Is there anything more alarmingly delightful than the creaking gears of history as the dialectic of Enlightenment lurches forth?? For all the gnashing of teeth and angry bashing of keyboards about K-Rudd’s 100% pathetic climate target, the real politics – the subpolitics of experts, bureaucrats and negotiators – continues under the public radar. Few (ie. everyone in the MSM except Bernard Keane) seem to have noticed that the government Marn is going to release a new Energy White Paper at the end of the year. To that end, they’ve published a “strategic directions paper” that doesn’t even bother with any pretense of deliberative input into what is essentially a private taxation regime for the Greenhouse mafia. The whole process is so completely stacked against any outcome commensurate with the challenge of climate change and economic common sense as to be essentially laughable.
As Keane noted back in early March, there is a “High Level Consultative Committee” which is
… “one of the key sources of advice for the development of the White Paper” which “represents a cross-section of stakeholders in Australia’s energy sector… from discovery and exploration through to export and end use, and in both existing and emerging technologies.”
However, that’s a bit misleading.
The Committee is composed of representatives from Shell, BHP’s uranium division, Santos, Woodside, Rio Tinto, Origin, AGL, Xstrata, the Energy Supply Association, the Petroleum Production and Exploration Association. The non-fossil fuel representatives are the Australian Energy Market Operator; chair and Department of Resources Deputy Secretary Drew Clark; the Secretary of the Victorian Department of Primary Industry, Richard Bolt, the Prime Minister’s National Security Adviser Duncan Lewis and the CEO of CSIRO, Dr Megan Clark.
Despite the terms of reference identifying the need to reduce carbon emissions as a goal, the need for cleaner energy and conservation technologies and environmental sustainability, and specifically indicating the White Paper will cover both fossil fuel and renewable energy resources, and energy consumption, there are no representatives of the renewable energy sector on the committee, nor is anyone representing energy users.
With a board stacked like this, you can guess how they’ll define their woolly objectives of ensuring that “economic development is sustainable and efficient; effective operation of competitive energy markets is promoted and the need and scope for government intervention on the basis of market failure is identified”
Section 5.2 “Realising Australia’s energy resource potential” is where the commitment to a complete rejection of any democratic principles or consideration of externalities is most visible.
the Energy White Paper may consider:
a) strengthening the economic and scientific data on Australia’s energy resource potential by undertaking resource assessments
b) a plan to ensure Australia remains a preferred destination for investment and encourage Australia’s established energy exports, including LNG, and associated services
c) an assessment of whether there are efficient and effective legislation and administrative frameworks for the identification, exploration and development of energy resources
d) arrangements to improve the provision, expansion, regulation, ownership arrangements and utilisation of infrastructure.
Might I humbly suggest that they consider elevating this guy (who probably has an office next to the Deputy Secretary of Pub Rock) and giving him some power to define what an ‘efficient and effective’ framework looks like:
The ‘coal is cheap’ meme was dealt yet another blow last week with the release of a new ATSE report entitled The Hidden Costs of Electricity: Externalities of Power Generation in Australia.
Leaving aside for the moment the difficulties in accounting for the not hidden costs of electricity generation, it does seem rather strange that the National Electricity Market has been running for over a decade, is Australia’s largest Environmental Externalities market and yet nobody has thought to publish data on the toll its participants exact to public health through particulate emissions and people through global warming. The findings of the report would make Marn blush, cause they ain’t friendly. All this crap about ‘not picking’ winners relies on a concerted effort to ensure these kinds of calculations are kept as rough and marginal as possible. The challenge for the troglodytes in the energy industries is to provide plausible counter-calculations if they’re going to have any chance of keeping a presentable public face.
1) For reference, they note that the present wholesale price of electricity in Australia averages around $40/MWh.
2) They estimate that between $1.5 billion and $2.5 billion will be required over time in the Australian context for RD&D to fully demonstrate a single commercial application of CCS. I’d love to know how they arrived at that figure, but still.
