Coal being phased out

[Martin KyteParticipant @martinkyte99762]

30 years is almost instantaneous when compared with past changes.

As the Earth moved out of ice ages over the past million years, the global temperature rose a total of 4 to 7 degrees Celsius over about 5,000 years. In the past century alone, the temperature has climbed 0.7 degrees Celsius, roughly ten times faster than the average rate of ice–age-recovery warming.

(Taken from Nasa earth observatory website data)

regards Martin

[RobinParticipant @robin]

In the UK cold WInters come in fours. We remember the cold ones more than we remember the warm ones.

Ice in the Arctic comes and goes with the seasons and it is only very recently that we have measurement of it. The Americans used to bring their new fangled nuclear submarines to the surface at the North Pole just to prove they could,

Sea levels are not moving uniformly everywhere. Land rises and falls. All mid Pacific ocean islands are temporary, the volcano that made them moves on up the chain. One inch rise in seven or eight years is an extra 10.66"" by 2100, will anyone notice?

Polar bears have survived much warmer than this and are becoming a real nuisance.

[Russell EberhardtParticipant @russelleberhardt48058]

Regardless of global warming we cannot rely on fossil fuels to power the needs and wishes of humanity indefinitely. Fossil fuels are going to run out. At the present rate of global GDP growth and population growth we have the following time left for our reserves of fuels:

Oil – about 30 years

Gas – about 40 years

Coal – about 70 years

ref: https://mahb.stanford.edu/

In the UK, for example, the average energy use is about 200 kWh per day per person. This can be broken down as follows:

Manufacturing and transporting goods – 60 kWh

Motor car use – 40 kWh

Heating and cooling buildings – 37 kWh

Flying – 30 kWh

Food production – 15 kWh

Plus other minor items.

ref: http://www.withouthotair.com/Contents.html

How can we make a significant difference without a big drop in lifestyle or population?

On yer bikes everybody!

Russell

 

 

Edited By Russell Eberhardt on 26/02/2020 16:33:37

[J HancockParticipant @jhancock95746]

Come on ( a la Michael Caine ) , never mind climate change, I am still trying to understand how 'everything' in this country is going to be powered by electricity which is derived solely from renewable energy by 2050 ?

How many more windmills ?

How many more square miles of solar panels ?

Tidal barrages ?

Geothermal ?

There is nothing else.

[not done it yetParticipant @notdoneityet]

Posted by J Hancock on 26/02/2020 16:53:54:

Come on ( a la Michael Caine ) , never mind climate change, I am still trying to understand how 'everything' in this country is going to be powered by electricity which is derived solely from renewable energy by 2050

….

There is nothing else..

This thread is about removal of coal from the generation mix. Ideally non-carbon or sustainable sources. That only includes renewables.

Think Nuclear, biomas for starters.

[Ex contributorParticipant @mgnbuk]

biomas for starters

Is that the "environmentaly friendly" pelleted wood that is felled & processed in North America, shipped across the Altantic, then delivered to power stations here using diesel trains & trucks to be burned to make electricity?

Nigel B.

[not done it yetParticipant @notdoneityet]

Posted by mgnbuk on 26/02/2020 19:18:40:

biomas for starters

Is that the "environmentaly friendly" pelleted wood that is felled & processed in North America, shipped across the Altantic, then delivered to power stations here using diesel trains & trucks to be burned to make electricity?

Nigel B.

No.

[SillyOldDufferModerator @sillyoldduffer]

Posted by mgnbuk on 26/02/2020 19:18:40:

biomas for starters

Is that the "environmentaly friendly" pelleted wood that is felled & processed in North America, shipped across the Altantic, then delivered to power stations here using diesel trains & trucks to be burned to make electricity?

Nigel B.

It's not going to be easy! However, whatever the answer is, it doesn't include fossil fuels.

