The government’s Renewable Energy Demonstration Program is going to hand over a not insubstantial amount of money to four renewable energy projects around Australia, according to Marn’s press release. A total of 235 million dollars is to be handed out – $90 million to Geodynamics for their Cooper Basin geothermal project, $66 million to Petratherm for their Paralana project, $66 million to a joint venture led by Ocean Power Technologies to build a wave power station near Portland, and a project to better integrate renewable energy into a small-scale grid on King Island, a small island in the middle of Bass Strait.
Geothermal energy has been discussed repeatedly on LP, particularly Geodynamics. Petratherm is taking a slightly different approach, choosing less hot, but more convenient locations for thermal wells. The integration project is moderately interesting from a technical perspective. They propose to use thermal storage – of a similar type to that used with solar thermal, though using a graphite solid block rather than molten salt – in combination with wind power. In essence, they intend to use resistive heating (like your toaster) to use excess electricity from the wind turbines and a little solar plant to heat the carbon block, and a steam turbine to turn the heat back into electricity when required.
Sounds great, right? In principle, this kind of technology can turn wind into a baseload power source. In practice, though, my guess is that no better than 30% of the excess electricity generated by the wind farm will get turned back into usable electricity – and you’ve also got the costs of the steam turbine and the storage system. Wind energy is not cheap already; this kind of storage will make the net costs even higher. It might make more sense if you have existing steam turbines lying around, that have been rendered uneconomic for some reason – of which there might be a few in Victoria and South Australia over the next few years!
Anyway, these seem like just the kind of energy projects that the government should be funding. Now, if only more of the compensation to polluters in the ETS could be instead used to fund a few more…
UPDATE: In comments, Huggybunny suggests that the conversion efficiency should be around 60%, because the system operates at very high temperatures, making everything more efficient (see this earlier post for a general discussion as to why)
One advantage: King Island is d*mn windy a lot of the time.
Wrong guess Robert,
The conversion efficiency should be greater than 60%
This storage system operates at >700C and is very, very suitable for electric resistance heating if you use SiC elements that are good for 1500C.
The theoretical (Carnot) efficiency of such a system with a storage temperature of 800C and a condenser temperature of 100C is 87.5%.
This is very good, better than flow batteries.
New steam turbines are really low cost BTW.
Huggybunny
Fair enough Huggy, but can you buy turbines that actually operate at those kinds of temperatures off the shelf?
Robert,
“but can you buy turbines that actually operate at those kinds of temperatures off the shelf?”
No, you cannot-easily. The present lack of a really high temperature “front end” will drag the efficiency down to 45% — closer to your estimate. However there is work on this.
I attended a briefing session on energy storage systems in Melbourne yesterday. The graphite system has huge attractions for wind energy because you can get really high temperatures using resistance heating at virtually no loss. Given a high enough temperature graphite can store lots of energy; 300 kWh (thermal) per tonne at a storage temperature of 750°C up to 1,000 kWh (thermal) per tonne at 1,800° according to one system developer.
This is a GWh per tonne at the higher temperature — nothing else comes any-where near this.
At 1400C the theoretical efficiency is over 93% – given that a suitable heat engine can be invented that will work at this temperature. To my certain knowledge there are common alloys that are good for 1100C.
Graphite storage is not so good for solar thermal as you cannot bury the heaters in the block but there is work going on. Graphite has one really big advantage here in that it emissivity is really low, you will not feel the heat from a block at say 800C until you put your hand on it and your hand vaporises thus the losses when being heated from an external radiative source are low.
The part I like is that carbon itself looks like being part of the solution to CO2 emissions.
Flatten the demand on the electricity network and you achieve huge saving in CO2.
Huggy
Don’t you mean a MWh per tonne?
One key thing with all of this is whether the energy can be released to effectively meet consumer demand. If this can be done, and at a reasonable cost, then things could get quite interesting. A one tonne block might not contribute much, but 500 one-tonne blocks would be something.
Sacha,
You are correct, I mean 1 MWh/tonne.
It is a huge energy density nonetheless.
Sorry about that.
In volume production this would have to be the lowest cost energy storage.
It should work very well with electricity generation systems such as wind turbine.
Huggy
As far as an efficient high-temperature heat engine, if I recall correctly the PBMR project in South Africa was working on a high temperature gas turbine using helium as a working fluid. I’m sure Huggybunny is happy that they’re currently struggling for capital, but the same principle could be used with this storage tech.
However, the problem would be getting the heat out of the graphite. You could use some kind of liquid working fluid running through the graphite, and a heat exchanger…but what’s an appropriate working fluid at those kind of temperatures, and what the hell do you use as pipe?
Robert, You don’t need pipes as such Its all in the geometry of the graphite – think transverse pores. As soon as you inject the working fluid it turns to vapour and wends its way through the graphite matrix.
