Posted on 07/31/2019 1:28:03 PM PDT by aspasia
An actual game changing technology is being demonstrated as we sit in our air-conditioned abodes reading this. And it is being demonstrated by North Carolina–based Net Power at a new plant in La Porte, Texas.
The process involves burning fossil fuel with oxygen instead of air to generate electricity without emitting any carbon dioxide (CO2). Not using air also avoids generating NOx, the main atmospheric and health contaminant emitted from gas plants.
(Excerpt) Read more at forbes.com ...
Unless they’ve a process to break the fuel down into respective elements (carbon, hydrogen) and then just burn the hydrogen, producing water.
Otherwise yeah, you’re still going to have CO2.
A single dollar spent on preventing the production of CO2 is a dollar wasted. CO2 is not a problem.
Yes, it is "used in the process", but it is not consumed, nor is it changed to any other compound. This is a classic example of how fake news can be written so that it leads to conclusions that are NOT TRUE.
Sure, a bit of CO2 may be reused over, and over, but the total amount of CO2 used to produce energy must be disposed of.
There is a market for a lot of the CO2 produced by power plants. But they don’t have a low-cost process to extract the CO2 from all the nitrogen and other gases and soot that’s in the exhaust stream. So they can’t produce it cheaply enough for the oil EOR industry. Also, the existing power plants weren’t designed to remove the CO2 from the exhaust stream, so it would take a lot of costly retrofitting of machinery and pipes to extract the CO2 for sale.
This process sounds very promising, especially the claims of extra efficiency at converting the energy in the natural gas to electric power. But I don’t know where developing countries that don’t have much of an oil industry (like India) are going to put all the CO2 extracted by this new process. They could just skip that step, release the CO2 into the air, and just take advantage of the higher efficiency (which should lower emissions of everything, including CO2, compared to conventional power plants.)
Ask any Liberal on the Street the composition of our Atmosphere.
I will bet a dollar to a donut that they will say Oxygen comprises 50% or more of it with CO2 in second place at 25%.
It only "sounds" promising because not all of the "facts" are true.
Most likely, the basic facts in the article are correct. But it’s a short article and it doesn’t get into all the technical details of this technology and all the business issues related to using new technology. We’d have to talk to some engineers to find out if there’s any downside to this new process. Then there are business issues such as, who will utility company hire to maintain and repair a new kind of power plant that nobody fully understands, except for the manufacturer? A utility company could get stuck with only the original manufacturer being able to repair the plant, possibly at a high cost.
So of course there are a lot of factors that utility companies have to consider before building one of these plants with this new process. You’re correct that it’s no simple decision.
The article doesn’t clearly say. It is noted that the argon and nitrogen from the incoming atmospheric air are being sold; it does not say how that separation process is being powered. We are left to assume (a bad strategy) that the plat is powering that process parasitically from their energy output.
Also woefully deficient, here, is the cavalier “Oh, we’ll get to that” handling of present-hour issues with the planned sequestration of CO2 in deep geological formations; and the offhand comment about earthquakes gave me a chuckle, as well.
More than likely; the plane will produce more CO2 than it can sell, sequestration plans won’t be ready to implement, and excess “captured” CO2 will end up getting released to atmosphere.
I’ve got your “game changer” right here - but you’d never know because it gets so little press (AND so few ppl understand the operating principle to start with):
https://brilliantlightpower.com/
Protos under going calorimetry testing in the lab early this year:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UwjyO8H0E6U
Public demo in 2016:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nIDmFJXrkx4
I’m sure you will agree then that the $20 billion per year subsidies to the fossil fuel industry ($14.5B federal plus another $5.5 billion state) should be eliminated too.
We’ll get right on that.
This “game changer” has no relevance to anything other than the Religion of Carbon. It is a prime example of economic malinvestment brought about by political interference in the economy.
CO2 levels on this planet are currently at 410 PPM.
But what the "experts" aren't telling you is that nature produces 95% of all CO2 and man made only accounts for 5%........
Waste of tax payer funded monies.......