Carrying on as we are requires three difficult problems to be ignored:

• Pollution.
• Climate Change
• Fossil fuel reserves are running down

Pollution can be disregarded provided you don't care about anyone living in a city or industrial area. Climate change can be dismissed by refusing to accept the evidence. That oil, coal and gas are accelerating down to empty can't be ignored so easily. The days when it was possible to go Wild Catting in Texas or anywhere else are long gone. There are no major Fossil fuel reserves in the world that aren't already being exploited.

Personally, I think ignoring issues in the hope they'll go away is unwise. Far better to try and fix them, whether it's a misbehaving lathe or a global energy crisis.

Dave

[J HancockParticipant @jhancock95746]

NO, the intention seems to be to rip out our domestic gas boilers, etc, etc, ie no 'fossil' produced

heating anywhere..

Ok, I missed out .fusion' as an alternative in my list but no real chance of that by 2050.

[Russell EberhardtParticipant @russelleberhardt48058]

Posted by J Hancock on 27/02/2020 08:51:38:

NO, the intention seems to be to rip out our domestic gas boilers, etc, etc, ie no 'fossil' produced

heating anywhere..

Ripping out gas fired boilers is a good idea if they are replaced by air sourced heat pumps (reversible air conditioners). They have a coefficient of performance of about 4 at present although some Japanese manufacturers are now claiming about 5. That means that for every 1 kWh used they will output 4 kWh of heat energy. That would cut my estimated 37 kWh/d/person to about 9 kWh/d, a much bigger energy saving than covering your roof with solar panels, remembering that not all of the 25 million households have a south facing roof area (think rows of terraced houses with north/south orientation, tower blocks, etc.).

Yes, it's a shame that fusion is so far away. However nuclear fusion plants although not really sustainable but uranium supplies and fast breeder reactors could have a very long life and have a much lower CO2 output. Just a few other problems to consider.

Russell

Edited By Russell Eberhardt on 27/02/2020 09:30:14

[VicParticipant @vic]

Flying 4.6K miles to lay on a beach in Goa surely doesn’t help much either but “they” seem reluctant to curtail holiday flights. I guess when oil supplies start to get short the various militaries around the world will insist on the end of frivolous flights?

**LINK**

I found this particularly interesting: “new airliner models in the 2000s were barely more efficient on a seat-mile basis than the latest piston-powered airliners of the late-1950s”

[SillyOldDufferModerator @sillyoldduffer]

Posted by J Hancock on 27/02/2020 08:51:38:

NO, the intention seems to be to rip out our domestic gas boilers, etc, etc, ie no 'fossil' produced

heating anywhere..

Ok, I missed out .fusion' as an alternative in my list but no real chance of that by 2050.

We will all be ripping out our gas boilers in the end. No point is gas central heating when there is no gas, or gas is too expensive to burn.

Much of British Gas comes from the Norwegian North Sea because our share of North Sea Gas is almost all gone. Most of Europe's gas comes from Russia. At the moment Russian gas is very cheap – drill a hole in the right place and it pours out of the ground in such large quantities that its given away or flared off. Fantastic, except this happy state of affairs can't last. Sooner or later, all the natural gas will be gone.

I've mt a lot of chaps my age who believe that some mysterious 'they' are plotting to inconvenience society by removing systems that have done us so well for a few generations. Whether it's gas boilers, diesel or petrol, the assumption is demented greenies are out to remove innocent privileges for foolish reasons. This is wrong: pollution is a serious problem in many places, global warming is far more dangerous than Corona Virus, and running out of fossil fuels will destroy our entire economic system.

Unless something is done the outlook is grim. Back in 1970 the issues were mostly hypothetical, well over the horizon. Fifty years later, they are impossible to ignore. Anyone under 30 years of age has a great deal to worry about, because the simple solutions available to Grandad are going, going, gone.

Signalling the end of domestic gas boilers gives industry time and encouragement to develop alternatives. That's surely better than ignoring the issue. New ideas required please, not denials and blaming others.

Dave

Edited By SillyOldDuffer on 27/02/2020 10:40:16

[pgk pgkParticipant @pgkpgk17461]

<cynic>Suddenly it'll be environmentally sound to go back to coal since we have massive reserves….

