Energy From Thorium Discussion Forum

I read an interesting article in the Financial Times today about China has started importing some coal.

http://blogs.ft.com/energy-source/2010/01/14/could-china-fall-out-of-love-with-coal/#more-39556

The quantities are small, but I think that this will increase their push for nuclear power.

China's synthetic gas plants would be greenhouse giants

So much for China's change of heart when it comes to taking care of the environment.



Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2013-09-china-synt ... s.html#jCp



The Chinese government recently approved construction on nine of 40 large-scale plants that will convert coal into synthetic natural gas — a process that produces seven times more greenhouse gas emissions than regular natural gas production, and uses as much as 100 times the water as shale gas extraction, according to a new study by Duke University.

The research, published in the peer-reviewed journal Nature Climate Change, comes just two weeks after China announced plans to cut down on air pollution, and blocked the construction of new coal plants in three of the country's heavily polluted industrial regions.

"The increased carbon dioxide emissions from the nine government-approved plants alone will more than cancel out all of the reductions in greenhouse gas emissions from China's recent investments in wind and solar electricity," said Chi-Jen Yang, a research scientist at Duke's Center on Global Change who co-authored the study. "While we applaud China's rapid development in clean energy, we must be cautious about this simultaneous high-carbon leapfrogging."

The nine plants would be capable of churning out more than 37 billion cubic meters of synthetic natural gas annually. For comparison, in 2010, China as a whole produced about 103 billion cubic meters of natural gas.

It doesn't help that the extra 37 billion cubic meters will be a lot harsher on the environment.

The nine plants would dump 21 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions into the environment over a 40-year span. If the others get approved, that number could rise to 110 billion metric tons, a 14x increase, (To put that in some perspective: China's pumped 7.7 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions in 2012, the highest rate in the world.)

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Excuse me, but just exactly how clueless are you about China?

China has never commited to taking care of the environment. But at least they're more honest about it than Western yellow jounalist style societies, who claim to be saving the world with utterly marginal gestures such as solar panels.

Here's China's "commitment" to CO2 emissions.

http://www.mongabay.com/images/2006/gra ... 0-2025.jpg

That graph is out of date- it doesn't have China's emissions exceeding those of the USA till 2017, but the lead passed to China a year or more ago.

Thanks for pointing that out. You're right, it is even worse than the official predictions of just a few years ago. This shows it is getting worse exponentially.

If they used nuclear steam for the heat required, they would get their gas with no extra carbon. It may be economically unwise to use this gas for power production rather than the steam directly, but it would come in handy for production of liquid fuel and also the DME where they are already tops.
Nuclear steam would also come in handy for gasification of deep coal, uneconomical (and risky) for manual digging.

Am I wrong or those plants have a yield of barely 140 cubic meters of gas per tonn of coal, that means a thermal efficiency of less than 20 % (supposed for instance 1 m^3 of nat gas = 10 kWht and 1 tonn of average coal = 8000 kWht) ? If it were so, it ' d surprise me because from a Dutch study
http://www.chemeng.lth.se/exjobb/E481.pdf
http://www.ecn.nl/docs/library/report/2009/m09086.pdf
I read that an energy efficiency of more than 70% from biomass to bio-methane was even possible