Sounds damn stupid to me. Hydrocarbon and oxygen equals water and CO2. It takes a lot of energy (relatively) to get the pure O2 the want to use in burning the Hydrocarbons. With energy you can break apart C from the O2. But again the net cost per Kwh would be quite high. Without CO2 there is no O2 for people and animals to breath. We actually need more CO2 to help feed everyone.
I’m sure you will agree then that the $20 billion per year subsidies to the fossil fuel industry ($14.5B federal plus another $5.5 billion state) should be eliminated too.
We’ll get right on that.
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I have absolutely ZERO problems with eliminating any existing subsidies that may exist and never establishing any new subsidies. And this applies to ALL sources of energy..wind, solar, nuclear, gas, coal, ethanol or anything else.
The ONLY subsidy I might consider acceptable would be to encourage urgent implementation of robust EMP protection for our national electrical grid and critical infrastructure.
supposedly “not emitting”, but same amount of CO2
“All CO2 that is generated by the cycle is produced as a high-pressure, pipeline-ready by-product for use in enhanced oil recovery and industrial processes, or that can be sequestered underground in tight geologic formations where it will not get out to the atmosphere for millions of years.”
btw, that high-pressure CO2 didn’t come for free, lots of energy is required to pressurize any gas ... oh, and the energy cost to produce that pure O2 is even greater, much greater ...
bottom line: if one accounts for all the extra energy inputs for this process, its net energy output is WAY less than simply burning the fuel conventionally ...
this is just another “miracle” energy process that’s nothing more than a scam accepted on faith by those ignorant of physics, chemistry and the laws of thermodynamics ...
The gases produced are trace amounts of nitrogen oxides, trace amounts of sulfur oxides, significant amounts of water vapor, and the remaining portion is carbon dioxide. The nitrogen and sulfur compounds dissolve in the water condensate formed at a cooler portion of the recycling process of the CO2. The acids formed are extracted for sale as industrial feed-stocks. Using or not using the pure water product for cooling purposes affects the overall efficiency by .5 to 1 percent. About 3% excess inventory of CO2 working fluid formed from the fuel combustion would be continually tapped off at a 30 bar pressure level for pipeline transport to oil reservoirs projects. This Senate Committee report provides some additional detail.
“One of the first things I learned as a young Army Officer was that quibbling is not a good thing. If it’s a good and efficient process it will be adopted without tax credit subsidies. If it’s not an efficient process it won’t be pursued absent the market distorting subsidies.”
hmmm. We subsidize families and children.
The CO2 is a money maker for the generating plant, with the cost of production very low based on the new approach to produce a pure product. The petroleum industry can use all the CO2 from 250 GW of generating plant capacity for the next 35 years, per details of a Senate Hearing in May of this year.
Natural gas is CH4. The hydrogen weighs very little. The carbon combines with the pure oxygen fed in, and becomes CO2. The carbon and oxygen molecules weigh about the same as the carbon, so the resulting gas weighs three times as much as the natural gas going in. The result is not a 3 percent "excess inventory", it's 300 percent. ALL of the CO2 is excess inventory. It is never consumed in the process.
The turbine system’s working fluid is a large quantity of very high pressure CO2. High pressure fuel and oxygen streams are injected to the combustion burner within the system at a rate such as to add 3% more to the total CO2 per second. This additional amount is the portion continually tapped off from a lower pressure point (30 bar) in the fluid processing cycle.
The high pressure of 300 Bar is the combustion unit pressure feeding the turbine inlet. The density of CO2 at that point is about half that of liquid water. Due to the density of this working fluid, the CO2 turbine equipment of equal power capacity is of a much smaller scale than the equivalent steam turbine system.
The basic system overview is provided in the first page, and the additional page highlights the additions that will allow coal as the fuel source with about 52% overall efficiency.
https://ngi.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/3_Brown_NET_Power_0.pdf
https://www.globalsyngas.org/uploads/eventLibrary/2014_11.2_8_Rivers_Xijia_Lu.pdf
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