In essence the lifting of nuclear reactor efficiency is the same as that of recovering the stored energy in graphite (delta t) only this time you don’t need make radioactive shit and you don’t need any fuel at all.
I think we will see a sort of hybrid gas/”steam” turbine. The trick is to get the highest delta t. With nukes you have a limited choice of working “fluids”, they have to be really simple or the neutron flux will tear them apart.
I have used silicon carbide heating elements in electric furnaces, they are very reliable at high temperatures. So the heating side is taken care of and the heating efficiency would be over 98%.
Huggy
Sounds exciting. I think the government should spend money to bring all technologies to the boil as it were and then the market will sort out which are used more widely.
Steve Hollis, from Lloyd Energy, who are doing graphite storage, modules each 1100 sq mts of heliostats over an acre focussed on 1 tonne blocks, 16 modules for a 3 Mw $10 million installation at Lake Cargelligo near Condoblin said on 3CR earlier this year:
He’d also said in an ABC interview in Feb
He’s based in Cooma, he told the local paper in June
And here’s the patent
Indeed, Huggy, but then you’ve got another problem – if you’ve got some highly complicated matrix of channels in the graphite, you have to manufacture the graphite in that more complicated shape.
Manufacturing your storage then becomes a fair bit tougher than just churning out lumps of granite.
Seriously, this *does* sound quite promising, but it’s not going to be trivial to make work at the kinds of temperatures that makes for really efficient energy storage.
Danny, thanks for the info, I’ll have a good look.
However, the working temperatures your post refers to are going to lead to efficiencies somewhere south of 50%, rather than the 70%+ available if we could figure out how to build a heat engine that works at really high temperatures.
As an engineer I find these alternate energy ideas fascinating. As a taxpayer I think it is outragous that the government is handing out our money like this. We already have MRET so if they really want to prop up investment in such things it makes more sense to work with that rather than splashing cash around like drunken sailors.
Of course if the government was actually serious about reducing CO2 emissions rather than merely posing they would be unwinding our nuclear power prohibition. However given that they lack the ticker to unwind something as basic as a prohibition on parallel book imports I can’t see it happening. This is a weak government that will ultimately end baddly.
As an engineer I find these alternate energy ideas fascinating. As a taxpayer I think it is outragous that the government is handing out our money like this. We already have MRET so if they really want to prop up investment in such things it makes more sense to work with that rather than splashing cash around like drunken sailors.
Of course if the government was actually serious about reducing CO2 emissions rather than merely posing they would be unwinding our nuclear power prohibition. However given that they lack the ticker to unwind something as basic as a prohibition on parallel book imports I can’t see it happening. This is a weak government that will ultimately end baddly.
Robert,
Graphite is just an amazing material. I have, right here here on my desk, a sample of graphite foam that; floats on water , has a higher thermal conductivity (in one axis) than copper. It is used for heat transfer in spacecraft.
Another version of the foam is used in advanced lead acid batteries.
http://www.fireflyenergy.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=204&Itemid=81
People like me have been trying to buy this battery for years it is a sensational left field advance on Pb battery technology but the company that owns the technology is taking a very conservative market approach.
Graphite can be easily formed into foams with any desired pore to mass ratio or more macro shapes such as used in graphite moderated nukes.
Its specific heat is high (0.71 kJ/kg K) but not sensational however you can use it to over 1000C so the energy/mass ratio is really good. Burns well, as the nuke boys have discovered.
One thing is that there is no shortage of carbon in the world. Sequester it in graphite and use it for energy storage and CO2 reduction, sounds sensible to me.
Huggy
Terje, the MRET, as currently designed, is good for getting wind turbines and solar hot water installed. As you well know, wind power without energy storage will never be able to replace fossil fuels. Therefore, some additional mechanism is required to encourage the commercial development of technologies which can enable this – either energy storage, or different renewable technologies that are available when needed.
Yes, you might be able to achieve similar results as achieved here by further tweaking the MRET, something that Greg Hunt proposed.
As for nuclear, you know my views. But we should give renewables a fair shot – not least because they might well be cheaper and better in many circumstances, but also because it’ll be much easier to get political support for nukes if it can be shown that renewables have been given a fair go and it’s been shown that they can’t do the job on their own.
TerjeP (say tay-a)
You are correct, no government is really serious about CO2 reductions, they all want to play games.
There are two problems with nukes, especially in countries such as Australia where there is no history of nuclear power. (Sorry ANSTO)
1. Implementation of a respectable nuclear program will take too long to have any effect at all on the emissions targets.
2. The insurance companies are backing renew ables and refusing to back nuclear unless indemnified by governments. The reason? Their statistical analysis says that before to long there will be another Chernoble.