Ouch.
That could buy an awful lot of solar thermal/wind integration/wave power research.
But there’s a much deeper issue here still, and it relates to the promises of big, complex technologies keeping within certain cost bounds. As Stephanie Cooke notes in this excellent piece, legacy issues with ‘too cheap to meter’ nuclear energy are a huge drag on the dreams of a clean energy revolution:
PRESIDENT OBAMA has made clean and efficient energy a top priority, and Congress has obliged with more than $32 billion in stimulus money mostly for conservation and alternative energy technologies like wind, solar and biofuel. Sadly, the Energy Department is too weighed down by nuclear energy programs to devote itself to bringing about the revolution Mr. Obama envisions.
Today, the department’s main task is managing the thousands of facilities involved in producing nuclear weapons during the cold war, and the associated cleanup of dozens of contaminated sites. Approximately two-thirds of its annual budget, which is roughly $27 billion, is spent on these activities, while only 15 percent is allocated for all energy programs, including managing the Strategic Petroleum Reserve and researching and developing new technologies.
2/3rds of its annual budget spent cleaning up nukes? Let’s hope Marn isn’t setting us up with a similar problem.
Wave power doesn’t need money for more research, it needs money for implementation.
Carnegie Corp just announced they have been granted licences for wave farms in WA, SA and 3 sites in Vic. They’re just about to start rolling out their first commercial test plant at Garden Island in WA.
Emission free desalination and power co-generation? Thousands of MWs of wave power potential around our major population centres? A system for which output can be forecast weeks in advance and is beneficial to marine life? Nah, let’s keep burning coal.
Hang on – that’s 2/3 of their budget cleaning up nuclear WEAPONS production. That’s a bit unfair to nuclear power.
By the way, Richard Bolt, Vic DPI Secretary, is Andrew Bolt’s brother. Which is not to suggest he’s a greenhouse denialist.
It’s quite bizarre how DEWHA is structured. And why energy efficiency is even in that Department is a good question.
Wot wilful said about civilian vs. military.
Otherwise, excellent post.
That said, a couple of billion dollars to make CCS work is chicken feed. The problem is the lack of actual “making it work” part, or any seeming urgency to make it work.
Every day, a little more of my hope that we’ll fix climate change dies.
Can someone of authority please de-moderate my previous comment? It seems I fell afoul of the links/post cut-off.
Robert @ 3-ish, that’s the whole problem with CCS. It won’t ever work and spending any more money on it is just a total waste. A couple of billion might not be serious money, but it could be spent so much better than on a smokescreen for the coal industry.
“a couple of billion dollars to make CCS work is chicken feed”
But for a single demonstrate plant???
ps. This just in from PointCarbon News
DK: one-offs of anything are far more expensive than things in series production.
Yes, it’s frustrating that the same kind of money isn’t being thrown at other options, but if we could get a first-of-a-kind CCS plant up and running for a couple of billion dollars, and that technology then demonstrated that it was workable, it would be very cheap at the price.
In any case, if they’re really proposing a commercial scale plant, the equivalent dirty coal plant would probably cost half a billion, probably more, to build.
My fear with CCS is that a small demonstration plant will work, sort of, just enough to proceed with a big one, and then they’ll tell us just how expensive and unscaleable the technology really is. Physically, I’m sure CCS can be done. Economically, I’m not at all sure. Having spent vast sums of money and more importantly delayed action elsewhere for many years is just unacceptable.
The only authoritative punditry I’ve seen on the question has been from Barry Pittock who, in response to Tim Flannery’s Quarterly Essay, stated that fully scaled CCS would be far more expense than most renewables.
I would disagree, Robert that once demonstration is proved replication will be cheaper. The analogy isn’t manufacturing but plantations. Sure you can master certain variables like soil type and terrain but every single one is an experiment subject to factors that are inherently uncertain.
