are removed from the gas before it is burned, which results in lower emissions of sulfur dioxide, particulates and mercury.

IGCC is more energy-efficient than simply burning pulverized coal, and the efficiency is further improved since heat from the primary combustion and generation is then passed to a steam-cycle, similar to a combined cycle gas-turbine. In the Hatfield situation, the final CO2 was intended to be removed by a CCS unit and pumped into "old" gas-wells under the North Sea.

This was an entirely innovative project, and Powerfuel is the only company with a license to put the technology to the test in the UK. The technology is not cheap and some £164 million worth of funding was secured from the European Union last year, to build the CCS plant. Even so, the rest of the £800 million needed to build the power station could not be secured, although the administrators, KPMG say they are hopeful to find a buyer, even in the present economic climate.

The project was to be at the forefront of the European Union's drive to provide low-carbon electricity, and this outcome is not optimistic that private industry can be relied upon to provide funding to meet governmental carbon emissions targets. There are still considerable reserves of coal in the world, although it was recently predicted that only about half the amount previously thought can be recovered economically. There is the further issue of the quality of coal, since the majority of the world reserve is of lower thermal quality than the top-grade anthracitic coal, and will yield less energy per tonne either burned directly or in the form of syngas in ICGC plants.

It is likely that more conventional (cheaper and proven technology) coal-fired plants will be built to keep the lights on around the world. While speculation still reigns in some quarters over the reality of a connection between carbon emissions and climate change, there is no doubt that running short of energy would be the most immediately catastrophic event for civilization.

Related Reading.
"Hatfield Colliery owner Powerfuel enters administration. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/industry/mining/8192474/Hatfield-Colliery-owner-Powerfuel-enters-administration.html

Shortage of Rare earth Metals made worse by Smuggling.

Rare earth (RE) metals find application in devices inlcuding wind turbines, hybrid and electric cars, LCDs, fuel cells, nuclear reactors and lasers. China controls some 97% of the world supply of REs, and in July announced a 72% reduction in exports of REs for the second half of 2010, compared with the previous year. It is predicted that in 2012, Chinese domestic consumption of REs will match domestic production, and this year will see a peak in availability and a demand-supply gap emerging on the world markets.

REs are not lacking in the earth's crust, and for example cerium ranks as the 25th most abundant element at 68 parts per million, in fact similar to copper. There are however few economically concentrated ores of the metals and their very similar chemical properties make the separation and isolation of individual REs in pure form difficult and expensive.

While China attempts to secure its dominance of the world markets for these metals, the scarcity of REs is compounded by smuggling. As much as 20,000 tonnes or one third of total exports of REs were smuggled out of China, which both reduces the price of the metals and ensures the more voracious depletion of the resource.

In my previous article, I wrote about the British focus on wind-power to meet its renewable energy targets for the European Union, by 2020. I commented that the rate of progress in building the required more than 4,000 new wind turbines had been rather slow to date, and now it appears debatable that there will be sufficient neodymium with which to fabricate the magnets for them, even if the manufacturing could be speeded-up.

China has been making strenuous actions to buy mines of RE ore around the world, to maintain its dominance of the global markets, and I wonder whether this will extend to Greenland, where the melting ice-sheet is likely to ease access to the rich veins of REs and other elements that the world needs to maintain its technologies and energy supplies.


Related Reading.
"Smuggling key factor in rare earths' scarcity," December 2010, Chemistry World, p6.

British Power is all Wind.

Britain has decided to go all-out for wind-power. On Thursday, I flew over the massive off-shore Thanet wind-farm - one of the largest in the UK - in the English Channel off Foreness Point. The farm consists of 100 turbines, each over 300ft high, and is expected to power over 200,000 homes. It will increase the amount of energy generated from offshore wind in the UK by one third to 1,314MW. Opened in September, the Thanet wind-farm was built by the Swedish Vattenfall energy company, and increases the number of large scale off-shore British turbines to 436, to be compared with 2,640 based on land.

Not everyone is convinced that wind-power is the most reliant route to clean, renewable carbon-free energy, and it is concerning that Britain is relying on a power source that must be backed up by more constant technologies such as nuclear, coal, or gas, because the wind blows inconsistently, as is its nature. A mere 2% of Britain's electricity was produced from renewable sources in 2002, but it is hoped that this should rise to 10% by the end of the year in light of the new wind-power generating capacity.There are further cost issues in upgrading the national grid to cope with power-surges and the need to switch between different power sources.

It should be noted that electricity provides only around one third of the total energy used in the U.K, and the bulk of that is accounted for by heating and transportation, which is supplied by respectively coal/gas and oil based fuels. Hence the UK will have its work cut out if it is to meet a EU target to raise its overall energy provision from renewables from the present 5% to 15% by 2020.

