CityCyclingEdinburgh Forum » Debate!

From under the sea and into the air

(15 posts)
  • Started 10 years ago by I were right about that saddle
  • Latest reply from chdot

  1. I were right about that saddle
    Member

    So this is frightening;

    http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-scotland-business-29987033

    Surely no one will stand in the way of this in the current political climate. The operators are going to apply for planning permission to build their plant, but not to vent their exhaust gases into our atmosphere, which they can do willy-nilly. Can you imagine an application lodged in the 1800s for a project to double the concentration of the most spctroscopically active component of the atmosphere over two hundred years? (Risk control - 'doesn't matter, we'll all be dead by the time the down side materialises').

    An excellent old university tutor of mine thinks that we should suspend democracy;

    http://www.amazon.com/Democracy-Survival-Governance-Biosphere-Crisis/dp/0953299090

    and he is a reasonable, cautious and gentle man. I like a hot bath and a holiday in the sun as much as the next naked ape. I also have unseemly hope in the moral character of the high-status apes to whom I delegate important decisions.

    Posted 10 years ago #

  2. kaputnik
    Moderator

    Setting fire to coal seams in the hope you can control the results from the surface sounds like an amazingly daft idea given the difficulties (impossibilities?) of controlling burning in coal seams once it has started, even where you have access to the seams and can send firefighters in and direct air and water where you please (as you could in a traditional mine).

    The combustion of the seam leaves behind ash, which fills a lesser volume than the coal did, resulting in the collapse of the seam and inevitably surface subsidence (in this case, the sea bed). Water penetrating into the seam can become poisoned with the combustion residues. You cannot control the subsidence and you cannot control for the potential of water ingress (note, the nearby Longannet deep mine eventually shut due to uncontrollable flooding).

    Miners spent the last few hundred doing all they could to prevent fires in coal seams (spontaneous or otherwise). Michael Colliery in East Wemyss, Fife was the biggest coal mine in Scotland, winning coals out under the seabed when a catastrophic and fatal fire began in 1967 due to spontaneous combustion. The fire could not be controlled despite best efforts and the mine was abandoned.

    Posted 10 years ago #

  3. chdot
    Admin

    "I also have unseemly hope in the moral character of the high-status apes to whom I delegate important decisions."

    Why?????!

    (Or am I missing the sarcasm?)

    Posted 10 years ago #

  4. I were right about that saddle
    Member

    Ah, monsieur chdot, I was berating my own lilly-liver, aplogies for being obtuse.

    I guess most of us know it's time for action if we want our society to continue, but it's so much easier if someone else takes the lead. Someone cleverer, or richer, or more powerful...not me, not just yet.

    You'd think they'd insist on CCS for this UCG as an absolute minimum. Surely?

    Posted 10 years ago #

  5. Arellcat
    Moderator

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underground_coal_gasification

    and particularly:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underground_coal_gasification#Environmental_and_social_impacts

    Posted 10 years ago #

  6. wingpig
    Member

    On my signal, unleash hell:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centralia_mine_fire

    Posted 10 years ago #

  7. chdot
    Admin

    "

    Stuart Haszeldine, Professor of carbon capture and storage at the University of Edinburgh, said: “CNR’s offshore deep UCG is a bold and innovative proposal which could help to regain energy security and value through low-carbon production of fossil fuel.

    “Domestic coal resources exist which are sufficient to supply many decades of secure energy production and feedstock.

    “But those resources will remain inaccessible until new extraction technology is deployed such as UCG, and unless the produced carbon is captured after use.

    "

    http://www.edinburghnews.scotsman.com/news/plans-to-draw-335m-tonnes-of-coal-from-forth-1-3600083

    Posted 10 years ago #

  8. kaputnik
    Moderator

    Closer to home, Centralia is rather like what happened at Gilmerton Colliery in the late 1950s, which stood where the Bernard Hunter yard is (over the hill and on the other side, heading down towards Dalkeith where Gilmerton Station Road is).