I know that Origin have an interest in geothermal development, and it may be that others in the committee are also smarter about things than Martin Ferguson (not hard!). So I retain a little hope.
We have the technology – in solar thermal and geothermal alone – to provide all the power we need. All that is needed is investment.
I thought that we were supposed to be looking for places to spend money to fix the Global Financial Wimwoms?
Prof Peter Newman, a member of Rudd’s Infrastructure Australia has poured cold water on CCS with the suggestion that Newcastle should not go ahead with a third coal loader at the port designed to double exports to around 200 million tonnes pa.
Bet he doesn’t get re-appointed.
The disconnect between AGW and increasing coal exports as flogged by the Minerals Council and city fathers is not lost on most Newcastle residents. A canoe blockade of the port took place recently.
dk: the extraction and concentration of the CO2 from the exhaust gas is manufacturing.
And it’s much easier to grow a familiar crop than a brand-new one that’s never been commercially planted before, even allowing for issues with soil types and whatnot.
pablo @ 13
Not sure what Newman has been smoking because the coal loaders in Newcastle are privately funded and run – I don’t see why the Government should care whether or not the mining industry wants to throw away it’s money on this sort of infrastructure. Personally, I think it’s a good idea because NSW Coal is much cleaner than most other coal in the World – the reality is that Coal is going to remain part of the energy mix for at least the next few decades so we should at least help make sure that the coal that is burnt is better quality and hence lower emission intensity.
dk (and others)
Most people looking at CCS don’t see it as the solution to allowing existing coal stations to operate but rather the pathway to making other fossil fuel combustion processes less CO2 intensive or even neutral. From my research in the area of CCS (predominately storage side of things), the cost will be in the capture and transport aspects of the CCS rather than storage. Unless the storage sites are close to the site of combustion, transport costs (ie pipelines, pumping etc) are going to make these combustion sites uneconomical unless they have very high energy efficiency. Gas turbine and pulverised coal/water engines are likely to be the energy sources that actually utilise CCS rather than the existing coal fires plants. I suspect that brown coal in the La Trobe valley will never be competitive even with CCS, even with the relatively close proximity of the potential storage sites in Bass Straight.
Of course we need a price on carbon to drive the investment into these new technologies and the other renewables. The CPRS, despite its flaws, is at least a start in this regard. If we throw out the CPRS, it may take years before we have a replacement carbon pricing instrument – the sooner we start investment, the quicker we move to cleaner energy technologies.
dk, looking at the externalities graph, one might think the take-home message about the relative cost of solar is that it stacks up reasonably well against coal. You draw the most obvious and reasonable inference available. But the person launching the report from which the graph is taken, the Minister for Finance and Deregulation, Lindsay Tanner, headlined it with another meme, straight from Marn:
It takes a particular skill to direct the thrust of the ATSE report away from coal and instead into a critique of a renewable energy.
It takes a particular skill to misread what Tanner said as well (but hey, you are in politics too). Quite obviously, he was critiquing solar advocates, and was still talking positively about renewables.
As people around here know better than most, solar PV is in fact a bit of a joke. But that’s not the broader perception.
“Prof Peter Newman, a member of Rudd’s Infrastructure Australia has poured cold water on CCS with the suggestion that Newcastle should not go ahead with a third coal loader at the port designed to double exports to around 200 million tonnes pa.
Bet he doesn’t get re-appointed.”
Oh, look!
“The New South Wales Government has questioned the impartiality of a top-level Commonwealth adviser after he raised concerns about a planned expansion of Newcastle’s coal facilities.”
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/04/01/2532318.htm
Dave55
NSW has a $1 billion bid in with Infrastructure Australia for a major expansion of rail network in the Hunter Valley so that:
So there are public monies involved.