The UK has identified hard coal resources of 3 910 million tonnes, although total resources could be as large as 187 billion tonnes.
link

We'll have a Trump of our own selling the latest capture technology and benefits of atmospheric sulphur to keep fungal disease at bay and the old comic book stories of going to sit in the gas works to treat your 'flu'</cynic>

Fusion, they say, is 30yrs away and always will be. Actually now that private enterprise is playing with fusion power ideas there is some hope….

The reality that no gov is prepared to accept is that we need to do with less…less imports, less travel, less making 'stuff' just to sell it and preferably fewer people…

I always assumed that the earth was slowly decaying it's orbit into the sun but apparently it's moving away at 15cm/yr so it will get colder – eventually.

[SamsarandaParticipant @samsaranda]

Just like to throw into the mix the magnetic North Pole is moving at an alarming rate because, supposedly the balance of the earth has been altered by the extraction of huge volumes of water in the Indian region and so much concrete has been erected in China, I fear we are all doomed !
Dave W

[Ex contributorParticipant @mgnbuk]

biomas for starters

Is that the "environmentaly friendly" pelleted wood that is felled & processed in North America, shipped across the Altantic, then delivered to power stations here using diesel trains & trucks to be burned to make electricity?

Nigel B.

No.

Actually it would appear to be yes – on the local news this evening was the announcement that Drax power station is to stop burning coal next year & move over entirely to "biomass". Source of this "biomass" ? It will be supplied as described above – which is where & how the current "biomass" comes from that is currently burned alongside coal. 250 redundancies as a result of the change.

We could always move from natural gas to LPG when natural supplies get difficult or too expensive to come by – the UK is apparently an exporter of LPG, which is a byproduct of oil refining. And stopping using oil for transport won't stop the use of oil – I read recently that transport uses of oil are already less that that used to produce petrochemicals & lubricants. All known oil reserves being exploited ? What about the recently announced field west of the Shetlands that is estimated as being a larger deposit than the North Sea field – just needs the price to rise to make it economic to start on. Likewise the fields around the Falklands.

While the variable horizontal scale of the temperature changes graph refered to earlier makes determining the older cyclic variation patterns with any accuracy difficult, what struck me was that the last 20,000ish years that show as being relatively stable appeared to be the exeception, rather than the norm. If the temperature variations are just returning to the previously unstable norm, it won't really matter what we do – the normal situation will reinstate itself regardless. Time for NASA to come up with a sunshade ?

Nigel B.

[Michael GilliganParticipant @michaelgilligan61133]

Posted by mgnbuk on 27/02/2020 19:46:59:

[…]

it won't really matter what we do – the normal situation will reinstate itself regardless. […]

.

Perhaps it’s time to review James Lovelock’s ideas, without all the hyperbole that was attached in the seventies.

MichaelG.

[Neil WyattModerator @neilwyatt]

Posted by Vic on 27/02/2020 09:53:44:

Flying 4.6K miles to lay on a beach in Goa surely doesn’t help much either but “they” seem reluctant to curtail holiday flights. I guess when oil supplies start to get short the various militaries around the world will insist on the end of frivolous flights?

**LINK**

I found this particularly interesting: “new airliner models in the 2000s were barely more efficient on a seat-mile basis than the latest piston-powered airliners of the late-1950s”

It's interesting that journeys on short haul, high-occupancy flights on turbo-prop aircraft have a much lower carbon footprint than single occupancy ICE cars (especially petrol ones) and comparable to train journeys.

Neil

[not done it yetParticipant @notdoneityet]

Actually it would appear to be yes – on the local news this evening was the announcement that Drax power station is to stop burning coal next year & move over entirely to "biomass".

I think this particular form of ‘generation’ is simply a means of Drax taking advantage of government rules which paid subsidies for non-fossil generation. It is, in my opinion, simply a company taking advantage of a loop-hole in the regulations – blame the rule makers for the loop-hole.

