New replacements for natural gas

A great many gasification technologies exist - all of which were developed before the price of solar PV panels fell dramatically. 

 This fall in the price of solar PV panels  has ground-breaking implications for natural gas replacements. 

All plant material is assembled inside plant cells from water and carbon dioxide using solar energy. The process is photosynthesis and it stores solar energy. Bush fires burn ferociously because of the amount of solar energy stored in plant material such as leaves, wood and grass. 

All reactions that store solar energy in plant material are minor variations of:

• One molecule of carbon dioxide from the air is split into a carbon atom and an oxygen molecule, 
• The oxygen molecule is released into the atmosphere, and 
• The carbon atom is added to a cross-linked molecule of plant material (such as cellulose or lignin) together with one molecule of water.

This simplified model could be represented:

(CH₂O)_n + CO₂ + H₂O =>  (CH₂O)_(n+1) + O₂

The resulting plant material can be considered approximately to be cross-linked collections of carbon atoms with one water molecule for each carbon atom. 

Because of the collapse in the price of solar PV panels, all existing methods of making replacements for natural gas from plant material use some of the energy embedded in the plant material, creating carbon dioxide and methane. 

It is inevitable that the methane created embodies LESS energy than was present in the plant material. 

The low cost of solar PV panels crucially changes the feasible processes for making methane from plant material. 

The plant material can be reacted with pure hydrogen, and NOT oxygen, to make methane and water vapour at a high temperature. 

The water vapour can be split into hydrogen and oxygen molecules with high-temperature electrolysis with electricity generated solar PV panels. 

The hydrogen produced by high-temperature electrolysis of water vapour is reacted with more plant material, continuing the conversion of all the available plant material is converted into methane and oxygen. 

There is no carbon dioxide produced, so no carbon dioxide storage is required and the cost of storing carbon dioxide is avoided. 

The methane produced embodies the energy that was available in the plant material PLUS additional energy from the solar PV panels used to electrolyze water vapour into hydrogen and oxygen. 

 

Further reading: "Coupling hydropyrolysis and vapor-phase catalytic hydrotreatment to produce biomethane from pine sawdust" at https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37423544/ .

 

Mathematics puzzles in modelling technology for energy

Suppose you need to calculate the amount of carbon in coal for someone who was pondering creating hydrogen from it. 

One way is as follows: 

1. Find out how much CO₂ a coal-fired power station emits for each megawatt-hour of electricity it sends out. 

2. Find out how many tonnes of coal the same coal-fired power station burns for each megawatt-hour of electricity it sends out. 

3. From the above pieces of information, calculate how much CO₂ is produced from each tonne of coal the power station burns. 

4. Calculate the amount of carbon in the CO₂ that is produced from each tonne of coal that is burned. 

The Australian Government's National Greenhouse and Energy Reporting site provides a sample of some of the information -

Australian Government's National Greenhouse and Energy Reporting
Yallourn Power Station

Energy Australia provided the corresponding information for coal consumption Yallourn Power Station on its web site a few years ago. This is a sample retrieved from the WayBack Machine - 

Coal consumption at Yallourn coal-fired power plant

 

The above information is sufficient for the calculations suggested above - 

1. CO₂ per MWh : 1.34 tonnes.

2. Coal per MWh : (1,480 MWh from burning 2,400 tonnes of coal) => 1.62 tonnes per MWh. 

3. The amount of CO₂ for each tonne of coal? 

1.34 tonnes of CO₂ are produced from burning 1.62 tonnes of brown coal. 

So burning 1 tonne of coal produces 0.83 tonnes of carbon dioxide.

4. The formula weight of carbon dioxide shows that 44 grams of carbon dioxide is made of 12 grams of carbon and 32 grams of oxygen. In other words the amount of carbon in carbon dioxide is (12/44) times the mass of the carbon dioxide.

So the carbon in 0.83 tonnes of carbon dioxide is 0.225 tonnes. (= 0.83 tonnes x (12 / 44).)

0.225 tonnes is 225 kgs of carbon in each tonne of brown coal burned at Yallourn Power Station. 

This should not be a controversial or surprising answer. 

The calculations to estimate that there are 225 tonnes of carbon using publicly available information about Victorian brown coal are not terribly complex. 

These following calculations are surprising:

1. In a 2019 report "Evaluation of options for production of low-cost CO₂ - free hydrogen from Victorian brown coal" the details for option 4: "Brown coal gasification plant using oxygen blown entrained flow gasifier followed by shift reactor for H2 production " given on page 35 are listed in the table below. 

The two lines of special interest are the ones showing -

• Wet coal of 893 tonnes per hour and 
• Total CO₂ generation of 518 tonnes per hour. 

A few calculations show that each tonne of coal in this modelling exercise is assumed to produce 0.58 tonnes of carbon dioxide, and

This means that the coal for the purpose of this model have only 160 kgs of carbon in each tonne. 

Target production of H₂

Wet coal requirement

Dry coal

Excess char to refinery

Tar production

Total CO₂ generation

CO₂ capture efficiency

Steam requirement 

32.1 tons/hour

893 tons/hour

332 tons/hour

Nil

Nil

518 tons/hour

88%

344 tons/hour

If the calculation of carbon coal burned by the Yallourn power station - 225 kgs per tonne - is correct, then the carbon in 427 tonnes of wet brown coal is sufficient to produce 32 tonnes of hydrogen by reaction with steam. 

This is less than half of the 893 tonnes of wet brown coal the 2019 modelling exercise found to be needed. 

2. The web site for the Hydrogen Energy Supply Chain pilot project says that it is to use 150 tonnes of brown coal to produce 3 tonnes of hydrogen. 

This is an even greater amount of coal per tonne of hydrogen than the 2019 modelling reported. 

The Hydrogen Energy Supply Chain project also estimated that it would produce 100 tonnes of carbon dioxide in producing the hydrogen. This is about double the rate of carbon dioxide produced per tonne of hydrogen that the 2019 modelling reported. 

That estimate has since been greatly increased to around 140 tonnes.

The assumptions and calculations in these two examples - the 2019 report, and the Hydrogen Energy Supply Chain project - cannot be reconciled with the information available about the use of coal by the Yallourn Power Station.