Already the Japanese have come very close to a major “incident”.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/461446.stm
Some in ivory towers may be entirely sanguine about this possibility but I don’t think the hoi polloi will tolerate another major incident.
Huggy
Huggy, any thoughts about the potential costs/MWh of these things (even a ballpark)?
This is a weak government that will ultimately end baddly.
As opposed to the previous government, Taja, that was so disciplined and focussed with its regional partnership funds and other assorted pork barrelling? At least this has a chance of benefitting someone outside the electorate.
Huggy,
Even including Chernoble the nuclear industry has a pretty good track record in terms of deaths per MW. And nobody is going to build a chernoble type reactor in Australia or probably anywhere else for that matter.
In terms of it taking a long time to develope a nuclear industry that simply makes the case for getting started all the more pertinent. Why should we delay starting just because finishing takes a long time?
Governments should indemnify nuclear power operators. However not against the risks of nuclear accidents but against the risks of regime change and regulatory costs. Historically these have been the real barriers.
Obviously I meant deaths per MWh not deaths per MW.
Terje, I don’t think you’re acknowledging the market bending that occurs with huge subsidies! Addictions are hard to break … To say that Nuclear is the only way to go is a little irrational and sounds like a stick up: please don’t tell us that you’re an engineer as that kind of thinking worries me!
Regarding storing energy. I remember reading here and there that enormous flywheels are very effective at storing and returning energy. Numbers over 90% come to mind. Any truth to this?
TerjeP (say tay-a) did you catch this article on the future of breeder reactors and fusion at TOD? http://europe.theoildrum.com/node/5929#more
nicki: the idea has been around for a while.
As I understand it, it’s suitable for very short-term energy storage because the potential maximum power draw is very high, but too costly for systems designed to be drawn down over a period of hours.
Niki
I have studied flywheels.
Problem is that the energy in a flywheel is proportional to (MV2)/2 where M is the flywheel mass and V is the angular velocity. This makes them very good for short time energy peaks (like a capacitor – same maths actually) they are not good for long term storage. Interestingly, the ones I looked at used carbon fibre for the “wheel” they run in a vacuum at 100,000 rpm or so.
TerjeP (say tay-a) @ 21.
All I am saying is that the insurance companies perspective is that another major nuclear accident must happen, they are good at statistics so I would take their word for it.
Death rate per MWh for power generation of any kind is only a tiny fraction of the death rate per MWh for motor vehicles- so no-one cares.
If enough people were killed and maimed in a massive accident then we possibly would care. That’s the nature of the beast.
Huggy
Dunno about the care factor, Huggy @ 26. Most of the world managed to ignore Bhopal, after all.
David Irving (no relation)
Bophal is an extreme example of the chemical poisoning that goes on every day.
We would have taken notice but there were not enough white professors killed.
This is my favourite nuclear accident report:
I think there are a few reactors scheduled for Indonesia?? If tha Japanese cannot discover a siesmic fault how is any-one else? Also note that it took aweek for the plant management to reportthe damage. This saving of face lurk is going to kill lots of people in Japan.
“2007
July 17, Kashiwazaki, Japan: radiation leaks, burst pipes, and fires at a major nuclear power plant followed a 6.8 magnitude earthquake near Niigata. Japanese officials, frustrated at the plant operators’ delay in reporting the damage, closed the plant a week later until its safety could be confirmed. Further investigation revealed that the plant had unknowingly been built directly on top of an active seismic fault.”
Huggy
TerjeP @20, Aren’t you still thinking in terms of the old energy paradigm of centralised power production? Perhaps it is time to rethink how we do things?
If the smart grid takes off, and we get lots of localised point sources of power production, there will be no need for centralised mega-power plants with foreign ownership generating monopolistic profits.
Localised purpose-built CCGT (Combined Cycle Gas Turbines) might be more appropriate for larger industrial operations. Meanwhile, the light industry and household sectors will be able to generate their own power, thanks to BlueGen and renewables.
David Irving @27, “…managed to ignore Bhopal”
Not exactly, David. Remember the name of that company? Did you notice how long they lasted after Bhopal?
It spelt the end of a long industrial history for Union Carbide.
Back to the topic,
It is interesting to note that the vey first electric power systems used batteries at the consumer premises and a dc transmission system. In fact, Kilmore in Victoria had a dc generation system for the town in the 1950’s as well as batteries at the generation end. I remember standing at the door of the generation plant as a kid. My Uncle built a trickle charger for my Dad’s radio using light bulbs, I remember him using lemon juice in water to detect the polarity.
There are major advantages for energy storage distributed throughout the grid.
Losses are reduced by alarge factor and the issues of generation management go away. It also puts intermittent renewables on an even footing with base-load.
The gummint should fund it instead of wasting money on Carbon Capture and Storage.
