[LINK] Tony pulls it off!

[Bernard Robertson-Dunn]

Chris Maltby wrote:
> On Thu, Dec 03, 2009 at 10:44:58AM +1100, Birch, Jim wrote:
>   
>> There was a piece on the Science Show in November talking about a new
>> technology that converts brown coal into something like black coal
>> halving the CO2 per energy unit.  Given the CO2 output of the Latrobe
>> Valley this sounds like a major improvement.  
>>
>> http://www.abc.net.au/rn/scienceshow/stories/2009/2742004.htm#transcript
>>
>> I'm not think that elimination of fossil carbon power isn't the real
>> objective, but this seems a substantial step in the right direction, it
>> can be achieved quickly.
>>
>> Does anyone know whether this process will work?  
>>     
>
> Jim,
>
> I presume that the process involves heating of the brown coal to drive
> off the extra moisture and other non-combustibles. When you subtract the
> energy input from boost in burning efficiency it's not so dramatic.
>   
You presume wrong.

<quote>
So what we do...as water reaches its critical state it chemically 
changes, it becomes a very aggressive chemical that goes back into this 
brown coal polymer, this lignite, and depolymerises it. It produces a 
high grade coal and it produces a group of oils. So we actually use the 
biggest disadvantage of brown coal, which is water, as an agent of 
change to actually enable us to get a higher energy density coal, which 
in our case moves from...remember the wet coal was about 12 megajoules 
per kilogram, our coal comes out about 30 megajoules per kilogram. So 
it's actually even higher energy density than traditional thermal coal 
using black coal power stations. Hence I can use less to get the same 
amount of energy in a power station, which means that the amount of CO2 
that I produce goes down incrementally as well.
</quote>

Black coal is 26-27 megajoules per kilogram.

-- 
 
Regards
brd

Bernard Robertson-Dunn
Canberra Australia
brd at iimetro.com.au