The actualization of an overall wind-power strategy is not going smoothly, however, and the number of new wind-farms coming on-stream has fallen by 30%, in part as a consequence of the recession. There has also been a fall in the past 12 months by 50% in planning approvals for wind-farms in England, a situation that is also reflected in Scotland. There is also considerable opposition to wind-turbines which are perceived as unsightly and noisy, as is reflected by the 230-odd campaign groups that operate across the whole of the U.K.

Indeed, some of these groups advocate nuclear power as a better option than wind, a situation that would have been almost unthinkable ten years ago. It was estimated in 2008 that to meet the U.K. wind-power goal by 2020 would require building one new turbine every day for the next twelve years. Since progress so far has fallen far short of this rate of conversion, little confidence is lent that the nation will be able to keep its promise on renewables.

Algae to Fuels Under Pressure.

The conventional route to biodiesel consists of extracting oil from plants and converting it to the methyl esters of fatty acids that are present in the lipid-components, known as triglycerides. These esters as a mixture constitute biodiesel: a specific kind of biofuel. High oil-yielding strains of algae can be grown and dried and the oil extracted from the dry algal mass, before being similarly converted to biodiesel in a process called transesterification.

Removing the water from raw algae is a highly energy intensive process, and to minimise the overall energy costs of biofuel production from algae, a process called hydrothermal liquefaction may instead be employed in which the algae are not dried but heated under pressure such that the water they contain acts as a chemical reagent and solvent that breaks-down the algal cells and converts not only the oil (lipid) but the sugar and protein component into fuels such as liquid hydrocarbons, gaseous fuels like methane and a complex material called "bio-oil" with a similar energy content to crude oil.

Clearly, the design of engines will need to be adapted in order to use these alternative fuels directly, or they must be refined in a "biorefinery" along with those from other kinds of biomass. In both cases of new engines or biorefineries, there will be huge new engineering required and on a scale that can only be guessed at if really algae can be exploited to make a nation the size of the United States independent of cheap imported crude oil.

Nonetheless, there is a consortium (National Algae Association) in the U.S. that is actively seeking a future in which algae are grown on a large scale and converted to oil-alternative fuels. Certainly, it is likely that algae will become an essential component of the mix of means to keep transportation going by means other than crude oil.

The claims of the NAA are undoubtedly true, that ultimately the supply of petroleum must decline, oil prices will continue to be volatile with knife-edge consequences for the world economy, and a wholesale industry based on algae would provide precious and needed jobs and economic development in the U.S. The approach could be introduced on necessary levels for all nations and even a village "pressure cooker" to provide algal fuels for small communities.

Related Reading.
A. Demirbas, "Use of algae as biofuel sources," Energy Conversion and Management, 2010, 51, 2738-2749.

Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) - Yay or Nay?

A new paper (1) published in the prestigious American Chemical Society journal, Environmental Science and Technology, has put the cat among the pigeons over carbon capture and storage (CCS). It argues that the colossal amount of money that CCS would entail globally would be better spent on "virtual CCS", meaning per se that instead of actual CCS, the emission of carbon be avoided in the first place by a wholesale implementation of non-fossil energy sources, specifically wind and nuclear power. As a statistic to prove the point, it is estimated that one wedge (billion tonnes) of carbon in the form of CO2 sequestered by CCS would cost $5.1 trillion over 50 years, while the same amount of money used to build wind-turbines would save 1.91 "wedges" worth of CO2 over the lifetime of the windmills. A strong rebuttal to this case is presented in the September Chemistry World (2), which calls for a parallel development of CCS and non-fossil energy rather than the exclusion of the former.

Since 100 million tonnes per DAY of CO2 would need to be so sequestered by CCS the engineering required to bring it to fruition is phenomenal. There are essentially two methods to remove carbon from fuel: post-combustion and pre-combustion. Post-combustion, CO2 is removed from flue gas by passing it through a liquid amine which dissolves the CO2. Pre-combustion, the fuel (coal, gas, biomass) is processed into a mixture of CO2 + H2 and the CO2 is removed. Either way, the CO2 must be put somewhere, for which strategies include pumping it into rocky formations (such as depleted oil and gas wells) at a pressure of 100 atmospheres, or even piping it in liquid form under pressure onto the sea-floor where it is cold enough and the pressure high enough that it is hoped the material will stay there, assisted by the formation of CO2-hydrate.


(1) C Tsouris, D S Aaron and K A Williams, 2010, Environ. Sci. Technol., 44, 4042
(2) http://www.rsc.org/chemistryworld/Issues/2010/September/DoWeReallyNeedCarbonCaptureStorage.asp