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Mistress Rose
Joined: 21 Jul 2011 Posts: 15932
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Shane
Joined: 31 Oct 2005 Posts: 3467 Location: Doha. Is hot.
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Posted: Sun Aug 23, 20 4:38 am Post subject: |
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Mistress Rose wrote: |
I have been thinking for years that rather than landfill, it would be an advantage to utilise waste to produce gas. |
An old friend of mine started up a company that did just that. Worked with existing landfill operators to capture the gas given off as the trash decomposed, boosted the pressure and used it to generate power. It deals with the methane given off, but isn't scalable enough to generate a meaningful amount of power in national grid terms. Neat little concept, though.
Mistress Rose wrote: |
That and the heat and power stations seem to be a step in the right direction as well as the cleaner alternatives of solar, wind and water power of various sorts. |
Combined heat and power has mileage, if you ask me. There was talk of bringing in legislation to force all domestic boilers to go the CHP route (fired on gas), but that wouldn't be particularly futureproof as you'd end up with a nation converted to gas dependency. There is, however, possibly still mileage in municipal CHP, where power stations located near major centres of population (or other heat users) could get cooling by supplying heat to homes and industry. I'd still view this as an interim step, though. |
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dpack
Joined: 02 Jul 2005 Posts: 46168 Location: yes
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Mistress Rose
Joined: 21 Jul 2011 Posts: 15932
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Posted: Sun Aug 23, 20 8:25 am Post subject: |
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I think we may be at the stage with this that we were some years ago with CFCs. We used them extensively for degreasing, defluxing and general cleaning in the electronics industry as well as their uses in refrigeration etc. When I had to leave through ill health, we were trying to find alternatives, which I assume have now been found, but going in all sorts of directions.
Certainly any waste we generate that can't be recycled has great potential for either composting/digestion to directly produce methane and other usable gases, or burning what can't be composted. We do need other forms of heat/power/cooking, and to my mind, at the risk of repeating myself, regulating firewood sales is a very retrograde step. I can see that in dire circumstances people will be using any old stuff to burn on open fires if there is a long power cut, rather than planning it out and having reasonable firewood available if they are put off by propaganda and legislation. |
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dpack
Joined: 02 Jul 2005 Posts: 46168 Location: yes
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Shane
Joined: 31 Oct 2005 Posts: 3467 Location: Doha. Is hot.
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Posted: Sun Aug 23, 20 10:28 am Post subject: |
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dpack wrote: |
land fill from the 1980's onward is energy rich, plasma gasification is our chum to make it burn
iirc the scandinavian plants are having to import it as they have dug up what they had and only create a bit
you can get the metals out before reburying the ash, good scrubbers and burn control reduce pollution to almost nowt
tis still burning fossil as well as other fuels but better than waste and burn new fossil. |
Problem is, many of the mitigations are also quite energy intensive. Gasification, for example, needs a source of energy. For coal seam gasification, the energy is supplied by partial combustion of the coal in place, which I guess could work for rubbish, but you'd still use a good percentage of the available recoverable energy just to heat the stuff up to the point at which is gasified.
A flue gas scrubbing system uses around 30% of the power you generate, so much better if you can remove contaminants pre-combustion and control the combustion conditions to avoid generating the nasties in the first place. |
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dpack
Joined: 02 Jul 2005 Posts: 46168 Location: yes
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Ty Gwyn
Joined: 22 Sep 2010 Posts: 4610 Location: Lampeter
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Posted: Sun Aug 23, 20 3:00 pm Post subject: |
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Apparently the last coal opencast in England is due to close at the end of next month,at Stavely near Chesterfield,i was under the impression there was one up the North East so that must have shut down.
An Anthracite opencast in the Dulais valley,South Wales,had an extension licence granted from the CA,local planning,but last month permission was withdrawn by the WA,now its being reclaimed and plans to turn into a train testing site,while they carry on to import Russian anthracite for domestic fuel,while over the mountain in the Neath Valley Aberpergwm Colliery raises between 5 and 6,000 tons of anthracite weekly which is all exported,and a smallmine i used to work in the late 70`s early 80`s raises around 100 ton weekly where the bulk of the graded sizes goes for filtration both water and sewerage outflow,so no more Welsh Anthracite for multifuel burners anymore,just foreign imports. |
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Mistress Rose
Joined: 21 Jul 2011 Posts: 15932
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Posted: Mon Aug 24, 20 7:22 am Post subject: |
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Another important aspect raised by you there Ty Gwyn. It seems pointless sending things round the world and relying upon other countries, which may have far lower safety and pollution controls than we do in the UK. If anthracite is needed, then it makes sense to mine and use our own. Similarly, we now depend on Russian gas which could be turned off at any time, which would also cause an electricity shortage.
I am not happy about coal gassifcation, but we make charcoal using this system for wood, and in that case there is a lot of excess gas produced. At present we flare off the gas, but the manufacturers of our kiln are working on a way of drying and cleaning it so that it can be used to run a generator or other engine, or stored at low pressure for later use. We are also considering using the excess heat from the chimney to dry wood, as some of the big British producers are doing.
According to the British government we are all supposed to use electric induction hobs and electric ovens (good business to get into with associated pots and pans), and either use waste heat from factories (?) or air sourced heat pumps in our hermetically sealed homes. Open windows and wood fires not permitted. I think the regulations may have come in that no new build is permitted to have chimneys or gas. |
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Shane
Joined: 31 Oct 2005 Posts: 3467 Location: Doha. Is hot.
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Mistress Rose
Joined: 21 Jul 2011 Posts: 15932
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Slim
Joined: 05 Mar 2006 Posts: 6609 Location: New England (In the US of A)
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Mistress Rose
Joined: 21 Jul 2011 Posts: 15932
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Posted: Sun Aug 30, 20 8:04 am Post subject: |
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I can see a lot of good points about those houses, but I think there are a number of things that may or may not have been thought about that were not highlighted in this. One is to ensure that rising damp isn't a problem. In the UK, which tends to be a bit on the damp side, particularly Wales where that was filmed, we went from solid walls to cavity wall for that very reason. The next is ventilation. The small block did have opening windows, but they were talking about separating washing and drying clothes. This means that you will have wet clothes hanging around in the house, as well as people breathing out damp air, kettles, baths, showers etc all producing moisture, and if air management is not thought about, mould very quickly develops. All of this may have been thought of, but it wasn't highlighted, and having experienced rising damp from a house where the builders didn't understand this newfangled stuff (1870s build) and having to reduce humidity in a house, they are real problems. |
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Slim
Joined: 05 Mar 2006 Posts: 6609 Location: New England (In the US of A)
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tahir
Joined: 28 Oct 2004 Posts: 45661 Location: Essex
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