Australians’ obsession with things solar does make a certain amount of sense. If there’s one resource we’re not short of over the vast majority of the continent it’s insolation and it’s not going to be going away any time soon. Tidal, geothermal and, to a lesser extent, wave and wind power are geographically limited in feasibility, but solar plants could be made to work pretty much anywhere.
Agreed, though, that PV is not the answer in most cases. Start looking at industrial scale solar thermal though, and it get’s much more exciting.
I’ve just been looking (professionally) at some aspects of a proposed plant and I certainly considered it very promising. It’s not exactly free energy and I’d like to see some figures on the carbon footprint of the huge amount of quite energy intensive manufacturing required in building it, but the technical hurdles are not large. For example, much of the major componentry is already available off the shelf, albeit aimed at other applications. Construction would be quite labour intensive (there’s a lot of assembly work that would, initially, be difficult to automate), but, in a climate where government employment programs may yet become necessary or where there is a pool of local, unskilled, labour, that may not be too hard to surmount.
As an engineer, I find myself very excited at the potential.
There seems to be some confusion about CCS.
The worst way to do it is to burn the coal in standard plant and then recover the CO2 from the smokestack.
The best way to do it is to liquify the air first, sell the liquid nitrogen and burn the coal in pure oxygen this reduces the volume of exhaust gas by the percentage of nitrogen in the air 70% ?. The CO2 still has to be captured but it is much easier to deal with. Requires a different type of combustor etc. Regardless of the extraction method the fundamental relationship between the mass of coal consumed and combined with oxygen to form CO2 stays the same – given the same thermal efficiency.
The real problem with CCS is the variability of the repositories.
Huggy
Gianni
Yep, but the complaint was about the extra coal loader not the rail line – besides, the rail line expansion isn’t just for coal but other commodities as well. Over the past couple of years the grain and cotton crops have been much lower due to the drought – the increased coal output has meant that the rail infrastructure still operated at capacity. Additional capacity in the system is required just to facilitate the transport of the usual grain crops and other commodities to the port without without reducing the coal output. Investment now in times of reduced demand also means that inflationary pressures when demand increases are reduced.
Opposition to the coal loader still doesn’t address my comment about quality of coal. I am all for moving towards cleaner and renewable energy sources but cleaner coal in the interim is far better than dirtier alternatives. Stopping NSW coal and forcing generators onto less clean alternatives may make some people feel better about our role in contributing to climate change but it is pretty dumb in the scheme of things given climate change is a global problem. I can support an upgrade of the Newcastle coal infrastructure and still advocate strong climate change policy without being hypocritical; in fact I think it is probably a smarter approach to climate change than that adopted by Lee Rhiannon etc.
Huggybunny: That’s a metric shedload of liquid nitrogen.
What could we do with that much of the stuff? Use it for industrial and commercial cooling?
To the best of my knowledge Richard Bolt has diametrically opposite views on climate change to his brother. Bolta actually banned me from his blog a few years ago for asking what his brothers views on climate change were!
Interestingly, Jennifer Marohasy’s brother is Jim Turnour, ALP member for Leichhardt in FNQ, who is also no denialist. This is from is maiden speech to Parliament…
So I’m not sure what kind of disease climate change denialism is, but its certainly not genetic!
Ferguson is a bit of a loose cannon in all of this….For a start, he has always been a climate skeptic and booster for the resources sector. Second, he and KR loathe eachother. Ordinarily, that would mean that he would have little influence over policy, but then Rudd turned around and gave him a portfolio with significant influence over Australia’s future fossil fuel intensity….Pretty dumb really….The separation of energy, resources and environment into separate departments no longer makes much sense…..Perhaps KR will have to learn this the hard way….
a couple of billion dollars to make CCS work is chicken feed. The problem is the lack of actual “making it work” part, or any seeming urgency to make it work.
The basic laws of physics and thermodynamics dictate that CCS won’t “work”, once you factor in the very high implementation cost (following massive R$D spend), and the need to burn 30% more coal to power it. Ask any engineer who isn’t pumping out industry PR.