Huggy
Elise: there are good reasons why energy systems are currently centralized, and may still be so in an energy architecture dominated by renewable energy.
In a nutshell, big heat engines are more efficient than small ones, and big wind turbines are more efficient than small ones. Solar thermal is likely to be cheapest at utility scale.
Sometimes decentralized, distributed solutions are better. Sometimes they’re not. Think cars vs. public transport.
Huggy @31: “The gummint should fund it instead of wasting money on Carbon Capture and Storage.”
Trouble is, our gummint doesn’t know how to find it’s way out of a wet paper bag.
- Trapped in the coal lobby’s wet paper bag (CCS).
- Trapped in the Oceanic Viking mob’s wet paper bag.
- Fooled by the book publisher’s wet paper bag.
- Running in dizzy diplomatic circles over Indian accusations that there is some kind of deliberate racist violence in Australia. India is of course free of discriminatory behaviour, and don’t mention the unmentionables.
Whatever next??? How about we decide we are going to occupy government buildings and not pay any more taxes until he negotiates with us, and by the way, we want compo and apologies too?
Elise – it so happens that I think the old think is the right thinking. New thoughts are not better merely due to being new. And in fact the idea of distributed power generation isn’t even really new. Smart grids will be nice but they don’t alter reality.
If war was looming and you considered that a threat was imminent then you would not be maintaining a ban on bullets whilst you experiment with battery powered laser pistols. If you did it would be clear that you are either quite foolish or else that you are not really feeling that threatened. As such anybody that proclaims that AGW is a threat and yet wants to tinker with unproven utopian energy solutions whilst maintaining a ban on nuclear simply can’t be regarded as credible. At least not in my book.
It will take a long time to build up a nuclear industry. The prohibition should end now so we can get started. If a better technology gets discovered in the interum then that’s a bonus but don’t bank on it.
Robert Merkel @32: “Think cars vs. public transport.”
Was that an example of the virtue of a distributed system or a centralised system?
If you were arguing in favour of public transport as a centralised system, then I would refer you to the data I presented on an earlier blog. The data showed that both buses and trains are LESS or at best equal to small diesels and hybrid cars, in terms of emissions per passenger mile.
If people migrate to driving small diesels, hybrids or electric cars, the public transport argument is dead in the water.
TerjeP @34, too easy to make snide implications that people are foolish if they don’t accept your preferred solution.
Too easy to make stupid analogies to wartime and bullets.
You should think of studying the development of disruptive technologies some time, and look at what the old guard had to say at the cusp of change in each case. Makes hilarious reading with 20/20 hindsight.
Take care that you don’t get left in the vanguard arguing for old ideas.
The big advantage of molten salt heat storage and flow through batteries are that the operate at atmospheric pressure so the cost per m3 of storage is low.
If you use graphite with heat input/output using high pressure gas/liquid streams you are talking about pressure vessels that cost a mint so it is not realistic to talk about using the graphite mass as the boiler.
also keep in mind that, at high temperatures, graphite reacts with a raft of materials including oxygen, steam and CO2 which explains why people are talking about helium.
I can see no fundamental why a combination gas generator cannot be run with hot helium driving the turbine.
Robert Merkel @32, further to my comment @35, here is the data again:
Urban passenger:
by road (car): 0.36 passenger-km / MJ (1 passenger per 8.1L/100km)
by road (bus): 0.71 passenger-km / MJ (1 passenger per 3.7L/100km)
by rail: 0.65 passenger-km / MJ (1 passenger per 4L/100km)
By my understanding, you could increase the efficiency of car transport to MATCH bus and rail, by 2 simple methods:
(a) Take more than one passenger in the car, so that you double or better the passenger-km part of the equation.
(b) Use a car with half the fuel consumption, i.e. a small diesel, hybrid, or in the future an electric car, to half or more the MJ part of the equation.
Brisbane has already implemented a “2 or more” fast lane for some of their arterial roads during peak hours. It rewards people for more efficient use of their cars, and it cuts traffic congestion, and it cuts environmental pollution. Win-win-win!!!
Why don’t all our capital cities implement something similar?
Perhaps we could have a lane designated “ECO-lane” for buses and ECO-cars with similar emissions as passenger-km/MJ (or some simpler formulation)?
Perhaps the ECO-lane could include multi-passenger cars with higher emissions for a transition period, until more ECO-cars are commercially available?
I can’t see that there’s any reason to be concerned about high pressures or high temperatures in these graphite storage systems. The working fluid is contained in the heat exchanger which would be tubes of some sort embedded in the graphite. If you run the working fluid through slowly, you will get high heat and if the metering valve before the turbine is throttled back you will also get high pressure. The flow will be regulated according to the turbine requirements, whatever pressure and temperature that may be. If you could zip it through fast enough one could bath in it!