At the same time, where would we be if that generation was disallowed? One to two GW that would have been fossil generated. Burning coal would generate about eight times the amount of CO2 apportioned to this fuel (only because the full emissions from the biomass are not recorded in the form the government use) and thus shows up in reports as a reduction in CO2 emissions. Nothing more than that.

It was why there was the ‘rush for gas’ three decades ago. Yes, far more efficient than simply raising steam to drive turbines but also it reduced our carbon use at a stroke – which was what was required. Back then, we used the same amount of electricity but the carbon foot-print was slashed.

Other forms of sustainable/non-carbon generation were subsidised, but most are now being installed without any support, but the historical subsidised installations were garanteed that subsidy for their lifetime. It was the only way to get them built cheaply, at the time. Think hinkley point strike price as a prime example.

Simply a scam, in my opinion. But lets remember that subsidies are paid to all manner of industries such as agriculture, coal mining (in the day), public transport and a whole lot of others. Tax payers are stumping up for all these subsidies, apparently for the overall good of the country. It is a form of spreading taxes more equitably among the population, say some.

But others might point out that they pay for the likes of public transport but do not get any benefit from it (remote rural communities with no public transport services). Subsidies are directed to resources for the main populaion, not out-lying minorities (where the returns on the investment would make it unsustainable).

Roundabouts and swings at the final analysis, I suppose.

[Clive IndiaParticipant @cliveindia]

Posted by Samsaranda on 27/02/2020 13:27:53:

Just like to throw into the mix the magnetic North Pole is moving at an alarming rate because, supposedly the balance of the earth has been altered by the extraction of huge volumes of water in the Indian region and so much concrete has been erected in China, I fear we are all doomed ! Dave W

Nice one Dave – but I fear many have missed the joke.

[PeroParticipant @pero]

On the right track Dave but no cigar.

Being north of the equator the extraction of water about India is not having a big impact.

It is the export of iron ore from Australia and Brazil ( about a billion tonnes in 2017 ) that is causing the problem.

Although a lot of it is exported as iron and steel, not that much of it comes back south of the border ( equator ).

[J HancockParticipant @jhancock95746]

Two 'big' ones that will have had an effect on the C of G in our lifetime are the loss of the Aral Sea and the 'plus' of the Three Gorges project. Coriolus Effect etc.

[J HancockParticipant @jhancock95746]

Back to the plot , all is explained on the gov. website ' UK net carbon zero 2050' with further details as a link

on ' Industrial Strategy.' as to how it will be achieved.

Allow at least 5 minutes to read it all.

My little brain can stop worrying now.

[vintage engineerParticipant @vintageengineer]

Well if the green idiots get there way we will all die out anyway, but we will leave a barren lifeless planet behind. If we reduce the earth's co2 level below 300ppm most of the plants will die out!

[SillyOldDufferModerator @sillyoldduffer]

Posted by vintage engineer on 29/02/2020 18:13:41:

Well if the green idiots get there way we will all die out anyway, but we will leave a barren lifeless planet behind. If we reduce the earth's co2 level below 300ppm most of the plants will die out!

If we had the technology to reduce CO2 levels by 50ppm, there would be no need to worry about climate change! As it is, CO2 is out of control.

Ice core records show CO2 levels wobbling just below 300ppm for the last 800,000 years. Then they show the level rising sharply since industrialisation, up to about 420ppm last year and accelerating. It's an awful big difference to make to the atmosphere in only 250 years. Carbon Dioxide being odourless and invisible doesn't help – the problem would be much easier to accept if the air turned black and car tyres dissolved in rain water!

Curious thing noted at today's family 'do': although the elders don't care about global warming, they're terrified by Coronavirus…

Dave

[Frances IoMParticipant @francesiom58905]

Dave “Curious thing noted at today’s family ‘do’: although the elders don’t care about global warming, they’re terrified by Coronavirus… “

Well I guess you told them to look on the bright side – if the pandemic happens it will possibly solve next winter’s NHS crisis

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