A couple of billion dollars spent on a mix of renewable energy technologies and efficiency measures would be far more productive, and would reduce emissions, not just fund some PR to appear to lower them.
Tanner’s money quote is:
This is clearly an indiscriminate attack of unspecified “solar advocates”. This is really just mudslinging and Cover Your Arse for Labor’s non-support of solar at both Federal (cap the rebate) and State (Claytons Feed-in Tariffs) levels.
All solar advocates I know agree that a mix of renewable energy solutions, including solar and wind, are required. Not a false dichotomy from Mr Tanner. Isn’t politics wonderful?
An interesting overlooked fact: PVs are producing power at times of maximum demand – when power is bought by retailers on the national electricity market (NEM) for about 45 times the normal tariff. This cost is passed on to consumers, and the people with panels producing this very valuable power only get the normal tariff.
Robert, you sell as much liquid nitrogen as you can. It is very good for things such as recycling tyres, drying stuff for waste incineration – controlled atmospheres the list goes on. It is already widely used in industry, also very good as a carrier gas for the direct reduction of iron ore (I used to inject methanol into it at 1100C where it cracked to form a reducing atmosphere).
If it was cheap enough it would make a good zero emissions “fuel” for vehicles. I assume that if CCS was adopted on the scale that the CCS advocates require it would be very low cost.
I rather like the idea – energy density not so good – but as the carbon burden is already paid for it is actually zero emissions. Unlike hydrogen it will not explode, only risk is burns etc from spilled liquid. Leaks in a confined space such as a garage could reduce the oxygen levels.
See: http://www.mtsc.unt.edu/CooLN2Car.html
Typical boffin-mobile but the science is good.
Huggy
Dave55
What’s the advantage of burning the better coal sooner?
Surely if the NSW coal might work with CCS and the brown coal almost certainly wont we should be trying to replace NSW coal with brown coal wherever possible, saving the NSW coal until we have CCS? And since coal isn’t going away it makes sense to mine it only as fast as we have to, because the price is unlikely to fall. The longer we hang onto it the more it’s worth…
moz: because in the meantime, brown coal has even higher CO2 emissions per unit of energy produced than black coal.
In Hansen’s opinion if we burn all the coal in the world then cooking the planet, Venus style, is a possibility. If we also mine and burn tar sands he thinks cooking the planet is a dead certainty. He points out that in the long distant past CO2 has been as high as 4000 ppm without boiling the oceans dry. But this time, he says, solar irradiance is greater, and there is likely to be an actual terminal disaster with respect to conditions for human life.
We are already in overshoot for a safe livable climate with methane on the uptick.
The IPCC let slip in its final report that emissions should peak by 2015 and come down from there. Even that trajectory would not be without danger.
If Tanner had attacked PV rather than solar he might have had a point, but he didn’t. Even allowing for that I think the reason Australia should be investing in solar is that it is effectively our job.
Denmark invested in wind because they have a lot of it, and that’s one of the reasons why wind power is now usually the most cost-effective form of renewable. Other developed countries were never going to prioritise solar because they either don’t have much, or have more wind than sun.
That would be fine if it was true for the whole world, but the developed world is going to need solar to work if it is to switch – most developing countries have heaps of sunlight, but not that much wind. To create a global renewables market that works at least one rich country needs to get serious about solar, and it makes sense for it to be us.
Absolutely. However, from what I’ve seen in the last couple of weeks (my first serious involvement in the subject), we still appear to be tagging along on the coat tails of what’s been done in the US. We’ve a long way to go before we can claim to be even following world’s best practice, let alone establishing it.
On a positive note, though, the client for the project I’ve been looking at is a serious player with plenty of capital available, who won’t need to go to the government, cap in hand, to make it happen. The project has a real chance of going ahead fairly quickly if the numbers stack up.
