An ill wind and a lot of gas

Lets just do what the French have been doing for the last 30 years – build lots of atomic power stations and be done with it!

Instead of worrying about sending the right sort of messages (right for who?) how about just telling the truth for once. Climate Change is an unproven computer model, an energy supply based on wind will lead to power cuts, carbon capture is an expensive delaying tactic to support self-interest groups in the scientific left, fossil fuels will last at least 100 years yet and give best flexibility and security against a baseload which must be nuclear. As for Energy Conservation, it creates nothing and won’t light a single lamp (although it is of course good practice).
Politicians need to stop playing politics with our future in furtherance of their own careers, and just tell the truth, get on with taxpayer subsidised investment in nuclear and stop milking industry to subsidise it’s climate change fantasies.

The trouble with any energy policy is that it goes beyond the life of a single parliament and once that happens no politician is going to back a policy the other lot might be able to gain brownie points for, or conversely, blame them for making the wrong choice.

A decision to put off deciding is the best we can hope for.

Indeed the messages are confusing and are not very well articulated!

Offshore wind farms are only part of the solution to tackle the non-fossil fuel agenda. It is expensive and will not provide enough energy to replace the fossil fuel power stations (Coal and Gas).
The Chancellor and DECC have been fighting over this for a while, explaining this 10% cut.
DECC sees Gas as important post 2020, as we will not have enough renewable energy in place (Wind, Solar, Biomass, Tidal). Also the potential from Shale Gas described by some could be an easy solution. But as Stuart mentioned, this should be linked to CCS, so the CO2 emission from those plants are controlled and therefore deemed green.
As for Nuclear, well it seems like the Government can’t make their mind yet. Political decisions are urgently required to make because the general public does not want it after all the fears brought by Fukushima (although the relevance to the UK still need to be explained to me). But in the same time I am sure that the general public does not want black out as predicted by DECC for 2018 due to the lack of energy supply. Shall the UK follow suit Germany? Bear in mind that Germany is now importing Nuclear electricity from France…

It is time for Central Government to make some important decisions and promptly.
Investments are needed now to be able to cope with future demand as most of power plants are coming to the end of their life.
Developing and building new infrastructures e.g.; Power, Transport, Schools, Hospital, etc will provide a brighter future, and create jobs and economic growth now to turn this recession around.
Since the UK was at the forefront of the two previous industrial revolutions, there is no reason why they can’t lead the next one! I know this does not happen overnight… Let’s remain optimistic.

Easiest way to sort out energy policy, is to remove it from the fiddling greedy hands of the Conservatives, and appoint an engineering council that cannot be over ruled by Government.

Consistent policy is what is needed, not some gratuitous back room dealing with large energy companies, to get them the best profits. Also change the way that power is generated, to micro-generation.

I am convinced that we are already getting niggling indications of the near-future probability of international strife over hydrocarbon resources. I also foresee that the children of today’s young parents will fight any decrease in energy availability from a Government intent on meeting carbon targets – carbon targets will soon be an irrelevant distraction. Simple arithmetic proves that the only technology capable of supplying the total energy needs of every individual on the planet, for all of time, is that of breeder reactors.

When the spectre of hydrocarbon rationing enters public consciousness, it will take international diplomacy of Wisdom-of-Solomon proportions to avoid instability or worse. The worldwide deployment of breeder reactors has to be at the point of ‘going critical’, when this juncture is reached, or we should try not to think too deeply about the world our children or grandchildren might inherit.

This beggars the question – is there any point at all in putting any of our hard-earned taxes into renewable or Pressurised Water Reactors (PWRs), when their useless hulks will be overtaken by the deployment of emission-free breeder reactors, which: use a minuscule proportion of the resources and energy per MWh generated; are inherently safe (shut down according to the laws of physics and without human intervention); produce waste that decays to background radiation level in 300 years (easily, cheaply and safely stored).

The only question our children or grandchildren will need to resolve is: Will it be LMFBRs or MSBRs?