The high heat of the graphite is purely for increasing the energy density.
Seeing as Terje ignored me, the link I posted on breeder reactors and fusion showed there are major problems. Certain people around here and Brave New Climate have been getting way ahead of themselves on Gen IV, and fusion is looking impossible at this stage.
Further to the ECO-lane idea @38, perhaps when you register your car, you could be issued with green number plates (or some equivalent ECO marker)?
This would make it easier for the cops to check that people aren’t cheating and using the ECO-lane for their old clunkers…
Elise, that’s a useful piece of information…but it’s a bit of an oversimplification.
CO2 emissions are not the only consideration when it comes to transport, for a start.
Secondly, the carbon footprint of trains depends on the source of the eleectricity they are connected to. Hook them up to a renewable grid and their emissions go away. It’s not nearly as easy to make cars zero-emission.
In any case, the broader point is that you can’t just say “centralization is bad” or “decentralization is bad”. It comes up in the IT context as well. Should IT services be managed as centrally as possible, or managed at a local or even individual level?
SG @39: Quite right – The king island system uses tubes in the graphite to carry the water/steam. However, the link in Danny @10 implies that the King island system is established technology so one wonders why it got the grant?
Yes but how many times have people been wrong about an imminent break through. Whether it was cold fusion, room temperature super conductors, personal jet packs for commuting to work. There are lots of technologies that simply didn’t pan out. Maybe one day they will but in the interum we ought to invest in things that work and let the inventors cary on tinkering.
I fully expect that we will see some disruptive technologies. I suspect that batteries will get cheap enought to change the transport sector in significant ways. I think hot rock geothermal is a quite interesting concept. However so far all these things are vaporware.
If you don’t like the war analogy then try a fire analogy. If you were in a burning house would you call the fire brigade or would you call the guy that is working on a new invention that will fight fires using force field containment. Again only a fool would go with the unproven technology.
Don’t like fire and war. What if your kid was dieing from appendicitis would you go with proven surgical methods or a totally unproven diet modification plan.
It is silly to hold onto a ban on nuclear power, a proven low emission technology, simply because you hope somebody might invent something better. Simply because it may be the case that they don’t.
# 43 said “I think hot rock geothermal is a quite interesting concept. However so far all these things are vaporware”
You couldn’t be more wrong. Geothermal is an established power source all around the world including Australia where there is power being generated at Birdsville.
The Hot Rocks concept is a newer opportunity but has achieved ‘proof of concept’ and so is definitely not vaporware.
Salient Green, I’ve got a few shares in Geodynamics, which I regard as speculative. Sure they’ve put water down a hole and got it up again 500 metres away through hot fractured rock and run the system for 6 weeks, from memory. But drilling at close to 5km underground is near the limits of drilling technology and they had plenty of glitches along the way. They now have to scale this up to a small power plant to power the site and Innamincka. Then comes the big one where they have to scale up large enough to warrant building a power line to take the power to market at a price that is competitive. In order to achieve this they have to do what they’ve done in “proof of concept” again and again and again in a routine manner.
And they have to get the business model right so that they can make money out of the project.
There is a long way to go.
Brian is correct, the global “hot rocks” resource is enough to run the world for hundreds of years.
Birdsville is technically a hot water system. They use an Organic Rankine Cycle (ORC) to extract heat from very hot water http://www.ergon.com.au/Resources/Birdsville_GeoThermal_ORC.pdf
There is a vast hot water resource under Germany and more across the world.
ORC’s are common industrial gadgets that are used to recover heat from industrial waste streams.
There is no shortage of non polluting sources of energy. There are plenty of technologies for storing the more intermittent versions. Distributed generation and storage helps to reduce the despatch issues. Plus DG and the smart grid are essential parts of the refurbishment of the 50-70 year old distribution network
Only ivory tower aesthetes want to poison the planet with this central generation nuclear shit that in no way fixes the main problem – the degraded network.
Huggy
Brian, I have a few shares in Geodynamics also and I view the investment as far better than speculative. I’m sure the company also has this view. The cracking of the casing will be solved with the new steel and stuck drill bits should soon be a rarity with a new bigger rig, as well as techniques learned by experience.
The company is now aiming directly for the 25 MW demonstration plant which will take a little longer, end of 2011. They estimate that a doublet would produce about 4 MW but with a grid of wells, this will rise to about 7 MW per well.
I believe it’s a matter of when, not if. They would have enough information by now
on well costs, flow rates etc to know if it’s going to be worthwhile or they wouldn’t continue.
HB #46, Geodynamics is also a hot water system, except much hotter and of course they were expecting hot dry rocks. The new term is Enhanced Geothermal Systems, EGS.
What a relief because I read somewhere that speculation is evil.
