Gigabattery plant

Strong rumours that TATA Gigabattery plant in Somerset will be announced tomorrow.

Suuposed to be 9000 jobs which is a lot for that area, added to the considerable Hinkley C jobs far away.

Bill D.

I'm guessing that they got a better grant/subsidy offer than what was available for Coventry (Baginton) aerodrome. Coventry would have been closer to Tata/JLR's other plants.

TATA Steel in Port Talbot are also in joint talks, local gossip was that if they didn't get Somerset they would pull the plug on Port Talbot and vice versa!

Seems possible from the media reports that mega loads of taxpayers money might go in as well.

Interesting to watch the extended term outcome.

Edited By V8Eng on 19/07/2023 13:21:31

I just can't see these things replacing combustion engines at the moment

Good for pootling to Asda and back though, and general city work

As usual, everything-in-moderation seems to be the sensible way forwards

I hope the new battery site has a decent fire brigade ,just in case they have a battery fire,I saw an electric car on fire on you tube and it would not go out until it was craned into a tank of water, I wonder how long it will be before insurance companies increase premiums for domestic garages especially integral ones,&storage of electric scooters and bikes?

There have already been a couple of serious fires from electric bikes or scooters being charged indoors. Didn't someone die in one of these, recently?

TATA was also wanting a subsidy to help them replace their Port Talbot blast-furnaces with a different process for smelting iron-ore. I don't know the details there, but Swedish and German iron-works were using electric-arc furnaces for that - a hundred years ago!. Tantalisingly my reference is an electrical-engineering text-book from c.1920, and it describes the electrical side but does not reveal the reducing-agent. It may have been coke but in far smaller quantities than if that was also the fuel. I don't know if their application succeeded.

For those awfulising about Lithium battery fires in cars etc. Have you ever been involved with a petrol or Diesel fire in an IC engined car? I have...

Lithium iron phosphate batteries don't have the thermal runaway issues that lithium cobalt based ones do. They also don't contain large quantities of cobalt, manganese or nickel, which are all expensive elements.

As for range, My Dacia Sandero Diesel will do 650 miles on a tank if driven gently, but dad's Morris Marina wouldn't manage 300. That's no better than the best current EVs.

Edited By Mark Rand on 19/07/2023 16:22:01

The BL icon, the morris marina lol

My Escort would do Edinburgh to inverness.... and back... for a tenner when they were around. 320 miles

Then go get a pint and a smoke at the pub. A garage in every village. A 3 months energy bill was 50 quid

omg take me back now

Posted by Ady1 on 19/07/2023 13:39:10:

I just can't see these things replacing combustion engines at the moment

Good for pootling to Asda and back though, and general city work

As usual, everything-in-moderation seems to be the sensible way forwards

Hi Ady1,

I don't think you're far wrong.

As I understand it (and I beg to be corrected of course) the current Euro 6 compliant diesel engines are pretty good, apart from the particulate emissions. A crazy idea maybe, but what about a particulate filter (something more sophisticated than perforated fibre) that you empty like the ash pan from a stove. OK, too simple an idea maybe, and I'm sure the automotive boffins have considered it. Or possibly not?

As usual, everyone's jumping on the EV bandwagon without first securing the infrastructure and implications for those millions unable to charge at home. Not to mention the low life stealing the trailing cables for the copper.

Also, what happens at 5 o'clock when everyone (you know what I mean) gets home from work and plugs in. Ooops, the lights go out.

As far as I can discover you can't reduce iron ore in an electric arc furnace. What they do is pass hydrogen through heated pellets of iron ore which produces sponge iron and steam, the melt the sponge iron in an electric arc furnace with the right amount of carbon to make steel. It all requires a large amount of electricity, and this has to be produced from renewables for it to make any sense, which is why countries with lots of hydro have been front runners. I have not found how the iron ore pellets are heated, anyone know?

Electric arc furnaces have been in use in the UK for many years for remelting.

Further thoughts. At very high temperatures water (steam) reacts with metals to produce metal oxide and hydrogen, this is what caused the Fukushima explosions, so they must have to control the temperature to make it go the other way. Complicated stuff this high temperature chemistry.

Thank god then that oil is never going to run out and there's no such thing as Climate Change! It means humanity can drive IC cars until the end of time.

Or is it a dangerous fantasy to believe that fossil fuels are unlimited and can be burned forever with no ill-effects?