Today I met with one if the boffins working on carbon storage. He said that they had not succeeded in finding a safe repository anywhere in OZ.
Robert, if nitrogen was used to replace petrol in vehicles it would be sold at the same price per unit energy. When the price of oil goes up it would make sense to throw away the oxygen and just sell the N2
All entirely feasible, liquid nitrogen tanks can be refilled in petrol stations (you pull up in the green section). I once had this huge spherical tank of liquid N2 in my care and protection.It was really great, kept the factory break-in merchants away, too scared.
Huggy
TIB @ 33, I expect you know about Worley Parsons’ plan to build 34 solar power stations by 2020 at $1 billion a pop.
fs @ 32, Germany for one seems fairly serious about PV solar, because they lack direct sunlight, at least at the roof-top level.
And surely California counts as a developed country for concentrated solar, given the size of its economy.
Huggy and others, N2O is what you get when you burn nitrogen isn’t it? Last time I looked it was evil, being one of the designated GHGs causing climate forcing.
Brian, thanks, I’d forgotten about that. Interestingly, the plant I’ver been dealing with isn’t one of the Worley Parsons ones, so it appears that there are other serious players who are looking seriously rather than spruiking pie in the sky schemes.
Having looked at Huggybunny’s link, the technology doesn’t seem to look at combusting the nitrogen in any way, just using it as the working fluid in a compressed gas engine. Not the same at all and, provided the liquid N2 is obtained as, effectively, a waste product (as it would be if removed from the combustion air of a coal fired power plant). It made me think that there may also be potential to use liquid N2 to cool the cold side of a Stirling engine too. Again, an application that would not result in the emission of oxides of nitrogen. I find myself intrigued.
TIB my physics and chemistry are not even basic.
It is good indeed to know that others are taking initiatives.
I just heard Ian Lowe on the radio say that we the people will just have to go ahead because we can’t compete with the greenhouse mafia’s lobbyists in influencing government. The ACF have been doing a version of Al Gore’s presentation which has now been seen by 300,000 people.
I also heard the other day that a group of major superannuation fund managers had formed themselves into a sustainability lobby and were prepared to use their shareholder power over companies. Since they own 25% of the sharemarket the threat to disinvest would be very negative to any company’s share price.
There is perhaps hope.
Brian, you don’t burn the liquid nitrogen, you expand it through an engine and recover much of the energy required to liquify it – no burning at all.
Huggy
Huggy, have you heard of the compressed air car? Not surprisingly, they’ve signed a deal with Tata.
Range is one of the problems. I guess you’d do a lot better out of liquid nitrogen.
You could use any source of renewable energy to compress the air, like wind power for example. Ditto for nitrogen.
Any detail on those greenish Super Funds Brian?
RE: thread title, energy and ground, digging of – On tonight’s (ABC) Catalyst in the story about extraction of metal from ore by flotation I heard
Large slice, what? So if we just gave up mining, we’re well on target for reducing carbon. What’s to be done with Marn’s miners, his real constituency, some would regard as a problem. Not me, IMO it’s sisgnificantly those cashed-up bastards becoming the new landlord’s who have been inflating house prices around here, as they gut them and turn them into sardine-can overseas student accomodation cash cows. It’s like the old drowning lawyer joke: what do you call an unemployed miner… a good start.
The national installed electricity capacity is about 50GW, 50,000 MW, 10,000 x 5MW. 5MW is the output of Ausra’s ($15 million to build by 150 people in 5 months, a fair bit must have been labor costs) Kimberlina plant opened late last year. That’s 10,000 x 150 x5 people-months, 53 months for australia’s mining workforce (140,000) if it was re-deployed en-masse, call it 5 years with holidays.
@ the 44c kWhr feedin tariff for the output which even the LNP policy had on offer, each of those 5mW stations working in the semi-desert sun for 1000hrs/yr generates 5000kWx1000hrsx$.44 = $2.2 million/year, so there’s a 7 year payback period on the $15 million cost.
