Coalpail.com Forum

Just an FYI...
I came across this at an electrical power trade show yesterday and thought it would interest this group.

It seems like an interesting alternative for the power industry. I hope they are successful since in my simplistic mind it would mean more coal available to us home coal burners and our prices wouldn't go up. The guy I talked to said although they could, they don't currently have plans to sell to the public. Their business plan is to build a plant on or near the power plant and optimize the plant for the biomass that will be used to create the "coal". The thrust of the pitch I heard was the reduction in emissions and scrubber costs at the power plant. I don't know what the effect of the emissions at the mfg plant would be.

I asked how many plants they currently have and how many power plants they are currently supplying. From the song and dance I interpreted they are currently working with one power plant in a test mode using "coal" they produced at their test facility, not at a co-located mfg. site. So from that it seems this is a ways off from making any kind of impact.

In my opinion mostly BS.

I did pick up a sample, although the 3 or 4 nuggets won't go far toward heating the house!!

I'd have to agree with Yanche. Bio fuels have not been very sucessful. The other issue as it seems with corn is how much energy to produce it to begin with? Wood pellets can feasible when produced from scrap and you have a very small population using them. If everyone switched to pellets they wouldn't have the trees to supply the need.

If someone showed me plans for a giant wind/solar/hydro plant in the ocean or plans to tap into to the heat in the earths core you might peek my interest.

I always thought the idea of a giant turbine generator in the gulf stream had potential (pun intended). But the fish chum coming out the other end might be a problem!

During the first energy crisis (Carter administration) I had a very minor involvement with a program to make ammonia at sea. The idea was to make more natural gas (NG) available by not using NG as feedstock to make the ammonia used in fertilizer. As I recall the design had giant floating ships and barges that would use solar energy and the difference between the solar heat and the much colder deep ocean temperature to extract ammonia from sea water. Some experiments showed it was possible but the proposal never advanced to a demonstration project.

The idea was championed by Dr. William Avery a brilliant scientist and engineer that designed most of the ramjet missiles used by the US Navy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_H._Avery_(engineer)

Bill was a good guy. I once designed a spark igniter for him that started the arc discharge of hundreds of submarine batteries connected in series. The arc heated air in a hypersonic wind tunnel test facility.

More on the idea known as Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion is here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_thermal_energ ... conversion

I think someone locally has some piles of these? Look like a pile of coal pellets?
I saw something on their sign about Reduce your Heating costs...will have to stop and see what they have??