Google: “atomic awakenings”

No mention here of shale gas, the energy transformation of the 21st century everywhere else on earth. Recent discoveries in the UK that promise volumes of gas far greater than in the North Sea have been dismissed, until today, on grounds that natural gas is just another carbon fuel.
If the shale gas revolution had hit ten years sooner, would we have the energy policy of 2008? Of course not. But shale changes everything.
Agree with Stewart Boyle, don’t think anonymous postings are helpful. Proud to have been posting on shale gas for four years at http://www.nohotair.co.uk, years before most people had heard of it. Visit the library section for over thirty reports on shale.
Key takeaway is that what the UK does is spectacularly unimportant in light of massive reserves of shale gas under almost every rock somewhere or another. The UK debate needs to start with that reality.
Shale gas is not perfect. But it can provide significant carbon reductions by 2030 at which point we’ll have 20 years to lower another 20 percent using future technology, not picking winners today and crossing fingers.

“Incidentally the anti wind, climate change deniers and pro-nuke supporters all seem to be ‘anonymous’ this week”. stewart boyle

Well stewart,
my name is john davies & I’m an anti wind – (because it’s the wrong technology to solve the problem),
pro-nuke supporter – ( because it’ solves the problem even though it’s using the wrong technology… we should use thorium).
I’m presumably also a “climate change denier” as I believe climate change has happened since the dawn of time on earth.

I live in a landscape formed by the ice age, weathered by thousands of years of storm and tempest; a few miles away I can show you rocks that were formed in a desert when this piece of land was at the equator and a few more miles away I can show you fossils of sea creatures, now on top of a mountain.

The world is in a constant state of flux, and man is just a transient creature. When nature has had enough of us, man will disappear, and as the bible says ”the meek will inherit the earth” (for meek read ants, spiders, bacteria etc.).

Man is just a wasteful arrogant fool. Does that make me a climate change heretic?

all the worlds fossile fuels are finite and will become scarce in time. we need to use the best available BRITSH TECHNOLOGYand ivest in renewables and replace the old reactors with the new breed of fast reactor and this will mean many highly skilled jobs in manufacture/construction as well as the operation of the plants when ready.
We need to form a cross party/cross industry forum who will detrmine the future energy policy for the best of the whole country which is outside the powers of westminster and its short term needs(getting re-elected every 3-5 years)and give the people what it needs ie cheaper power with no drop in supply that is not at the whim of foreign govts.
tp round this little tirade up we need govt to keep their noses out of policy just provide the funds/backing to get the construction of whats needed going and the british people will do tyhe rest

So many respondents and varying views herein I can only repeat what I annotated to an article a few months back.
Decisions of this magnitude and technical complexity are far to difficult for any government to accomodate unless a fully experienced, varied (and politically neutral?) engineering team have evaluated and provided a summary and recommendation to the government of the day. This would perhaps remove party politics from the fray and hopefully allow some sensible, longer term planning to happen.

It pains me to say it but I believe you are right.

Some of us just hope that someone in power reads our small contributions and thinks……..

Ed Davey has recently stated that the ‘wind versus gas’ debate is “a false debate”. We agree with that view.

The DECC views discussed in the Editorial simply ASSUME that gas is always a fossil fuel. However, gas use can be decarbonised as well as electricity, and at probably at lower cost, as noted in a big study in late 2010 for the ENA. DECC has been aware of this fact for the last 2 years. On 1st November 2011, DECC wrote privately to us: “we are keen to decarbonise the gas grid”, although the current Energy Bill and the EMR reform process (why not ‘Energy MR’?) focuses almost exclusively on the electricity sub-sector.

The existing gas grid is: connected to 85% of all UK energy consumers; the UK’s largest and fastest-response energy store; supplies 3 times more energy on average than the electricity grid; supplies 5 times more daily energy at the Winter heating peak, and is actually already the UK’s main dispatchable energy store supporting the flexible load-balancing electricity generation essential to balancing wind power, via the flexible gas-fired power plants. The capital cost of the gas grid and its huge energy storage is already largely ‘written-down’ in the past by the UK taxpayer, while additional (LNG) storage capacity has recently been added at the new LNG import terminals.
Between 1955 and 1992, the old nationalised British Gas Corporation, actively supported and co-funded by the government, developed an advanced complete gasification and conversion technology in a far-sighted strategic plan to supply the whole of UK gas demand post-North Sea Gas decline using Synthetic Natural Gas manufactured from indigenous solid fuels, so as to avoid the need for any price-volatile gas imports, commencing between 2010 and 2020. Over £250M was spent on this development. This strategic “30 Year Plan” dropped out of public view when British Gas was privatised back in a time of plentiful North Sea gas, and has been largely forgotten by DECC. The British-developed ‘BGL + HICOM’ technology remains, to this day the World’s most efficient ‘grid- scale’ SNG production technology with an outstanding 76% efficiency from solid fuel to SNG (nearly double that of a modern power station, or 3 times a power-recovery waste incinerator). All key parts of the process have been proven at industrial scale since 1992. SNG technology based on coal is now rapidly taking off in both China and Korea.