So, if someone ( Super funds sound good to me, if BHP Billiton have a few tens of billions spare, they’d be good stakeholders, they’re used to doing things at scale and over decades) stumped up the startup capital, and we the people took it on the chin that our electricity spend is going up threefold (44c kWh /14 c kWh) for the next 7 years, ( up to par with our present phone/internet spend ), to pay the greenpower infrastructure workforce for the 5 years it takes to build it, leaving 2 years of payments for the financier profit margin, (20%, which is fair), well, then it’s done.
The infrastructure will be up and on, owned by we the people as a national utility, the financiers and workforce will have been paid, the running costs will be minimal ( the 5 mW Kimberlina plant needs 7 people to run it), and we will have substantially de-carbonised by 2020.
Australian’s taking it on the chin for 7 years for the sake of long term sustainable survival? Australia moving on from it’s stone-age economy, pulling the plug on mining? Yeh, right, as if.
Danny, I haven’t had time to research the sustainable investment group yet. This guy I know told me about it and gave me a heap of stuff I have to sort through.
Then last week I noticed an article in the Courier Wail about the Investor Group on Climate Change (IGCC). I notice that my bloke’s company is not listed as belonging, so maybe there’s two groups.
Then it depends on what their policies are and how hard they push them.
Brian, the thing with liquid nitrogen is that it exposes hitherto unexpected synergies.
If the oxyfuel process is ever to be useful it will generate vast quantities of liquid nitrogen.
This is because to get the pure oxygen required the air is liquefied and fractionally distilled to obtain the oxygen. Some of the energy generated by the power station is required for this process. The process also generated 73 % liquid nitrogen. There is an industrial market for some of this. Otherwise it is released back into the atmosphere – presumably with some energy recovery.
If the liquid nitrogen can be sold into another market such as that for motor fuel the entire economics of the oxy fuel process will be radically altered. Vehicles could be converted to this fuel by changing engines and fuel tanks.
Suddenly the “waste” N2 becomes a valuable resource. There are no emissions at the point of use, the CO2 emissions during manufacture will be buried.
The only catch is that suitable repositories are hard to find. Rather like nuclear actually.
Huggy.
Brian, on compressed air cars.
The difficulty with them that I have (apart from the thermodynamics) is that the”fuel” is stored at very high pressure and the tank could explode somewhat vigorously. Liquid nitrogen, on the other hand, is stored at atmospheric pressure; in a Dewar flask. No this is not a problem.
Both systems must extract energy from the air to stop the engine from freezing up.
While the liquid nitrogen will not explode if the tank is ruptured it will spread a large amount of very cold liquid around- Cold enough to kill you. It will however eventually evaporate.
I can think of a number of containment systems that would make it very safe. Probably safer than petrol.
Interesting;
Huggy
Interesting indeed.
So you are saying that the use of nitrogen for power depends on CCS being successful, at least in some measure. Which makes it a long shot in terms of the time frame, if nothing else.
If you aschew nuclear, there would be some countries, would there not, that would have to depend on hydrocarbons for continuity of grid power? I’m thinking of Britain here as an example. Could Germany access enough geothermal to solve the ‘base load’ problem?
Brian yes nitrogen powered vehicles will only come if CCS is successful.
Germany has enough hot water underneath it to generate its entire base load -forever. (some estimates have all of Europe)
If the Kalina Cycle (ammonia and water) is implemented then ordinary steam turbines can be used.
No nuclear waste no steam generators no fuel no nothing.
This is why I get so mad when the nuclear touts talk about “New” safe nuclear reactors in 25 years.
We have the technology off the shelf – now- for sustained hydrothermal generation all over the place.
Problem is it will not be implemented while the nuclear touts are running interference.
Huggy
Thanks, Huggy, I must write and tell the other Merkel, Angela that is, no relation, I believe
Brian, Sehr drollig.