Use of coal, oil and fossil fuels

John Doe -

Building standards are being improved greatly, but that does not account for all the existing ones, nor for the big increase in insulating materials needed. A builder whom you might expect would find it profitable, once told me that increasing the insulation of individual homes reaches a point where it is actually less "green" than it seems. (He also frankly admitted it would be too costly and wasteful to fit his own home, a 1930s ex-Council unit, with a heat-pump, despite no labour-charges - not something you'd expect to hear from an accredited plumber!)

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Steam locomotives are indeed very inefficient but I am not sure they are relevant here. Nice to watch though!

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Solar "farms" in fields: apart from unsightly, the serious objection is taking very large areas of land that should be producing food, for relatively low output for their scale. There is also some NIMBY speculation here by the builders choosing rural areas far for their intended customers in London or other major cities. They also turn the land from agricultural to industrial use, for tax purposes, an important point for landowners to consider.

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Tidal Flow (submarine equivalent of wind-turbines) - I agree. Actually British firms are among the word's best at designing these but we've governments set on wind and sunlight, so not encouraging them. I think a tidal-flow scheme is being built by the Shetlanders?

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Re(?)-foresting. Apart from aesthetics, this is already encouraging swathes of ecologically harmful, monocultured, import-species pines in neat rows, by major companies with no interest in the countryside or the environment at large, just for "carbon-trading" and "green" posturing. A lot of the Welsh and Northern English moors are also sheep-grazing land.

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Ground-source heat-pumps next to every house? Fine until one cold day your heating all goes off because your pump has extracted heat from the ground much more rapidly than its natural replacement rate. Even worse when every home along the road has the same installation. Although not affected by cold fronts as I imagine an air heat-pump could be, this depletion, analogous to pumping a water-well dry, may be why we don't hear much about ground heat-pumps. Also, as with air ones, the maximum amount of heat energy and its temperature would be quite low, few existing homes are suited to it, and installing one could mean replacing the entire heating-system and putting in masses more insulation.

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New homes next to railways, with new stations (by your suggestion, potentially one every mile!). Hard to see how that can be achieved. Such ribbon-development, like most NIMBY (i.e. not in the speculator's back yard) estates now, would take no account of local geography, needs, services, other transport, etc. There are sprawling housing-estates being built around the country, within a few miles of existing main-line stations, but aimed mainly at London commuters, even 100 miles from the capital. A billboard I saw advertising a new estate near Banbury boasted of its 45-minute train times from there to London.

(Brimsmore Estate's 3000 houses, just outside Yeovil, was advertised by double-page spreads in the London Evening News. A friend, a local man, living in Yeovil told me there is very little local employment available for such estates, but by train it is about 100 miles from London and 50 from Bristol, the latter offering the more efficient rail route from the South-West to Wales, most of England and Scotland.)

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Re-opening branch-lines closed not by Dr. Beeching but by a government wanting to do that. He was the consultant: it was really the Ernest Marples Plan, after the Minister of Transport who held a lot of shares in a motorway-building company and thought the future lay in road transport anyway. I think Barbara Castle managed to rein the anti-rail lobby in a bit.

This is good idea where possible, and a few have been rebuilt as Network Rail, not heritage, lines. It is not practical in most cases because under the plan, British Railways rapidly sold key areas - junctions, stations and lengths of track-bed - for development of buildings and roads, precisely to prevent any future re-opening.

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"National, integrated plan." What, as if by a joined-up government?

Fortunately we are not China, even if we do give away vital assets to it. Unfortunately though we lack that nation's ability or will to make long-term, integrated plans based on governments of (in our, not its, case) all hues thinking ahead and understanding anything related to science, engineering and business. (Knowing only Annual Accounts and Dividends, is not good enough!)

Some while ago I read HS2's official web-site. I do not know if the management has improved since, but not one of its named Directors was an Engineer, let alone anyone with any stated railway building, operating or service-selling experience. They were all support staff, necessary but still support roles: legal, personnel, accounts. Oh, and some mystery magisterium called "Director of Strategic Partnerships". I rest my case.

I don't know if any of the members saw the two programs on the BBC recently about the change to Electric cars and Heat Pumps.

To iterate some of the posts here we are totally ill prepared.

