End of coal by rail?

[APOLLO]

Quite frightening the future if the sea levels rise as predicted. Not be new to the planet though, ice ages, tropical forests at the poles etc etc.

 

As to climate change / global warming I'm on the fence listening to / reading about all sides of the debate, At the moment I'm agreeing with none BUT agree we do need (somehow) to wean off fossil fuels in the long term. The billions of tons of CO2 and other shyte we pump in the atmosphere must have cumulative effects on the planet over time.

 

As to who WE are I cannot answer these days as far as GW & CC goes. Every country seems to be doing there own thing, The UK way seems to be to shoot ourselves in the foot (or higher !!).

 

Just read that the Philippines are about to 23 brand new coal plants. We could sell / give them some newish locos and wagons. !!.

 

http://www.powerengineeringint.com/articles/2015/06/23-new-coal-fired-power-plants-for-philippines.html

 

Brit15

[Arthur]

No problem David.

 

Here's a couple of photos,

 

A ship heading downstream from the locks at Irlam, the third set down from Salford, which is ten miles or so upstream.

 

 

And a more recent photo looking into the locks at Barton, the second set down. Again looking upstream, the high level bridge in the background carries the M60 orbital motorway.

 

[Revolution Mike]

Just seen Jon Snow's C4 report from Bangladesh on the impact of rising sea levels from climate change is having on populations. How much difference does the UK's remaining 10 or so coalfired stations have on this?

 

The (fairly coherent) argument is that the industrialised nations have already emitted their "share" of GHGs in the industrial revolution and since then.  The argument then being that they should bear the brunt of the reduction in emissions while allowing unindustrialised countries to industrialise. Ideally some of that industrialisation will be much cleaner than our industrialisation (this is already the case in China a lot of the time, though they still build coal plants (substantially more efficient than we were building 100 years ago!)).

[APOLLO]

When I worked in Warrington in the mid 70's I liked to go to Latchford locks on the Manchester Ship Canal to watch the Manchester Liner container ships go through. These ships were specially built to (just) fit the locks, about 2 ft each side and 6 ft front & rear (note my non nautical terms !!). The tugs, one front & one rear would go through the smaller lock alongside. The container ships funnels and masts were lowered to fit under the high level railway bridges, of which there are several along the route. 

 

The canal is still open and used, though not much these days. Incidentally it's there for ever. It can never be abandoned / filled in as it forms part of the river Mersey just below Irlam locks. The river Mersey was diverted in a few places, especially around Warrington. Even today when the Mersey is in flood, the canal acts as a flood relief, special massive moveable overflows (sluice gates) being provided at Latchford locks and elsewhere.

 

Large lock to the left, smaller in the centre and sluices to the right.

 

 

 

Brilliantly engineered was the ship canal.

 

Brit15

[Arthur]

Yes, it was generally capable of taking 10,000 ton vessels, which into the 1950's, was the vast majority of the merchant fleet. Manchester Liners had some vessels specially built to make the best use of the canal which were 12,500 tons.

 

In 1969 one of them, the outbound Manchester Courage, rammed through the downstream gates at Irlam locks. Whilst the ship was extricated and the gates rebuilt several ships were stuck, upstream in the docks at Salford and the wharves at Eccles, for several weeks.

 

Back to coal, the ship leaving Irlam locks in the first photo will shortly pass Partington Coaling Basin, seen below at a a time when there was no end in sight for coal on our railways.

 

[Dava]

Good to see these fine old pictures of the Manchester Ship Canal when it had steamships (some coal fired!), tugs (similar), its own rail system and waterside smokestack industries. The whole economy was pretty much coal (and to a lesser extent oil) driven. As some of the posts above point out, much of our industrialisation was done the dirty way,  as  can be seen from the air pollution.

 

Dava

[bennyboy]

When I worked in Warrington in the mid 70's I liked to go to Latchford locks on the Manchester Ship Canal to watch the Manchester Liner container ships go through. These ships were specially built to (just) fit the locks, about 2 ft each side and 6 ft front & rear (note my non nautical terms !!). The tugs, one front & one rear would go through the smaller lock alongside. The container ships funnels and masts were lowered to fit under the high level railway bridges, of which there are several along the route. 

