Carbon Capture and Storage Project

rayh

Carbon Capture and Storage project see http://www.sei.ie/uploadedfiles/InfoCentre/1153_SEI%20Full%20Report.pdf.

Will somebody tell Minister Ryan that this is another stunt by the Power Generation techies to seek public funding to extend its operation beyond its sustainable limits. Our priority must be to migrate away from fossil fuels and all available current public funding should be channelled in this direction.

BendiBus

CCS can be used in conjunction with renewables, for example biomass, to actively reduce atmospheric carbon levels.

I've no problem with it.

AIR-AUSSIE

rayh wrote: »

Carbon Capture and Storage project see http://www.sei.ie/uploadedfiles/InfoCentre/1153_SEI%20Full%20Report.pdf.

Will somebody tell Minister Ryan that this is another stunt by the Power Generation techies to seek public funding to extend its operation beyond its sustainable limits. Our priority must be to migrate away from fossil fuels and all available current public funding should be channelled in this direction.

I think Rayh has a point we should be attempting to move away from Fossil fuels first before steps like these are taken when they will have marginable or even neglible effects on the country's carbon emissions, due to the fact we are so highly reliant on fossil fuels - which is completely unsustainable and short minded.

rayh

In County Longford we have one of 3 peat power plants in Ireland. This plant is of Finnish design and runs on milled peat at a thermal efficiency of 37.5%.

http://www.esb.ie/main/downloads/news_events/lough_ree.pdf

An older sister plant at Jyväskylä (Rauhanlahti Power Plant) in central Finland again running on Milled Peat (80%) and wood (20%) can reach efficiencies of nearly 80%.

http://www.cygnnet.jkl.fi/koulut/lyseoil/iltalinja/Comen/energy.htm

The plant in Longford converts milled peat to electric energy, while to plant in Finland converts peat/wood to electric energy and heat energy which it supplies to both a paper plant and a District Heating network. About 60% of households in Finland are connected to District Heating systems.
In Ireland the ESB have been mandated to produce electric energy and this they meet with the technical resources available to them, while in Finland the company is an energy company and it responds to a heat energy and electricity demand.
It is worth noting that in our national energy demand (http://www.sei.ie/index.asp?locID=686&docID=659 ) we loss 2,991 ktoe (Kilotonne Oil Equivalent) in electricity generation and transmission, while on the other hand we use 2,990 in the residential sector. In other words the energy loss in electricity generation is equivalent to our residential requirement or put another way, we need ¾‘s of our natural gas imports to meet our generation/transmission losses.
It appears that maintaining the empire is important?

heinbloed

Carbon is already captured. So better leave it where it is.This won't cost a penny.Carbondioxide capturing from combustion power plants reduce their efficiency by more then 50%. So why doing this if we're trying to safe energy and running out on captured carbon to burn in the first place? That's absurd!Worldwide CO2 emissions are increasing and the natural vegetation is decreasing.There is nothing like capturing CO2 the natural way. Since a few hundred years this is going on. And getting worse.Ask your teachers why mankind's agricultural operations are emitting more CO2 then they're holding.Who would call spending money "capturing money"?Those who try to sell us something?

rayh

So Minister Ryan has decided that we with the lowest electric conversion efficiency, the highest carbon content, the most energy import dependent state and as we face into the end of the fossil fuel era that we should use our resources to bury/capture our carbon.
Am I missing something?

heinbloed

Well, you might have missed the point that most politicians are string-puppets, they have no idea where they're and what they do, their selfconsciousness is retrieved from the aplaus they get from their enviroment.
Or as the old knight said:the more enemies you have the more honourable you live.
But we can opt out, become independant in terms of energy.Everyone can do that.

District heating; one of the simplest ways to improve energy efficiency available today, as it simply puts waste heat to use in the local community.

Why isn't it used?

Power stations are usually built in remote locations, NIMBY's prevent them building near towns - also peat powered stations are built close to the energy source.

As already mentioned, power stations are built to produce electricity and that's what they do!

The suburban sprawl in a typical Irish town would make such an installation very expensive to install & maintain.

Could it be used here?

If a new suburb is planned with it in mind right from the start, then yes!

rayh

A community group that I am associated with hired a consultant and in concert with both Athlone Institute and the Finnish Energy Agency VTT, we made submission to SEI to carry out a feasibility study on the use of the waste heat from Lanesboro Power Station and they did not even acknowledge receipt of the submission.
This made sense?

pauln

rayh wrote: »

A community group that I am associated with hired a consultant and in concert with both Athlone Institute and the Finnish Energy Agency VTT, we made submission to SEI to carry out a feasibility study on the use of the waste heat from Lanesboro Power Station and they did not even acknowledge receipt of the submission.
This made sense?

You can hire all the people you want but if it doesn't make technical and economic sense then it's never going to work.

Your not comparing like with like when your talking about the 80% effeicency of the Finnish plant verus 37.5% for the Lough Ree plant. The Finnish plant is a combined heat and power (CHP) plant, designed to both generate electricty and heat from day one. The plant can reach effiiciencies of 80% when acting solely as a boiler for district heating and steam output, if it is only generating electricty it's efficiency will be back down in the 30's the same as the Lough Ree plant.
By the nature of the processes plants are always more efficent if they only use the heat for district heating, steam etc. as they are effectively only acting as boilers then, where the greatest losses are is in the conversion of the heat to electricity, that is why Lough Ree which is an electricity generation station has en efficiency of 37.5% (which is actually an excellant figure for a peat electricty generating plant).

You can't just decide to now use Lough Ree as a CHP plant, it would require massive investment and change to the plant.

You could try and capture some of the heat from the outfall of the cooling water system but this is low grade heat and would not make much economic sense.

District heating in Ireland is probably never going to make much economic sense. Our climate is not cold enough, with too small a space heating demand to justify the installation and maintenance costs of a dedicated district heating system. The only hope of doing viable district heating would be to put a CHP waste to heat incineration plant in the centre of a newly built high density urban area where all the housing/offices were plumbed into the system, I won't hold my breath waiting for people to support this.

rayh

Sorry, for those who are not really familiar with the Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS). The following links maybe helpful with this discussion

http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2008/3/31/181924/330


http://www.princeton.edu/~cmi/resources/CMI_Resources_new_files/CMI_Wedge_Game_Jan_2007.pdf


http://www.grist.org/news/2008/09/05/clean_coal/index.html

This thread may be more at home in green issues...

smashey

Deleted User wrote: »

This thread may be more at home in green issues...

Agreed, moved to Green Issues from Renewable Energies.

Húrin

rayh wrote: »

Carbon Capture and Storage project see http://www.sei.ie/uploadedfiles/InfoCentre/1153_SEI%20Full%20Report.pdf.

Will somebody tell Minister Ryan that this is another stunt by the Power Generation techies to seek public funding to extend its operation beyond its sustainable limits. Our priority must be to migrate away from fossil fuels and all available current public funding should be channelled in this direction.

CC&S cannot possibly arrive universally in time (within 7 years) to ward off climate disaster. The British Government has made energy policy depening on technology that has not even been invented yet.

heinbloed

There is absolutly no need to keep the stinkers running.An efficiency increase by 50% is not enough to meet future CO2 emission targets. District heating systems can be run using renewables, 100%.See for example here:http://www.arcon.dk/frames/frame_uk.html