An estimate of the current fitting of Heat pumps means it will take 400 years to complete. A system that produces three times the heat for the energy put in (????) and uses electricity which is three times as expensive as gas. I don't think I will be fitting one anytime soon. The latest Nuclear plant is still being held up in the planning stages and has been for 10 years. The national grid cannot cope with the off shore electricity produced, so the companies are paid to turn the generators off.

A more efficient means of carbon capture from the burning of coal would be my way forward, and I don't mean pumping the stuff into disused oil wells. Carbon is one of the building blocks of life it's removal from the emissions means it could be used for other things. It just requires a bit of thinking outside the box.

Unfortunately big money runs the current thinking which is all electric.

Regards

Gray,

You'd have to put a lot of energy into turning CO2 into carbon, more than you got by turning carbon (coal) into CO2, so it's a bit self defeating

Lots of houses near me don't have cavity walls, so the only way of insulating is either lining inside, which makes the rooms smaller, or cladding the outside, but then the roof isn't big enough, so it needs a new roof. Getting close to being more economical to knock them down and start again, but at least it would save the carbon footprint of all the bricks and concrete

Edited By duncan webster on 03/08/2023 12:56:46

Why did we not immediately start planting our own extra wheat and crops on unused land when that idiot Putin invaded Ukraine?? Look out of the train window as you next go somewhere, and see how many fields and empty spaces do not have crops in them, just rough grass, but no livestock. (Yes, I do know about fallow fields.)

Who says I am a southerner? Far from it ! The South already has trees - but could still have many more - whereas there are huge areas of Yorkshire, northern England, and Scotland that are completely tree-less moors, as far as the eye can see. This seems a huge waste of land to me. Planting trees* on land not suitable for use as farm land, would increase natural biodiversity, and retain rain water as well as helping reduce climate change, so a multiple bonus on land that is simply wasted otherwise.

*But please, let's have indigenous woodland trees, not acres of conifers.

As I've said before, these aren't 'mistakes', it's by design. It's managed decline with a cover story.

Martin.

The 400 year "estimate" is by idiots who do not understand what a bell curve is: The initial uptake will be very small but then will rise exponentially, before starting to fall off after about 50% take-up. The future growth rate cannot be extrapolated linearly from the initial very low rate of a typical bell curve.

Heat pumps use about a quarter of the electricity than an electrical heater would use for the same heat output. This is because the heat produced by a heat pump comes from the air or the ground, NOT the electricity, which only runs pumps and fans, not the heating elements.

We keep hearing all these arguments, such as 'the grid can't cope', as if that is a good reason not to bother with new energy sources in the first place. Did they say that during WW ll when the Nazis started an airborne attack campaign? No, they just got on with it and built more fighters and bombers.......and beat them back and won !

We just need to get on with it now.

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Edited By John Doe 2 on 03/08/2023 13:25:44

Can you explain please Nigel?

For all practical purposes Petroleum is a fossil fuel. Though it's possible to make petroleum from vegetable and animal sources, almost all petroleum is cracked and refined from Crude Oil, which most definitely is a fossil-fuel. Never mind politicians, campaigners, journalists and the General Public, the definition of petroleum comes from geologists (formation of rocks and minerals) and chemists (hydrocarbons).

Difficult to match the volume of petroleum currently made from crude oil by synthesising it. As reserves of crude-oil are depleted over the next 20 to 30 years, the cost of petroleum will rise sharply. Won't disappear entirely, just become too expensive for the ordinary motorist to burn in an engine.

Dave

Edited By SillyOldDuffer on 03/08/2023 13:53:22

How much is a heat pump installation, plus a new EV, plus a home charger?

I need to know how much to budget before I 'just get on with it'.

Martin.

15K + 35K or more +1K4

Today I saw an article which said that if I went down the heat pump route I could "save" £150+ on my annual bill, well that is a non starter with the interest on the cost rather more than that £150

Gray -

Heat-pump efficiency.

I heard that misleading figure suggesting [energy out = 3 X energy in], as well.

I suspected a muddling of Heat and Temperature, in the same way I heard one correspondent on the radio using Latent when he meant Specific Heat; but I turned to one of my old text-books. I recalled it describing not "heat-pumps" as we call them now, but A Reversed Heat-Engine As A Warming Machine, in a chapter on refrigerators. That terminology had me foxed for a time, as i was looking for "heat-pump" !

These things are not new, but the book describes the principles of commercial plant, not domestic appliances, though the physics would be the same.

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What we call a "heat-pump" relies on the amount of Heat moved being many times greater than the Work Done, which it will be if the Temperature change is low.