 

The canal is still open and used, though not much these days. Incidentally it's there for ever. It can never be abandoned / filled in as it forms part of the river Mersey just below Irlam locks. The river Mersey was diverted in a few places, especially around Warrington. Even today when the Mersey is in flood, the canal acts as a flood relief, special massive moveable overflows (sluice gates) being provided at Latchford locks and elsewhere.

 

Brit15

There is still a regular container ship (currently Thea 2) which runs between Liverpool and Irlam Container Terminal a few times a week and the occasional cement delivery to Weaste, plus the dredgers, one of which I managed to photograph on Sunday when it was turning around at Latcham Locks. (apologies for going slightly OT at this point)

[PenrithBeacon]

The (fairly coherent) argument is that the industrialised nations have already emitted their "share" of GHGs in the industrial revolution and since then. The argument then being that they should bear the brunt of the reduction in emissions while allowing unindustrialised countries to industrialise. Ideally some of that industrialisation will be much cleaner than our industrialisation (this is already the case in China a lot of the time, though they still build coal plants (substantially more efficient than we were building 100 years ago!)).

I can understand this, but I'd far rather that the industrialising nations used more modern technology! There's an awful lot more of them than us, and while on the one hand I really wouldn't want the BRICs to stay as they are neither do I want them to deliberately repeat the methods of the past to get where we are today.

 

If we continue as we're doing the planet will be a mess in 100yrs time and it won't be able to support the human population we have today, never mind the projected increase. I see an awful lot of suffering and death if this problem isn't cracked, but globally we don't have the institutions to do it.

 

I fear for my grandchildren and their children.

 

Regards

[Revolution Mike]

I can understand this, but I'd far rather that the industrialising nations used more modern technology! There's an awful lot more of them than us, and while on the one hand I really wouldn't want the BRICs to stay as they are neither do I want them to deliberately repeat the methods of the past to get where we are today.

 

As I said, this is already happening - even a Chinese coal fired plant built now is much better than a coal plant from 100 years ago. Of course a lot of the BRICs development is much more advanced (and clean) than coal.

[jjb1970]

http://www.offshorewind.biz/2015/12/03/make-offshore-wind-capacity-to-reach-92gw-by-2024/?utm_source=emark&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=daily-update-offshore-wind-2015-12-04&uid=55671

 

Note that one of the key drivers for the growth of offshore wind is expected to be China. I think it is very unfair that people assume China is not doing anything to reduce its emissions when they're already investing huge amounts to develop clean energy.

 

On coal, even the most modern super critical plants are not that efficient. The easiest way to increase efficiency of a thermal plant is to develop it as a CHP where you can get incredible efficiencies under optimum conditions but you need an awful lot of heat demand to really boost the efficiency of a coal plant. And the traditional problem with CHP is that the heat balances rarely get near their optimum design points with the result that efficiencies rarely match claimed figures and in some cases are not much above a power plant without CHP. When talking about CHP I mean external heating and cooling supply, not heat recovery within the plant for steam generation, feed heating, machinery thermal conditioning etc. which should all be done regardless of whether or not it is a CHP.

[Revolution Mike]

I agree completely, though the biggest issue (certainly in the UK) for heat is joined up thinking amongst various potential users to guarantee that there is a customer for the heat.

[jjb1970]

Unfortunately the UK often falls down when it comes to joined up thinking. In the UK the cost of installing urban district heating schemes is often prohibitive unless either done during the development phase or if there are easy routes for piping which avoid the need for excavation (much of the City of London piping is routed via car parks or existing tunnels) yet everybody agrees that district heating/cooling is an excellent solution in offering both excellent thermal efficiency and robust energy supply. So much of our CHP development was for large industrial CHP schemes using CCGTs and steam export to a host industrial plant however then the risk is that plant shuts down and you're left with a small CCGT (tens of MW rather than 100's of MW) with nobody to take the steam. My former employer ended up with several CCGT plants that had been built as CHP but ended up as straight power plants because their steam clients closed not long after commissioning the CHP.

[Kickstart]

What does all this mean for rail - well all those 66s are just as capable of hauling trains of wood pellets around as coal

Few more spare now that Ironbridge power station has closed. While it was coal burning, think it has only been biomass burning recently.

