Vocal Voices

In the fight against climate change? A British inventor, Rodney Allam, might be onto something interesting.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/christophe ... 63d894402d

Fingers crossed for it to work. Fossil fuels with no emissions might be good for the UK, considering we have about 200 years worth of coal left underground.

Very interesting, vey interesting indeed.

If the shortened link does not work use this one:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/christophe ... 63d894402d

And this one gives a more in-depth explanation of the Allam Cycle.

I had heard rumblings about this some time ago but it was so far "out there" that it seemed more fantasy than fact. I have now had a chance to do some reading up and it does look promising.

Where it looks to have the most potential (for now) is not in replacing the mega sized coal fired power stations such as Drax, Eggborough or the former Ferrybridge, but with the now defunct city power stations in the 250 - 400 MW size. According to the information from Forbes, and other places, new plants with outputs of about 300MW come in at roughly £225m and can be operational in no time.

If the UK could run them on gasified coal, and as you say, Cromwell, we have loads of coal, then we could conserve the gas and oil reserves we have left and cut down on energy imports of many kinds. We might even be able to produce enough electricity from them to make electric cars more of a reality than they currently are.

Flying today, I'll comment when I have time.

Suff wrote:Flying today, I'll comment when I have time.

Please look.

The sad thing is that even if it can be made to work it could (will) go the same way as small scale hydro. We know that works. We know there are hundreds, possibly thousands, of suitable sites in the UK. We know it is local with hardly any transmission loss. We know that its environmental impact is minuscule. And we also know that all those things make it unattractive to *investors*.

Big is good. Bigger is better. Mega-humongously-gigantically big is perfect.

I had time to read, extremely interesting. I just don't have time to make
a coherent response. Extremely interested in the US venture capital company.

The Idea has great merit, especially for local use where it might be better to put carbon neutral infrastructure in which is always on but doesn't need huge application like large Nuclear stations.

The issues I see are:

Transport of the coal. Gassified coal is neither free nor easy to transport into an urban setting. There is a reason why coal fired power stations had rail lines to them and why they became larger and larger and smaller in number.

For the US, who now have a surplus of natural gas due to Fracking, this makes a lot of sense. However it doesn't make quite so much sense for the UK where Fracking has much larger implications for less gain.

Personally I've had an idea around the use of excess CO2 in transport which might make this kind of thing even more interesting and it's why I posted about the venture capital company facilitating the use of the US Billions of clean energy initiative money.