If H = the heat energy taken from the atmosphere at temperature t,

h = heat delivered to the room at temperature T,

W = work expended in heat units:

H/W = h / [ h-H] = T / [T -t ]

. The text then gives a worked example, presumably a real case though un-named, a refrigerator used for cooling an auditorium in Summer but reversed to warm it in Winter. The machine was driven by an oil-engine. (The book's latest impression was in 1942, hence that motive-power and all-British units.)

The temperature range ( T-t ) = (55 - 40) ºF.

The engine, we are told, used 0.5lb of oil per BHP per hour; at 20 000 Bt.H.U. / lb. .

After some sums, we have 69,900 BtHU of heat delivered to the auditorium, whereas burning that oil directly, in a lamp, would yield only 10 000 Bt.H.U. over that hour.

The text also calculates the system's efficiency, that of the engine being about 25%, the "warming machine" 80%.

It also points out more heat is available from the engine's exhaust and cooling-water, to 7460 Bt.H.U. - making the total for heating the theatre 77,360Bt.H.U. / H.P. hour.

So although not very intuitive, and I found it hard to grasp, the heat-pump transfers more energy than it consumes, by working over a modest temperature-range. That though, is one factor limiting the output temperature.

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The above is for air-air transfer; and at 40ºF, not especially cold for a British Winter day! I don't know the effect of heating water, with its different specific heat.

Also of various experiences aired on the radio, some have reported very good results from installing a heat-pump, others wish they had not, with high installation and running costs making it a loss. Some of the running-cost will presumably be the immersion-heater tank necessary to raise the water temperature to what it should be, about 55ºC.

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Reference:

Wright Baker, H. (rev. & ed. by), Inchley's Theory of Heat Engines, Longmans, Green & Co., 1st pub. 1913, last imp. 1942. pp.317-318.

I regret to say the point I was trying to make is that we are totally ill prepared.

The laying of high voltage cables beneath London was I was told because the Grid cannot cope.

The installation of the heat pump on the program was costing £18,000.00 pounds according to the owner. At 71 years of age I am not going to lay out £18,000.00 just to get perhaps £5,000.00 from the Government.

As regards the efficiency again this is what was quoted on prime time TV by the BBC. It is of no consequence to me as I shall not be fitting one. (There is no room in my house for the rather large storage tank, for one thing).

Getting rid of coal before there was something viable to replace it is madness in my book. There are Carbon capture plants already in use around the world.

Regards

Gray,

Chuck Taper, Graham has nicely illustrated for us here that, for the individual citizen, an unwillingness to embrace the necessary changes is often based on common-sense economic principles, obedience to which is fundamental to that individual's short- and long-term economic survival.

No politicans I'm aware of, of any political stamp, have provided guarantees that making the necessary changes will actually be affordable for the individual on a limited budget, i.e. 99% of the electorate.

Until the necessary changes are viably affordable alternatives to the way we as individuals do things at present, then those necessary changes will not in most cases be made, and understandably so.

'Common Sense' has little to do with economic principles. For example, plenty of posts in this thread assume the cost of fossil fuel sourced energy will stay low forever! Alas, it is not so, unless magic can be made to work, or the people who believe such stuff know of an enormous new source. Or believe 'they' will find more oil, not realising that 'they' will have to be a fairy godmother.

Always better to tackle problems before they turn into a crisis. Denial and self-interest are strategies, but they're not smart. Today, Silly Old Grandad might safely rely on dying before big bills start arriving, but his children will have to deal with life no matter what the old man believed.

No politicians I'm aware of, of any political stamp, have provided guarantees that not making the necessary changes will be affordable for the individual on a limited budget. Worse, my understanding of the oil and gas problem is that individuals on a limited budget are going to suffer unless something is done. The issue is that fossil fuel energy is about to become irreversably expensive.

Given oil and gas are depleting, our job is to reduce the pain by finding alternatives to them. Pretending it's not happening will only cause more difficulties. Kicking the can down the road may be easy, but it's cowardly, and never ends well.

Regretfully true that: 'Until the necessary changes are viably affordable alternatives to the way we as individuals do things at present, then those necessary changes will not in most cases be made, and understandably so'. Slow movers always risk being left behind to sort themselves out. In 10 years time, perhaps sooner, I shall be a vulnerable pensioner. There won't be much help available for me if the whole country is struggling with an ongoing energy crisis. Therefore I'm against negligence.