Fact 1. The electricity grid in most of the developed countries is reaching the end of its economic life.I have heard estimates that 60 Billion dollars are required to fix it – in Australia alone..
Fact 2. Traditional remediation will not work. Unless the After Diversity Maximum Demand (ADMD) can be flattened or reduced, the cost of providing service will be increased by a large number.
Fact 3. The “Smart Grid” program is a way of using intelligent systems to reduce the ADMD
Fact 4. ADMD can also be reduced by distributed storage and distributed generation, but these systems are more beneficial to the network
Fact 5. The crisis of supply has managed to coincide with the need to reduce greenhouse emissions – big time. A reduction in ADMD will assist this by increasing the efficiency of the distribution network.
Given storage systems of the type being discussed here and other storage systems in development the network could be sustained by a judicious mix of large scale wind, solar and a small percentage of gas fired generation.
Huggy
I notice that your last paragraphy isn’t prefixed by the word “fact”. Which is a good thing because the storage systems being discussed here remain speculative.
For what it’s worth, I reckon it’s all speculative until it’s been done repeatedly (which includes fourth gen nuclear, by the way, though at least some of the basic designs were prototyped decades ago and worked).
Which, to come back to the point of this thread, is why these kinds of projects are so important (regardless of the exact funding mechanism).
From an investment point of view, Geodynamics, and indeed the entire Australian geothermal sector, is a punt. An informed punt, maybe, but a punt nonetheless.
Robert – I agree that fourth generation nuclear is speculative. Promising but speculative. However III generation nuclear isn’t speculative.
In terms of two definitions of speculation which apply here, ‘theoretical rather than demonstrable’, and ‘assumption of unusual business risk’ I believe EGS to be well beyond the first.
The second is characterized by penny stocks and which comes with another definition ‘Speculative stocks often have a high probability of declining in value and a low probability of experiencing above-average gains’. Again I believe EGS is well beyond those definitions.
I would add that the graphite storage system is not speculative either where it’s currently being installed.
If you read Geodynamics latest Quarterly and Annual Report it sounds very much as though Origin have given up on it, and dont want to spend more money, (It is mainly Origin’s money that has been spent to date). Seemingly they will not even be hooking up the 1MW plant to supply Innamincka, which was supposed to have been nearly ready six months ago. If it wasnt for another $90m from the Feds, this project would probably be dead.
In 4 or 5 years the only thing Geodynamics has got to work up there is the Visitor Centre.
Petrotherm may have less problems with hole stability given lesser heat, but it is silly to regard deep geothermal as anything better than speculative at this stage.
There are a number of questions that need to be asked when deciding whether to invest in R&D projects:
1. “So what?” What gains will be made if the R&D is successful? I have seen a lot of effort wasted on research over the years for which the potential benefits are quite small.
2. How much money will need to be spent to reach commercial operation? The money being asked for may be a fraction of the total cost.
3. How much will the proposed R&D increase the probability of final success?
4. What other R&D will be necessary to establish commercial viability? A lot of big projects fail to reach their potential because of inadequate testing or failure to ask the right questions.
5. Is there other R&D that should be done before the proposed R&D? Sometimes detailed testing starts without the low cost preliminary testing that would have established that the project was a lemon.
6. Can the technology/operation evolve or do you have to go from R&D to major expenditure for the project to be commercially viable.
I might be missing something but my quick evaluation of the three projects is:
1. The King Island project is not R&D because it is simply the application of existing technology.
2. The wave generation is worth supporting assuming the economics look promising. The learning from this site could be applied elsewhere and there is a need to demonstrate the system can run for years with acceptable operating costs.
3. The geothermal project is very questionable because:
a. The key information this project will produce is site specific. We can’t even be sure that successful operation between two wells proves that success will be achieved from adjacent wells let alone that it would work at other sites.
b. The project has to be large to be viable because it is a long way from the grid. We would be better to be putting money into proposals that are close to existing power lines.
Bill, I have read both reports and I don’t feel your negativity at all. The well/s earmarked for the 1 MW generation are stuffed due to hydrogen damage to the metal casing, which you should have read. Rather than remediate these wells, they have decided to bypass this step, for now, and go directly to the larger generation option, which requires more wells but will have a larger impression on investors.
There’s obviously no shortage of investment as a new rig has been ordered and new wells are planned.
And calling me silly hasn’t won you any points either.
John D #57, Agree except for 3a. When stimulating, they listen for fracturing and can accurately map the extent. This is established technology from the oil industry. Having mapped the extent of stimulation one can reasonably assume connectivity.
JohnD, on point 3b, unfortunately the rocks aren’t as hot close to civilization and the generating efficiency of hotter temperatures outweighs the longer transmission. A DC transmission line would help as would solar generation in the same area but I don’t believe the viability of EGS (Enhanced Geothermal Systems) will sink or swim on this.