 

All the best

 

Katy

[don]

And not announced in the recent budget but in a private meeting(heard on radio 4 science programme Thursday evening) the chancellor has given the chop to the Carbon Capture programme after millions of pounds of taxpayer and energy companies expenditure has been spent over the last four years.mmmmmm!!!!!!!

Don.

[Reorte]

And not announced in the recent budget but in a private meeting(heard on radio 4 science programme Thursday evening) the chancellor has given the chop to the Carbon Capture programme after millions of pounds of taxpayer and energy companies expenditure has been spent over the last four years.mmmmmm!!!!!!!

Don.

A crying shame, even if it wasn't a long-term solution it could've done a lot to help the transition. But short-term monetary considerations are the only one that really matter I suppose.

[Revolution Mike]

One of the big problems was that the Govt had set aside money for CCS schemes for some time and projects kept being cancelled. I don't know the full details of why, but understandable from the Govt's point of view to cancel the funding if not being used.

[SwissRailPassion]

Eggborough is to remain as a standby station rather than close, I heard yesterday.

There is an effort to secure biomass conversion for it. We need the additional capacity.

[jjb1970]

For conventional coal plants, the huge cost of adding a carbon capture plant is only really sensible for new builds or re-engineering to reset the expected life to something similar to new. The energy demand of available options is very high and the ground foot print high. The carbon capture plant proposed for Kingsnorth 5 & 5 was going to impose a parasitic load of something like a third of the plants output and be as big again in terms of foot print. Integrated gasification combined cycle technologies offer a much more carbon capture friendly way of combusting coal however when I was in generation despite a lot of claims by its advocates and promising pilots there were still some major metallurgy issues in terms of commercialising the technology on a large scale. Other options include things like oxy firing to control combustion and assist with knocking out carbon from the flue gas however most of the proposals I saw were very much in the purely post combustion amine sorbent camp.

I think there are two real problems with the carbon capture fund. The first is that if we are going to move to a low carbon economy then there is a good chance carbon capture would be a medium term transitional technology and as with any transitional technology there is always that question of how much investment do you want to throw at a transitional technology. The second is that nobody wants to be first, or second. The archetypal "race to be third" was very much alive in this area. For those outside engineering that may sound odd, but usually the first generation of any technology is essentially technology proving and those buying it generally get a very expensive, inefficient solution which soon becomes obsolete. Second generation is a bit better but it is generally third generation when it becomes genuinely attractive/viable. There is always an argument that says we know the first generation is probably going to be expensive and not that great but it establishes us, puts us in pole position etc. Unfortunately the rest of the world can learn most of the lessons you'll learn by monitoring somebody else's  pain and use that to develop a much more attractive solution. Hence the race to be third.

In fairness to the government, if nobody has actually taken the money despite the fund being around for ages then at some point it seems pointless to continue with the idea.

[jjb1970]

Here is quite an interesting article:

 

http://www.smh.com.au/business/energy/its-the-end-of-energy-and-transportation-as-we-know-it-tony-seba-20160519-goz5bm.html

 

I don't agree with all of this, but I do agree with the central premise that the world needs to stop thinking about the future in terms of historic solutions and technologies and that we are in a phase of revolutionary as opposed to evolutionary change.

[woodenhead]

Coal trains are back in the news (well on YouTube).

 

Extra traffic ahead of winter when the coal power stations will be there on hand should the gas get too short.

 

https://www.current-news.co.uk/news/uniper-to-keep-coal-fired-power-plant-running-until-march-2023-amid-energy-crisis

 

 

[KingEdwardII]

10 hours ago, woodenhead said:

coal power stations

Used to provide the backbone of our electricity supply. Unfortunately, we've unwisely closed most of them and are now over-reliant on gas fired stations. 

 

Yours, Mike.

[woodenhead]

1 hour ago, KingEdwardII said:

Used to provide the backbone of our electricity supply. Unfortunately, we've unwisely closed most of them and are now over-reliant on gas fired stations. 

 

Yours, Mike.

And those we have are due to be commissioned at the end of March 2023, fingers crossed that the Government remembers this and extends licences  and does what ever else it has to be keep them on stream.

[Michael Hodgson]

Sad to see the old signalling missing from there.