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Why Fossil Fuels Matter
Home & Index Page
Why Fossil Fuels Matter
We MUST NOT Give Up On
Fossil Fuels - they are too ubiquitous, too useful, and too cheap.
But We MUST STOP Burning Them With The
Old Technology That's Causing Climate Change.
As long as we continue to attempt to move away from the cheap energy of fossil
fuels, we will continue to fail.
Most of the thermal energy that is making our modern life
comfortable is coming from fossil fuels. The key measure: U.S.=10,000 Watts
per person per day, Haiti = 500 Watts per person per day.
This is how it is going to be for a long time into the future. Our job is to
obtain as much of that energy as possible without letting the fuel's carbon
escape into the air.
How cheap is it to get at all that energy? The more people
that are needed to obtain it for us, the bigger the price we will have to pay. So the more we will avoid using it.
Making CO2
is Mother Nature's Way of Producing Fire
Making CO2
is what makes fire hot.
Click To Enlarge
BECCS Is One Way We Can Stuff A Lot Of Climate Change Back Into The Ground
Carbon-negative Electricity From Wood
Allam Cycle
Is Better Than Earlier Conventional BECCS - Both Natural Gas Fuel
BECCS is a new technology. . . Wind, solar,
nuclear, coal, oil, natural gas, can't be used to roll back Climate Change.
Allam Cycle
This is how
the newly developed 'Allam' technology - which was recently patented -
could be implemented in a potentially far more efficient and cleaner BECCS facility.
Perhaps as efficient as a standard
non-emission-controlled 60% efficient 'CO2
Dirty' combined cycle natural gas plant, but having no CO2
slippage.
Earlier Conventional BECCS - 'Add-on Carbon Capture'
This is how today's standard
BECCS 'Add-on Carbon Capture' technology - which was patented in the 1930s - could be implemented.
The amine facility and the constant amine replacement is both an additional
capital (CAPEX) and operating expense (OPEX).
Perhaps 75% as efficient as a standard combined cycle natural gas plant, with
~10% CO2 slipping
past the absorber column.
Conventional BECCS technology performance. Cost of
parasitic electricity would be 67 times $50 per megaWatt-hour times 8,760 hours
per year or $29,346,000 / yr.
CB&I = Chicago Bridge and Iron. As it happened, they did both the above study
and the actual physical Allam demonstration plant in La Porte, Texas. (Two
completely different contracts.)
Both plants could have a wood, coal, or lignite fuel-to-synthetic natural gas front end added.
The conventional combined cycle example power plant happened to be about twice as powerful as the Allam sCO2 plant.
Please take a look at the youtube video presentations listed below. You can't get easier-to-understand presentations faster. And very few commercials.
The company:
https://www.netpower.com/technology/
https://www.netpower.com/news/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vFcbev1TkoU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1zDZmIDbDO0
Articles About: https://www.powermag.com/inside-net-power-gas-power-goes-supercritical/?mypower
supercritical carbon dioxide (sCO2) cycles
This website's pages:
3a Natural Gas or Oil Allam Cycle CCS
Power Plant
3b Coal or Lignite Allam Cycle CCS
Power Plant
Similar Technologies
This new type of power plant, located over a CO2 disposal region, would burn trees originally planted to remove Climate Change CO2 from the air, store their CO2 underground, and sell the electricity.
The basic Natural Gas burning Allam
cycle module.
"ASU" means "Air Separation Unit". The ASU contributes oxygen from the air to the CO2
working fluid for combusting the natural gas in CO2 (1). First time I've encountered
this.
To me, it's basically a rocket engine connected directly to a single stage steam
turbine. The CO2 and steam water are then separated in
(4), the water separator.
Most of the exhaust of a rocket is steam - recall all the white?
For details of proposed coal processing components see pdf 2.306.02
A leading chemical engineer, Rodney Allam, has invented a new
fossil-fuel powered thermodynamic cycle
for power plants. It has been named the "Allam Cycle". It's emissions are
sequestration grade and pressure CO2, potable water, industrial grade argon gas,
and industrial grade nitrogen gas - each coming out of their individual exhaust
pipes. A 1/10th size pilot plant has been constructed in LaPorte, Texas
(near Houston) and has been connected to the Texas electrical grid, providing 25
megaWatts of electricity since last October. As far as
I know, so far, so good.
