I am asking this as a technical not regulatory question.
Given the current emergency with gas supplies, would it be possible to operate Drax at full capacity using coal? I believe some or all the station was converted to burn biomass. Do we have the infrastructure to source and deliver coal in quantity? Also, are there any other coal fired power stations that remain in running order?
disregarding whether drax-style biomass is actually green, and disregarding how much work would be involved to reverse the changes made, would there be any point, assuming supplies of biomass aren't about to disappear?
I think that is an accurate assessment. Drax has completely modified their fuel loaders to take woodchips at huge expense. It would probably be cheaper to reactivate some other coal plant or in fact build a new one
Maybe I'm wrong but I thought coal had a far higher calorific value than biomass.
Maybe they have to burn larger amounts of biomass?
Yes and yes. Biomass has a lot of water in it, and huge amount of cellulose Which is a carbohydrate.
If you convert that to pure carbon, you get charcoal which is extremely light, so that's how much carbon is in wood.
Obviously the carbohydrate itself burns, but its partially oxidised already.
So pretty low calorific value.
My point exactly - that the capacity (in terms of output) would be reduced.
Ratcliffe-on-Soar is (or was a week or so ago) running and there was a rail delivery of coal in progress when I drove by. There was vapour from all 8 coolers but hard to tell if this was just a stand-by mode.
I wonder if it'll get a new lease of life or will the current energy crisis be resolved by Sep 2024?
I don't drive past it every day as I used to, but it was noticeably still putting-out vapour in the early afternoon one day last week, normally if they run it in summer it just seems to be to about mid-morning.
Uniper(?) didn't seem to be interested in running it for longer, which is odd because they did pay to get it up to sulphur scrubber status so it was LCPD exempt. I think they want to sell the site off for a waste incinerator (and presumably a nice cluster of houses around east midlands parkway).
There was talk of BEIS incentivising generators to not get rid of any capacity at the moment, just in case ...
From the Guardian:
"National Grid asks UK coal power plants to be on standby this winter"
we don't grow our own anymore. Where is the coal coming from?
Depends a lot on how wet the biomass is.
We find ourselves pretty much in agreement on this. ISTR they ship the biomass for it from half way round the world too.
Any feel for the practical differences in a real power station with forced air and a moving grate as opposed to a domestic heating setting?
My multifuel domestic stove generates roughly 50% more power output when run on coke or coal as it does when running on reasonably seasoned (ie not kiln dried) wood. Power output in the case of solid fuel mainly limited by how much air it can get and not wanting to melt the grate.
Heats of combustion for common fuels are here.
It was always much cheaper to import it from Oz or South Africa where it is mined in huge opencast 'pits' well away from builtup areas.
PS I saw a news item that Hinkley 'B' was shut down today, after generating more power than any other nuke. Would it really hurt to keep it running, even if at a lower power until the new one is working ?.
There is someone who was trying to promote a technique similar (note similar) to fracking which involved exploiting the abandoned coal mines, especially those in the NE which have deep seams going out under the sea. From memory, it involved pumping super heated steam down to extra gas - we used to generate ‘town gas’ from coal before the days of North Sea gas. He even suggested pumping CO2 down to keep the tree huggers happy.
Needless to say, the tree huggers didn’t like it.
UK,Poland,USA...
It was heated in the absence of oxygen which drove off the volatiles, leaving coke. Remove the dirty volatiles and you got gas. The dirty volatiles were a useful chemical feedstock.
I thought it involved heating and spraying with water but it is a long time since I did chemistry. Certainly Coal Gas contained a high percentage of hydrogen. It was often burned off as a waste product. There was a large Coke Works near my ( original) home town and the flame could be seen for miles. It served as a ‘home coming’ beacon for several years when we moved away and used to drive back - we used to do the trip at night in our younger days. Now we use Penshaw Monument.
I learned recently from a relative who previously worked in the cable making industry, they used Coal Gas as a ‘barrier gas’ when making those cables with bare copper and powder like insulation. (I can’t remember the name!).
Google town gas, coal gas and producer gas. Not quite the same. Coke - very useful for steelmaking - was the result
We still produce about 2 million tonnes a year, but also need to import coal, particularly steam coal. In 2021, we imported (estimated)
Steam coal
Russia 1,121 thousand tonnes USA 388 thousand tonnes Venezuela 319 thousand tonnes Colombia 167 thousand tonnes South Africa 97 thousand tonnes Others 74 thousand tonnes
Coking coal
Russia 827 thousand tonnes USA 739 thousand tonnes Australia 511 thousand tonnes EU 34 thousand tonnes
Anthracite
EU 46 thousand tonnes Russia 20 thousand tonnes China 6 thousand tonnes USA,Indonesia and other countries about one thousand tonnes between them
No, the original charcoal kilns didn't use water.
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