Jump to content
Science Forums

Why Not?


Recommended Posts

There is an uncontrollable  underground fire in a place called Centralia in Pennsylvania that has been burning for some 50 years, and will continue to burn for a very long time.http://www.news.nationalgeographic.com/news/energy/2013/01/pictures/130108-centralia-mine-fire/   My question is why are we not collecting some of that heat to generate electricity, say with sterling engines?  It shouldn't be hard to use the directional drilling techniques to drill in to the heat from a safe distance.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

My question is why are we not collecting some of that heat to generate electricity, ...

My guess is that it’s not economically viable to do so. Some reasons:
  • Centralia and Byrnesville and the whole of Columbia County PA don’t have many people or other electricity consumers, so electricity generated there would have to be transmitted a long way to find paying customers. Since these towns are small, their electric lines are too, so you’d have to build new, big ones, to take the output of a power plant.
  • There’s a lot of well-established power plant competition in PA, including 5 nuclear plants. You’ve to to produce power at a cost competitive with them, while paying off you startup costs that include building the transmission infrastructure I mention above and the physical plant getting its power from the mine fire, which itself will require a unique design with R&D costs.
  • It’s illegal to build anything in these towns. They’ve been effectively condemned for health and safety reasons, all the land bought by the state, buildings demolished, except for a few old folk who are being allowed to live in their homes ‘til they die. A commercial venture would need to get those regulations changed.
  • The vicinity of the Centralia mine fire is dangerous. It leaks a lot of CO, which can asphyxiate you literally before you know it, and occasionally suddenly opens deadly flaming sinkholes that can swallow up equipment or people.
  • Weirdly, there’s still an issue of who owns the coal being burned in the mine fire. Some of the early proposal to put out the fire got shot down over these kinds of property issues.
The only pro reason I can think of is that, by arguing that the fire is likely to be there for another 250 years or so, greenhouse gassing and polluting whether it’s put to useful purpose or not, making it arguably a natural phenomenon, a venture to generate electricity might be deemed green energy, and be eligible for government and private subsidies.

 

Questions and puzzles for business people and lawyers, not engineers.

 

… say with sterling engines? It shouldn't be hard to use the directional drilling techniques to drill in to the heat from a safe distance.

Technically, I don’t think getting power from the Centralia mine fire would be very hard. Drill short shafts near known existing hot-spots, stick in water pipes as you do with an ordinary steam boiler, then use a proven, conventional steam turbine generator.

 

A hobbyist looking for off-the-grid electricity could likely pull this off on a small scale, were it not for the pesky “it’s illegal to live there because you might die” regulations I mention above.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

My guess is that it’s not economically viable to do so. Some reasons:

  • Centralia and Byrnesville and the whole of Columbia County PA don’t have many people or other electricity consumers, so electricity generated there would have to be transmitted a long way to find paying customers. Since these towns are small, their electric lines are too, so you’d have to build new, big ones, to take the output of a power plant.
  • There’s a lot of well-established power plant competition in PA, including 5 nuclear plants. You’ve to to produce power at a cost competitive with them, while paying off you startup costs that include building the transmission infrastructure I mention above and the physical plant getting its power from the mine fire, which itself will require a unique design with R&D costs.
  • It’s illegal to build anything in these towns. They’ve been effectively condemned for health and safety reasons, all the land bought by the state, buildings demolished, except for a few old folk who are being allowed to live in their homes ‘til they die. A commercial venture would need to get those regulations changed.
  • The vicinity of the Centralia mine fire is dangerous. It leaks a lot of CO, which can asphyxiate you literally before you know it, and occasionally suddenly opens deadly flaming sinkholes that can swallow up equipment or people.
  • Weirdly, there’s still an issue of who owns the coal being burned in the mine fire. Some of the early proposal to put out the fire got shot down over these kinds of property issues.
The only pro reason I can think of is that, by arguing that the fire is likely to be there for another 250 years or so, greenhouse gassing and polluting whether it’s put to useful purpose or not, making it arguably a natural phenomenon, a venture to generate electricity might be deemed green energy, and be eligible for government and private subsidies.

 

Questions and puzzles for business people and lawyers, not engineers.

 

Technically, I don’t think getting power from the Centralia mine fire would be very hard. Drill short shafts near known existing hot-spots, stick in water pipes as you do with an ordinary steam boiler, then use a proven, conventional steam turbine generator.

 

A hobbyist looking for off-the-grid electricity could likely pull this off on a small scale, were it not for the pesky “it’s illegal to live there because you might die” regulations I mention above.

 

So, obviously the technical issues are far from insurmountable.  

Link to comment
Share on other sites

My guess is that it’s not economically viable to do so. Some reasons:

  • Centralia and Byrnesville and the whole of Columbia County PA don’t have many people or other electricity consumers, so electricity generated there would have to be transmitted a long way to find paying customers. Since these towns are small, their electric lines are too, so you’d have to build new, big ones, to take the output of a power plant.
  • There’s a lot of well-established power plant competition in PA, including 5 nuclear plants. You’ve to to produce power at a cost competitive with them, while paying off you startup costs that include building the transmission infrastructure I mention above and the physical plant getting its power from the mine fire, which itself will require a unique design with R&D costs.
  •  

 

Perhaps we should revisit Tesla's idea of wireless power transmission. http://www.teslasociety.com/tesla_tower.htm  I understand that the reason it never happened was that that J.P. Morgan wouldn't finance it when he found out there was no way to collect payment from customers who could freely access the power, but I think that is a technical issue that could be worked out.  