    Gilmerton mined coals right on the very edge of the Midlothian Coalfield, which is rather like a bathtub, with the coals at the edge rising towards the surface at angles approaching the vertical, and the coals at the deepest parts being relatively flat. Although it was complicated and dangerous work, requiring especially skilled miners, it was worth it to retrieve the coals which as they were of good quality and relatively close to the surface. These coals also happened to be particularly prone to "heating" i.e. self-combusting.

    There have been small pits in the area for hundreds of years, digging out coal where the seams reach the surface, and over years these were filled in by farmers to help level their fields. All that organic matter slowly composted in the seams, eventually reaching a temperature at which it caused the coal to combust. The fire then spread through these small seams into the colliery, where it found itself burning in the main vertical seams and the whole mine effectively acted like a giant lum. The fire was so out of control that they had to block up the shafts and cap them with concrete to try and bring it under control.

    There was also a terrible fire at Mauricewood Colliery in Penicuik in the 1880s, with 63 men and boys killed. It was thought to have been spontaneous combustion but there was a working theory that they may have hit (or at least got too close to) a magma chamber.

    Posted 10 years ago #

  9. Cyclingmollie
    Member

    If they did get close to a magma chamber (and setting aside the Eldritch horror of that for a moment) then we could be sitting on an Icelandic style clean energy source.
    Or we are just a few optimistic decisions away from recreating Arthur's Seat/Salisbury Crags at their most spectacular. I suggest getting it ready for the launch of the next Commonwealth Games to come to Edinburgh.

    Posted 10 years ago #

  10. amir
    Member

    That would sure beat the demolition of some towers.

    Posted 10 years ago #

  11. kaputnik
    Moderator

    There was an idea a while back that a heat exchange system could be used to provide district heating and perhaps electricity by using the flooded, 900m deep shafts of Monktonhall Colliery. It never came to anything though and they're now I think capped off in such a way that this would never be possible.

    Posted 10 years ago #

  12. chdot
    Admin

    "

    Appendix 1 The Scottish National Minewater Potential Study and the Shawfair Minewater Project

    "

    http://www.scotland.gov.uk/Publications/2013/11/6383/12

    Posted 10 years ago #

  13. chdot
    Admin

    "

    Fossil fuel must be consigned to past

    Published on 11 November 2014

    Herald View

    NEWS that a company wants to extract a form of gas from under the Firth of Forth after a huge deposit of coal was found there has exasperated environmental groups, and understandably so.

    "

    http://www.heraldscotland.com/mobile/comment/herald-view/fossil-fuel-must-be-consigned-to-past.25799610

    Posted 10 years ago #

  14. I were right about that saddle
    Member

    It increasingly seems to me that we can have either a financialised growth-based society or a habitable planet. One of those is a luxury for a small group of people, the other provides somewhere nice to cycle our bikes.

    Posted 10 years ago #

  15. chdot
    Admin

    Yep.

    Clearly there will never be a time when 'everyone' has the same "standard of living".

    I have never been clear to what extent such levelling would result in most people in the 'west' having to do without what they consider 'normal' - availability/use of energy, food, transport etc.

    Imagine for a moment that "climate change" is a hoax - or at least 'don't worry there is a technical fix coming'. That more or less seems to be the justification for 'business as usual' economics.

    Alternative scenario - 'yeah fossils fuels are a problem so we are transitioning to renewables (with a bit of help from 'no carbon' nuclear in the middle)'. All well and good, but there never seem to be many concerns beyond "keeping the lights on". So that's the electricity supply 'sorted'. Not sure if there will be enough left over for electric cars, bikes, trains and planes.

    Not sure what the plan is to replace fertilisers and chemicals once all the gas is fracked.

    Too many people already? Dunno. Enough good condition topsoil to feed them all well? Dunno? Enough minerals left in the ground to give them all a bicycle and an iPhone? Dunno.

    I do know that making and selling more stuff to add to the 'great GDP god' - and using the tax take (and 'austerity' cuts) to pay back the interest on all the money 'we' borrowed isn't going to work - financially, socially or environmentally.

    But there is no alternative as the politician driving the car towards the edge of the cliff said when he (probably) realised that the brakes don't work.

    Posted 10 years ago #

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