There are major geological hot spots below the hunter valley which is already well served by transmission facilities.
I regard any power plant as speculative if a commercial plant of the same type has never operated before. What Geodynamics is working on falls into that category. This technology has been worked on since the early 1970s and they are yet to prevail.
Salient Green – I think you are banking on wishful thinking. It isn’t a sound way to conduct public policy.
SG@28: You have got to drill the wells before you can start the fracturing tests. The real question is how certain people can be that they have a viable option before they drill the holes. Oil industry experience?
The issue with power lines is that they cost about the same no matter what the generating capacity will be. Any data on the full cost of the power line required compared with the capital cost of of the rest of the operation?
JohnD, yes, oil industry expeerience. The heat and rock formations have been documented by the oil industry long ago, as well as experience in fracturing and stimulation to increase flow rates through rock. Geodynamics plans to have 500MW generating capacity by 2015. There are existing transmission lines from Leigh Creek 400km away and upgrades from there would be shared with the likes of Petratherm and hopefully by then, some solar thermal enterprises.
#60 terje, You must be right of course because you have your very own definition for ’speculation’ but I am comforted by the fact that I am “wishful thinking” in company with a lot of people who are a lot smarter than me and a hell of a lot smarter and visionary then your good self.
Salient, they were also planning to have a demonstration power plant working back in 2004.
Doing something new is hard.
# 63, They were drilling the 2nd well in ‘04 but even if that statement is accurate, it has no bearing on the fact that they are doing the job they set out to do and will succeed.
Think about the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T3iryBLZCOQ
This project is massively funded, totally speculative, has problems. It will probably end the world (universe?)when they get it going properly.
There is no reason at all why we should not choose to put that sort of money and effort into large scale energy storage or even distributed energy storage and geothermal in all its guises.
Its not about money its about prudence and consideration for future generations.
There are two choices:
Those who advocate the nuclear route are apparently willing to expose the world to the risk of catastrophic plant failure, clandestine bomb making and a vastly increased radiation load for their own selfish benefit.
The alternatives of geothermal and energy storage are essentially radiation and CO2 free. The resource will never run out and there is no toxic legacy only the feeble minded and the totally self obsessed would choose otherwise.
Huggy
Huggy, there was an interesting story about the Large Hadron Collider on the weekend. It keeps failing for weird reasons. The last involved a bird shitting on something.
There is a theory that someone in the future is using time travel to sabotage it because it’s incompatible with the future of the planet.
@66 “Someone in the future is using time travel to sabotage it because it’s incompatible with the future of the planet”
That’s the best news
I’ve ever hadI’ll ever haveBrian, the version I heard about was that God didn’t want them to find a Higg’s Boson.
Interesting, there is nothing in physics that says you cannot go back in time (Visit Adelaide today and you will see what I mean).
Seriously and way off topic, the LHC may explain why we don’t find other “civilisations” out there. They get to the stage of building a LHC and they blink out of existence in a black hole.
At least it will get the Europeans first and us last as it eats up the planet.
Huggy
TerjeP @43 & 60, I sincerely hope that you are not a major decision maker for any large corporation. The idea that you do not invest in something until it is proven and demonstated to work, means that you would never invest in either research (“unproven”) or even development work (“not demonstrated to work”).
That is, the only technology you want to use is past technology. I guess you would have been still arguing for ice chests, horse and buggy, wooden sailing boats, etc?
Luckily, enough other people have enough faith in ingenuity to work on “unproven” concepts, or we would never have progressed from the stone age.
Then again, TerjeP has already shot his argument against investment in new technology in the foot. Comprehensively.
He wants us to begin immediately on R&D for unproven nuclear technology. Yet he would have us accept: “Again only a fool would go with the unproven technology.”
“If you don’t like the war analogy then try a fire analogy. If you were in a burning house would you call the fire brigade or would you call the guy that is working on a new invention that will fight fires using force field containment. Again only a fool would go with the unproven technology.”
Does this principle (above) have a marvellous exception whenever it suits your own preferences?
Whether it be Enhanced Geothermal Systems or nuclear reactors, how much does water usage in order to create energy in this dry land play as a factor in regard to feasibility of these projects?
Thought provoking discussion BTW.
N’
nasking: geothermal is basically a closed cycle, as I understand it, or at least that’s the claim.
With nuclear reactors, it depends. If you use conventional cooling towers or once-through cooling, you need a lot of water, but seawater will work perfectly well.
If you want to put them inland and avoid a lot of water usage, you need to use a dry cooling tower, which is a fairly standard piece of technology but adds further to the capital cost.
Thnx for the feedback Robert.