I hope Bo'sun and Ady1 have evidence that supports their opinions, and aren't just sharing fact-free beliefs.

What happens to our children and descendents if Bos'un, Ady1 and their many friends turn out to be ill-informed optimists? Nothing to do with 'tree-hugging'. As our entire way of life depends on oil, the problem is far more serious than the 'millions unable to charge at home'. Unless we act to avoid the crash...

Dave

On the other side of the Electric/ICE debate, Renault - Geely also announced they are setting up a facility in the UK to develop ultra low emmission petrol/diesel/hybrid cars!!

Iv'e thought for a long time that the electric car boom could come to an end if some totally new technology comes along. Of course technology is also improving batteries so who knows?

This is what annoys me no end about many of these environmental protestors, it seems few of them understand technology and what great strides are being made, I would also like to know just what does 'Just stop oil' mean.

Stop oil being used for combustion or stop oil full stop, they seem unaware of what they use, own, wear, travel on etc all use oil based products one way or another.

Bill D.

It's a good thing for our locality, as in Weston Super Mare, there are thousands of new homes being built but no jobs locally for the prospective buyers. Millions already have been spent on a new roundabout near the entrance to the defunct munitions factory which was built during the second world war, and it would have been a complete waste of taxpayers money if the factory were built elsewhere. There is already a rail link directly to the site and the M5 junction is only about a mile from the factory site.

Duncan -

Ah, but you can use an arc-furnace for iron-ore smelting - that's what the Canadians, Californians, Swedes and Germans were doing over 100 years ago. It seems the cost of electricity might have been the main problem, plus of course in many countries with plentiful coal, distilling that to coke yields a lot of useful by-products and uses it almost directly.

You still need a reducing agent though, and lime flux to help separate the slag. That is mostly silica as a lot of iron-ores are basically iron-oxide rich sandstone: that from Abbotsbury, in Dorset, proved too siliceous to be economical.

The original method was developed in Italy by a certain Stassano, at his plant in Turin, and patented in 1898.

It entailed pulverising the ore, flux and "carbon" and forming the mixture into briquettes, and was capable of producing high-grade pig-iron for conversion to steel and refining that - naturally, in electric furnaces.

So it still uses carbon, but my book does not tell me the nature of the carbon, whether coke or graphite; in a chapter dealing comprehensively with electro-thermal metallurgical processes and their furnace types.

[Another chapter describes progress in developing battery-electric vehicles, including small vans and lorries. Direct petrol-electrics - not "hybrids" - had been tried but the only successful ones were omnibuses built by Tilling-Stevens, which had a quoted "overall commercial efficiency" of 79%. Also, we learn, battery cars were allowed in London's Royal Parks where the internal-combustion engine was banned!. BEVs? You-Les? They'll never catch on!]

.

Ref.

Various authors; Modern Electrical Engineering, Vol. 5 [of 6]; ed. Prof. Magnus MacLean; The Gresham Publishing Company, London. Date not given, post-1914 by a cited paper, but probably pre-1920. pp236 et.seq.

.......

Old Mart -

I know the M5 link and old military site you mean as I normally use that route when driving to and from the Midlands and North. Yes, I'm sure I noticed a new junction in what was a gateway anyway, near the traffic-lights; and I wondered why. However, is the over-expensive roundabout you cite actually the one on the hill, just above the motorway junction, to serve the University of Bristol's huge 'Gravity' property-speculation? Or have they gone and built another?

(They've gone roundabout-happy on the Fosse Way too, building one merely to serve an HS2 building-site for which an ordinary junction should have sufficed.)

So if its using carbon in whatever form it's not exactly green is it. It's probably greener than what we have now, provided the electricity is from renewables. The hydrogen method is green provided the hydrogen and electricity don't produce CO2

No, not fully green but probably using far less carbon than the conventional blast-furnace because it is only the amount needed for the ore. It still needs huge amounts of electricity though, whether using carbon or hydrogen.

The problem for the extreme eco brigade is they've turned it into a religion, a crusade

These things always attract a distinct subset of society, with a curious mindset

Extreme politics or religion never succeed and are never successful because the silent majority are never extremists

it seems to be a state of mind some people are susceptible to, but most people aren't, an awful lot appear to be relatively well educated people

They latch onto religion, or politics, or a social belief, and they want everyone else to do their system

The most famous anti-smoking anti-drinking vegetarian in history tried to impose his religion on us in the 1940s

But life is always best and at its most sensible when it is pursued in moderation