This new technology
has the
potential of economically powering the reduction of fossil fuel greenhouse gas
emissions to net-zero by 2050 by powering the manufacture of biomass-based
net-zero replacements for fossil fuels such as gasoline, diesel, jet fuel, and
natural gas. Since fossil fuel is available everywhere, these fuel factories can
be located anywhere both biomass and CO2 sequestration strata exist. Mankind can
then consume the world's remaining fossil fuel by using it to power the
manufacture of net-zero fossil fuel substitutes.
Dubbed the "Allam Cycle", it exploits the thermal and pressure
characteristics of supercritical liquid carbon dioxide and water - instead of
pure steam, air,
or helium - as its working fluid. Relatively simple and 59% efficient, it uses
an external rocket-engine-like oxygen+methane combustor instead of a water
boiler. The combustor directly drives a simple high-temperature gas turbine-generator with a blast
of CO2 gas and steam. It can be powered by any methane-gasified fossil fuel,
i.e., natural gas, oil, coal, lignite. The only emissions are pure high pressure
liquid CO2 ready for underground disposal and pure liquid fresh water,
industrial grade nitrogen gas, and industrial grade argon gas, each coming out
of the Allam engine contained in it's own pipe. If renewable fuels are used and
sequestered, the Allam engine would produce
carbon-negative CO2 emissions.
It should be noted that the super-clean, fossil fuel versatile, Allam Cycle 30 mW(e)
grid-connected pilot plant - a new form of Oxy-fuel carbon capture - is
performing well and appears economically
competitive all the way down to non-CCS Lignite.
The first mass production Allam cycle power plant will be a 300 mW(e) single turbine version made by
Toshiba, possibly as soon as 2021. "While the challenges
remain significant and require a focused research effort, there don’t appear to
be any show stopping problems to commercialization of
this technology." - P.A. Strakey, et al., 2014.
Toshiba will manufacture the 300 megaWatt full size version. In addition to the 300 megaWatts of grid electricity, it might produce as much as 1 million gallons of potable water per day and 5% CO2 by volume. The Allam's oxyfuel combustor is pretty close to a rocket engine. Think of the massive white plume of steam coming out of a oxyfuel rocket engine as it lifts off.
Perhaps Toshiba could license their design to the world's top power plant companies to ultimately make 10 to 20 thousand 300 mW copies in the next 10 to 20 years. The coal and lignite versions would need an additional gasification module. Shutting down all the world's conventional coal plants would really pull the rug out from under Climate Change.
To this author, this achievement may open the door to halting the 100 million tons of CO2 the world adds to the air every day via unconfined fossil fuel burning and perhaps also halt most of the current plans for building over 1,600 new large conventional coal power plants in 62 countries [Urgewald's tally], replacing conventional air polluting coal power plant plans with plans for environmentally safe Allam cycle gasified coal power plants instead. (Recall pre-WWII "Town Gas" made from coal?)
Once fossil fuel CO2 addition to the air is halted by substituting the use of environmentally safe carbon-neutral renewable fuels instead of fossil fuels, CO2 subtraction from the air can begin with the goal of eventually restoring the air to the way it was before the beginning of the first fossil fuel age.
_____________________________________________________________________________________
Obtaining Massive Volumes of Trees to Provide the World's Syngas and Removing Climate Change From the Air
The Cause of Climate Change is
contamination of the air due to burning toxically large quantities of the
ancient carbon contained in fossil fuels.
The UN’s climate panel
found that any scenario that doesn’t warm the planet by more than 1.5 ˚C
will require nearly eliminating emissions by midcentury, as well as removing 100
billion to 1 trillion metric tons of carbon dioxide from the air this century.
Keeping warming below 2˚ C could necessitate sucking out 10 billion tons a year
by 2050 and 20 billion annually by 2100,
a study by the National Academies found.
The most recent data from NASA Earth
Resources Surveys indicates there are about 3 Trillion trees on Planet Earth.
A
trillion is a thousand billion. A billion is a thousand million. A million is a
thousand thousand. That's a lot of trees.
Forestry estimates indicate the average tree weighs about 5 tons. About 1/2 the
weight of a tree is carbon. CO2 is one carbon atom (12 grams per mol) attached
to two oxygen atoms (16 grams per mol) or 12 + 16 +16 = 44 grams per mol.).
It is virtually impossible to make and burn the world's hardwood densified wood
pellets faster than their wood can grow.
[2.000.04.20]
The average cost of carbon
removal via tree restoration is less than $10 per ton of CO2. - Carbonshot https://www.wri.org/our-work/project/carbon-removal
World Resources Institute
https://www.wri.org/about
[2.100.01]
https://www.wood-pellet-mill.com/Solution/miscanthus-pellets.html
Primary energy: Annual Consumption by fuel, in Exajoules, Rounded. (British Petroleum Statistical Review of World Energy, 2020). Bold = Sources of fossil carbon.