N’
Robert Merkel @41: “Secondly, the carbon footprint of trains depends on the source of the eleectricity they are connected to. Hook them up to a renewable grid and their emissions go away.”
In that case, I will hand in my green halo when that fine day comes, and trains are hooked up to renewable energy. Meanwhile a low emissions car is a less polluting method of travel than public transport.
Of course, the data does not suit the purist ideology of the deep green set. However, it seems rather pointless for us all to be waiting for the government, or the rest of Aussie society, or a Copenhagen agreement, to move first on lower emissions.
Perhaps it has something to do with “locus of control”? As in: “Ay orta do somink…the gomint orta fixit”
We could all independently do things to make a difference, at home and at work, couldn’t we? If we all pitch in individually, eventually the Queen Mary could be turned around, couldn’t it? But not if we all wait for “someone else” to change the scenery.
If we all boycotted coal-fired power, by installing solar HW, solar PV, BlueGen, etc (households and businesses), then those coal-fired mongrels might go out of business. If we wait for the government to do it for us, we will be rotting in our graves before any discernable action is taken.
Just tuned in to this website while surfing. Wow, hope springs eternal, you lot. Salient Green @47 &c, your faith in Geodynamics is endearing. They dig down 4.2 kilometres, then blow the top off the well. It’s a write off. Not our fault they say (four months later) – hydrogen embrittlement under extreme temperature and pressure. Why are they surprised about that? Didn’t they look at the data from the oil drillers? Hydrogen embrittlement is text book stuff – didn’t they know about it, and if they did, did they analyse the water? And if they didn’t, have they got the right engineering on the job?
Meanwhile they Have managed to get an “independent” expert (GeothermEx) to say that the Habanero 3 “incident” does not invalidate the proof of concept. Well it may not invalidate the concept of this type of geothermal energy, but it puts a hell of a dent in the concept of doing it at the Cooper basin, at 4.2 km, at high temperatures and pressures, and whether it can be done at a competitive price. Even accepting the feasiblity and economics, it puts a question mark on Geodynamics ability to assess and manage the technological requirements. Who knows what new disaster awaits that they will fail to anticipate?
No amount of spin is going to change this catastrophe into an “incident”. It has set them back years, and probably would have sent them to oblivion had it not been for the $90m of our money the government has now given them. I sold my shares the the day the well blew up, before the price crashed. Now they have the audacity to write to remind me (in bold type) that my options to buy shares at $1.50 (current price $0.88) are about to lapse. They may think I am stupid, with some justification since I bought shares in the first place, without taking a hard look at what they were trying to do. But now having done so, I think I am one up on them – at least I recognise my stupidity and have taken the corrective action. My advice to you is to do the same – Geodynamics will not pay a dividend in the next five years, and probably never.
Elise @38 – I’d be interested to know the source of those figures – they’re quite different from these.
While your assessment may be correct under some circumstances, there are reasons to believe that it’s not the case in Perth.
First, the figures in the PTUA spreadsheet I linked to (which show that emissions per person/km for electric trains or diesel buses will be lower than fuel-efficient cars, even with multiple occupancy) are for Victoria, which has a significantly dirtier grid than WA’s (which is predominantly gas-fired), so the emissions figures for WA electric trains are likely to be even better than those in Victoria.
Second, the public transport system runs on a fixed schedule, so if you choose to drive instead, you won’t reduce the emissions of the public transport system by the amount you emit in driving, so your driving emissions will be largely additional, even if you use an efficient car.
Third, public transport system emissions are averaged between peak periods (fully utilised) and off-peak periods (under-utilised). The off-peak periods drive down the average efficiency – at peak times, public transport is much more efficient than the average figures suggest. If you work ordinary business hours, you’ll be using the system at peak times. I also understand that the WA Government has directed the Public Transport Authority to reduce the frequency of its off-peak services as part of a budgetary cutback process. This will further reduce the emissions intensity of the public transport system.
So, while using a fuel efficient diesel or hybrid car is certainly laudable, I rather doubt that it will result in a better emissions performance than using Perth’s public transport system.
Of course, a bicycle beats both.
Tim’s reasoning above is very solid, but it’s also an argument either for using fuel efficient/lowest possible emissions vehicles during the off peak when public transport could not improve in net terms on private vehicle usage and was withdrawn.
That said, I believe one could devise public transport options using existing energy sources for low shoulder periods that would still improve in per person terms on single passenger vehicles except where these were near zero emissions. At 2 in the morning however, it’s obviously going to be impossible this side of a near zero-emissions back end generating the output to be as good as a fuel efficient car. In cost terms too it is obviously going to be a lot more expensive to the public to provide public transport during such times, and you have to wonder whether spending the money in some other way to reduce emissions might not be better.
Agreed Fran. My reasoning applies principally to commuting. I doubt that it necessarily holds for other urban transport uses.