The SNG process is inherently Carbon Capture Ready (CCR) at effectively zero marginal cost as around 55% of the total Carbon throughput is separated as CO2 as a normal part of the ‘unabated’ conversion process . The original SNG process was intended to use UK coal feedstock, but our current plan for using a waste/biomass fuel mixture with c.50% biogenic Carbon content in an SNG plant fitted with CCS can produce net-zero-emissions clean energy, as the sequestered biogenic Carbon offsets the residual (uncaptured) fossil carbon in the product SNG. Operation of the gasifier on such a mixture has already been proven at the full commercial scale in Germany. The quantity (tonnes/day) of CO2 requiring sequestration is less than half that for an equivalent coal fired power plant and the energy penalty for CCS per-tonne is much smaller. Sufficient waste and biomass materials are available in the UK to easily and affordably make at least 50% of current gas demand (e.g. the whole of the fuel for the UK gas powerplants fleet) by this method. This could also solve the UK’s gathering waste landfill crisis. And these feed materials are effectively both low-carbon and renewable. Landfill Tax avoidance credits means that this fuel mix can be obtained at near-zero average price, while SNG made from the biogenic portion of the feed will qualify for the generous RHI subsidy, or any power produced will qualify for ROCs. Because of the broad feed flexibility and large possible individual plant size, this system can produce vastly greater volumes of gas for the grid than the currently-promoted AD digestion process. We propose that SNG and AD are used in parallel, as their best feed materials are complementary.

SNG is specified to be fully interchangeable with natural gas in any proportion, making it a perfect complement in the gas grid to gradually declining natural gas supplies over the rest of the century. IF large quantities of SNG which has been decarbonised ‘at source’, are injected into the existing gas transmission grid, all types of downstream energy users: power, heating and industry can be partly decarbonised with no disruption to their businesses, and at very low net cost.
Still further, in the longer term, instantaneous surplus wind power and other RE could be harvested by converting the surplus electricity into ‘green’ hydrogen ON-site at the SNG production plants, which can be used economically without the need for a separate hugely expensive ‘hydrogen grid’ or any direct hydrogen-using technologies, by efficiently directly integrating both the hydrogen, oxygen and the waste heat produced by electrolysis directly into a decarbonised SNG plant feeding the normal methane gas grid. In this way all of the products of electrolysis are beneficially used, giving approaching 100% energy utilisation.

The late Mr Cyril Timmins, a senior ex-British Gas engineering manager, who had worked directly on the SNG technology development throughout, continued working in his retirement and in 2007 invented the Timmins CCS process, which uses a simple re-arrangement of standard industry-proven gas separation plant to greatly reduce the parasitic energy losses and costs associated with applying CCS to any pressurised gaseous energy stream. We have found that the Timmins CCS scheme is a particularly elegant and cost- effective fit with the ex-British Gas SNG scheme, as it both slightly increases the efficiency of the base SNG plant and significantly reduces the net cost and energy of CCS.

A preliminary study of the integrated British Gas SNG scheme fitted with Timmins CCS, using a net zero-cost 52% biogenic Carbon content fuel mix of: 80% wastes, RDF and woody/ contaminated biomass and 20% fossil fuel suggests that, allowing for regulatory waste and bio-energy (RHI) incentives, SNG can be produced for less than current traded natural gas price while CO2 can be captured for under £20/tonne and with less than half the quantity of an equivalent coal powerplant.

We propose that The Engineer promotes a debate about how wind and gas (including UK-manufactured biogenic SNG); and electricity and gas, can work together so that engineers can demonstrate how they can add value to the political and economic debate about energy policy by creative problem solving. The problem to be solved is how to simultaneously fulfil the two utilitarian ‘goods’:

1 Delivering the maximum reasonable degree of decarbonisation.
2 At lower cost than the incumbent fossil fuels.

Tony Day (Alton) and Chris Hodrien (Solihull), private energy consultants