Fuel: Oil Gas Coal Nuclear Hydro Renewables Total
U.S. 37 29 13 8 3 6 96
World 191 139 159 24 37 26 576
_____________________________________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________________________________
Contemplating Returning
To A BioWorld
In his scientific paper about the Allam Cycle, Dan F. Smith, et
al*,
rates the 300 megaWatt Toshiba Allam Cycle power plant at 772,200 tons of CO2
sequestered per year.
That means 45,325 Allam Cycle plants could remove a year's worth of current CO2
emissions (35 Billion tons) from the air in a year, perhaps repairing the air in
about 50 years.
At 3 tons of CO2
per tree, 100 billion tons CO2 is
about 33 billion trees. The world has about 3 trillion trees. A trillion is
1,000 billion. 3,000 billion trees minus 33 billion = 2,967 billion trees
remaining.
(1 hectare = 2.47105 acres, = 0.00386102 sq miles, = 0.0099999958937700001 sq
kilometers.)
This shows how big a job repairing Planet Earth's air is going to be.
But not impossible. The world currently has well over 50,000 running fossil-fuel
power plants.
This many wood-burning Allam Cycle power plants would effectively stop today's
Climate Change's growth in it's tracks.
$30 per ton CO2 sequestered, $50 per megaWatt-hour seems to be the ballpark
money available over a 60-year plant life.
https://www.equinor.com/en/what-we-do/h2hsaltend.html
Bottom Line: The wood of trees must be kept from returning their CO2 back to the air when they die. With CarbFix sequestration, CO2 is locked deep underground forever. It cannot be recovered.
Dan F. Smith's scientific paper: "Process
and Carbon Footprint Analyses of the Allam Cycle Power Plant Integrated with an
Air Separation Unit" 15/Sep/2019 appeared in 'Clean Technologies' Journal.
Google fetched a free pdf copy for your author at:
https://www.mdpi.com/2571-8797/1/1/22
Engineers should have a copy in hand because the paper will give them detailed
insight into how the Allam thermodynamic cycle both functions and performs.
[2.804.35]
Clean Energy Systems ( http://www.cleanenergysystems.com/ ) has a similar predecessor system in the same league but appears to be using somewhat earlier different technology.
_____________________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
The Allam Cycle Is Only The Beginning Of Supercritical CO2 Engines
Below: An earlier advanced
BECCS-capable power plant
http://www.cleanenergysystems.com/
http://www.cleanenergysystems.com/site-locations
You can strip about 5 barrels of "Stuck" oil per barrel of
liquid CO2 from a "Depleted" stripper oil well by using
liquid CO2 as a solvent to free it up.
While most of the liquid CO2 can be recovered when the
dislodged oil is processed at the wellhead, eventually the CO2
becomes "Stuck" underground forever instead.
Around 2010, there were several supercritical CO2 engines in various stages
of development out there in the Kimberlina, California, sand and bushes.
The Allam cycle engine appears to have captured both the technical and market
leadership by 2018.
One place where Allam's thinking shows up is they used a really tough
single-stage sCO2 steam turbine in their demonstration
plant in La Porte, Texas.
________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Natural gas is the last stop on
combustion's fossil fuel highway.
Wood is the worst fuel for CO2 but is the ONLY common hydrocarbon that is carbon-neutral.
Hydrogen is a CO2-free combustion
fuel.
Coal is being phased out in favor of natural gas in the
United States and in much of Europe.
Natural Gas -
Combined Cycle plant electricity CO2 = 737 lbs per megaWatt-hour
Coal - Advanced Pulverized
Coal plant electricity CO2 = 1,813 lbs per megaWatt-hour
Biomass Municipal
Solid Waste plant electricity CO2 = 3,600 lbs per megaWatt-hour
Source: http://www.ngsa.org/download/Leidos-Update-2016-emissions.pdf ( http://www.ngsa.org/ )
Where the natural gas you use to make your
electricity, heat your house, cook your food, comes from.
What is a natural gas Combined Cycle power plant?
Natural gas powered Combined Cycle (Jet Engine + Steam
Turbine) power plants produce
electricity with 40% the CO2 emissions
and TWICE the efficiency of a coal powered steam plant. They are quick
enough to fill in for wind's lulls and solar's clouds.
They are the main reason for the recent reduction in U.S. CO2 emissions - not windmills and solar cells.