Anyone study history? Today's high expectation levels are not justified by the history of human affairs. Human affairs are never stable in the long run. All previous civilisations have collapsed. Nations don't remain top dog forever. Wealth and liberty wax and wane. No society is immune to famine, disease and war. And on a personal level death is inevitable. Turns out large numbers of historic disasters were caused by avoidable human error. Not just the blunders of rulers, but whole populations choosing to believe in utter nonsense rather than deal with uncomfortable truths. I fear the same is happening to us. Too many heads in the sand.

Climate change and rising energy costs are manageable, but only if we get stuck in and deal with them. Faced with serious physical and practical problems, denial, wishful thinking, vested interests and conspiracy theories are, and always have been, pointless time-wasters. They have a rotten success record.

Dave

Edited By SillyOldDuffer on 03/08/2023 20:30:38

Some land can be dual use.

Didn't a ship loaded with EV's burn for days when one of them caught fire last week? I think that's the second such event in less than two years. Think of the pollution too.

They're proving to be a real safety hazard and quite impractical when compared with what we already have.

Martin.

It might be a nice sun shade but the grass won't grow as well surely.

I agree entirely, as I do with probably everything else in your post.

What I was chiefly attempting to explain was simply the reason why so many people, acting as individuals, choose certain still perfectly legal solutions to a particular problem [in this case heating their home] that may be worse for the environment than equally legal, but significantly more expensive, alternatives.

When the immediate financial cost to the individual of choosing the environmentally more friendly option is so high, [perhaps in many cases so high as to be unaffordable] surely it's unfair to label everyone who chooses the environmentally less friendly but still perfectly legal option as unsmart denialists etc.

Making steel without carbon is impossible but do you have to use coal to to add the carbon into high carbon steel? We are mining and importing coal for the steel works in Wales.

Simply not true. The one percent of carbon (only in some steels) is nowt compared to the blast furnace fuel consumption.

trying to get that Petroleum is not a "fossil fuel" into the heads of politicians of all flavours, campaigners, journalists and the General Public is probably akin to rolling a whole barrel of the stuff up Ben Nevis.

Correct. Petroleum should only be used for making plastics, etc, not for burning - for heating or in inefficient engines to transform energy to another form (often motive force for doing work).

ASHP

Not particularly cost effective to replace a fossil fuel burner until that boiler is in need of replacement.heat pump installation is very much cost-prohibited without a large subsidy and will not show any (or much) financial gain when running (unless, of course, installed in an electric-only residence) when there is likely no government scheme for the 5 grand subsidy as it is not replacing a fossil fuel burner! The health issues of urban dwellers will be improved by both fewer fossils being burned (for space heating) and less pollution from vehicles burning liquid fuels quite inefficiently.

GSHP

Expensive to install unless lots of land or a handy stream. Boreholes are far more costly, but should last a lifetime. GSHP systems will show a much improved COP over an AHSP. No need for heating the cold-side heat exchanger like when an ASHP system freezes over.🙂

As the grid becomes less reliant on fossil fuels, the heat pumps will become a better option from all perspectives.

LUBE OIL

A minor usage of mineral oil. It can often be recycled. Plant based oils can be developed (Castrol R was a superb lubricant for racing engines in the past).

Ethanol is much lower mass than normal petrol or diesel

Is it? There was me thinking that one kilogram of ethanol had precisely the same mass as one kilogram of anything else!

Mass had little to do with M-G. The energy of a fuel depends on the ratio of Carbon to Hydrogen atoms in the fuel. The Oxygen in ethanol is slready part way to making water - is it not? Some chemistry bondig energies to consider when burning different compounds.🙂

Plastics

​​​​​​​Recycle, up-cycle or whatever. It ix a shame that some has to be burned to avoid ever-larger wate tips. Remember that man-made fibres are actually plastics. Cotton clothing is dead out of fashion due to cost, ease of washing, etc. cotton would not be adding to the micro-plastic particles in our environment.

And so it goes on. Petroleum should really only be used as a base for compounds/materials that are really necessary - not for burning. Coal likewise - but not for burning.

Much of the the current problem is the unrest in the world and over-population. Only when energy can be converted for all the human requirements - without the need for either coal or oil - will we prevent/reduce the current global temperature increase. Likely there will still be too many humans on the planet … but that is another matter…

Edited By not done it yet on 03/08/2023 22:47:11

My arguments and the only reason I think I need to say something about todays world, is based from how humans wants & desire to live in an "organised way" in relation to MONEY(It does not matter what replaces it) & RESOURCES from Earth(Closed system). I feel very few people understand the relation between MONEY(Our main control system) and RESOURCES(Basic), money is not a resource in the greater picture in a closed system like earth.
So if you does not have basic resources, money means nothing, you can print as much as you want, you cannot survive on money if theres not basic resources and your ability to deal with it.

If you find difficuilt to understand this, or think about it in such a way, imagine you are on an island isolated and solely depend on your resources, your inteligence to work with it, your population growth, which is an inverse pyramid for the most time, and getting to your imagination of a better life from on your feet with no clothes your future in, yes thats how difficult it is if you not later borned into a lifestyle.

Another base of my arguments are from the fact that if your low down basic resources like, Water, Energy(Oil Coal, Gas for now, whatever it may be) is relatively to Money creations, Population numbers,... are expensive, everything upwards depending from it, is loaded and get loaded exponentially over time also like an inverse pyramid, and this shorter and shorter cycles makes monetary sysems over the globe binds up no matter how much money you print for some the end is near, for others if population numbers don't go down to 3 Billion the same fate will follow over time as a result.

Now theres a new man made basic resource being embedded in our lives, systems, everywhere, and that is Digital Binary code and what comes from it. It is deeply abstract in many ways/directions and effects everything.
Now this is new to mankind(1992+ from the early 80-Ties). This is prone to security issues, and Abstract forms of corruption, unlike any older analog/paperbased corruption(Which were dealt with and tolerated), it can be extremely parasitic, the next cost is just a digital click away, its that easy and fast. There are some great positive advantages, but theres also a lot of evil going with it which seems to grow in uncontrolable ways, and this ideology is 100% dependant on power/electricity supply, no power , you may have no mone in your hands, no live, you may starve to death literall(With money "in the bank".

Young positive people today think you can just print money, you can just pluck it from a tree or from the net, or from the clouds, and everything will be ok, I disagree strongly. We must be carefull about "Parasitic Jobs/Incomes) versus basic very important jobs/incomes. Parasitic jobs cannot exist if the basic jobs does not exist due to the resources and population number thing. The other problem is digital never matures, and the cycles getting shorter and shorter and we just cannot afford these increasing changes for the sake of change ignoring a few exceptions as always. I want to guess because of digital we wasted the next 500 years of resources over the last 30 years. This is not an ideology that can continue as it is currently going.
Think about Digital developments & storage and the ability to read it, I think in future the history bon the panet may be stored, but not readable with no printed books, there may be holes in history in a 50 years time.

So my point is, if you do whatever in the future on this planet, you have to understand the above, or run out of life so to speak. Todays people are all born into going circuimstances, and its very difficult to imagine a fresh start from nothing.......Projecting a new way as "cheap"(Costs go down", is not enturely true, it may be subsidised, it may be cheap initially, but costs to maintain it, or live with it, may just kill the operations over TIME..

Note: About Digital power consumption:
I know about crypto's bizarre reasons(Abstract-Mining) for cunsuming lots of power, but I don't think it consumes as yet as much as the rest of the complete net, from server buildings to all the little things at home or work. Digital also has a minimum draw of power even at "idle".

Cannot agree that common sense has little to do with economic principles Dave - after all the opposite of that is stupidity does (which on reflection may actually be true given our current fiscal leadership). What I am sure of is that if something makes good economic sense to people, then folk will adopt it without needing government 'encouragement'

I'm also afraid that Climate Change and Rising Energy costs are not "manageable". It's too late. Neither the public nor the government has the money to make the current alternatives to fossil fuels viable. Frankly, we (and most western economies) are broke. The real costs of moving off fossil fuels are enormous and the short timescales simply unrealistic. I certainly agree with you that rising consumption of oil and decreasing avaialbility will lead to shortages of supply and higher costs but that will just increase global financial pressures, essentially lessening everyones ability to fund workable low carbon replacements. The real "Wishful Thinking" is believing that we are not going to need oil and gas for several decades to come, probably much longer.

Unfortunately, the same people who block roads and climb on roofs today are pretty much the same type who objected to Nuclear power 30-40 years ago when we could have made a sensible transition to a reliable base-load alternative to coal. We didn't and here we are...

Regards,

IanT