 

How cheap is the power generated by the nuclear plants when you consider the political issues of waste disposal?

 

Now the nuclear waste issue brings to mind that I seem to recall hearing from someone that even spent nuclear fuel still gives off heat.  Couldn't that energy be harvested as well?  

 

As for the R&D costs, I think that if you got a few of the right people involved, if they were passionate about not letting energy go to waste, it seems very doable to me.

 

How would one go about getting the ideas into the minds of people that could put them into use?

Edited by Farming guy
Link to comment
Share on other sites

So, obviously the technical issues are far from insurmountable.

I agree. A mine fire is not dissimilar to a natural geothermal heat source, for which power generating technologies are fairly mature.

 

Beyond simply being able to do it, however, a commercial power venture must produce power at or more cheaply than their competitors.

 

Perhaps we should revisit Tesla's idea of wireless power transmission. http://www.teslasociety.com/tesla_tower.htm

I don’t think may people with a good physics education, or advised by such people, would invest money in Tesla’s wireless communication or power transmission ideas, because unlike in 1900, we now have a practically complete theory of electrodynamics, which tells us Tesla’s core idea – in his words:

“(using) the Earth itself as the medium for conducting the currents, thus dispensing with wires and all other artificial conductors ... a machine which, to explain its operation in plain language, resembled a pump in its action, drawing electricity from the Earth and driving it back into the same at an enormous rate, thus creating ripples or disturbances which, spreading through the Earth as through a wire, could be detected at great distances by carefully attuned receiving circuits. In this manner I was able to transmit to a distance, not only feeble effects for the purposes of signaling, but considerable amounts of energy, and later discoveries I made convinced me that I shall ultimately succeed in conveying power without wires, for industrial purposes, with high economy, and to any distance, however great.”

– is simply wrong.

 

Present day Tesla fans, in my experience, believe that Tesla successfully demonstrated his “making the Earth into one gigantic dynamo” idea on a small scale, and just needed to make bigger versions of machines like the Wardenclyffe Tower in Shoreham, NY, USA, to send power to receivers anywhere on Earth. Tesla himself claimed to be able to send signals from Shorham to “a similar power house in Scotland”, but this claim appears to be an outright lie, as no evidence of or witness to such a building, or the money needed to build it, exist other than for the Wardenclyffe site. (see Nikola Tesla: The Scottish Connection)

 

Tesla was an interesting figure, but it’s important to note that he was not scientifically educated, was a notorious liar, paranoid, and by the end of his life at least, obviously mentally ill. I suspect he was mentally ill his entire life, but such a talented speaker and intuitive reader and manipulator of the people that he was able to convince people he was a misunderstood scientific genius, rather than just misunderstood. He was right about the viability of AC power, though not any scientific theory about how it worked, built a lot of interesting machines, but was dead wrong about many other ideas.

 

I understand that the reason it never happened was that that J.P. Morgan wouldn't finance it when he found out there was no way to collect payment from customers who could freely access the power, but I think that is a technical issue that could be worked out.

This is a common explanation among Tesla fans, but I’ve not seen it supported by a credible source, and don’t believe it’s true.

 

The better documented and accepted one is that Morgan invested in Tesla’s venture because Tesla promised to build a radio superior to the Marconi’s, which most people believed would not prove capable of transmitting a signal over the horizon. When Marconi unexpectedly succeeded in sending radio far over the horizon (many frequency ranges in the radio spectrum, we now know, are reflected by the upper atmosphere, allowing them to reach many times over the horizon), Tesla shifted his goals from communication to power transmission. With a 51% controlling interest in the venture, Morgan felt he had a great chance of making a fortune in radio communication, but was less enthusiastic about power transmission, which was already a largely mature technology due to Westinghouse’s development of Tesla’s AC current patents, so when Tesla shifted goals (Morgan’s 51% share of their venture didn’t mean he had any control over Tesla’s activities, other than by giving or withholding money), Morgan withdrew his support.

 

How cheap is the power generated by the nuclear plants when you consider the political issues of waste disposal?

This is one of the deep political topics of the past few human generations.

 

From a technical perspective, it’s not a difficult problem – remove spent fuel to local cooling pool’s ‘til the short lived radioisotopes decay by a few powers of 2, then vitrify and dump it someplace permanent. Personally, I think ocean floor disposal (which was halted internationally in 1982) is the best approach.

 

From a political perspective, nuclear waste disposal is a terrible, unending problem, ranging from silly, NIMBY issues of finding sites that local people and governments will permit to be used to preventing waste from being stolen and used in criminal mass poisonings.

 

Now the nuclear waste issue brings to mind that I seem to recall hearing from someone that even spent nuclear fuel still gives off heat. Couldn't that energy be harvested as well?

It can, and devices to do so – RTGs – are among the most mature and reliable ever made. They’ve been used to powering everything from automated lighthouses to the farthest traveled manmade objects, the Voyager probes.

 

The main drawback with RTGs is that they have low power/mass ratios. The PuO2 fueled MMRTG flown in space probes including Voyager 1 (launched in 1977) and New Horizons (2006), for example, mass 45 kg, and produces 120 W at startup, which decreases by about 50% every 87.7 years

 

As with nuclear waste disposal, one of the big problems with RTGs is the prospect of people stealing them and using them for terrible crimes.

 

How would one go about getting the ideas into the minds of people that could put them into use?

For the original idea of using the Centralia mine fire as a “geothermal” source of a commercial power plant. I’d say you’d go about it as you would any speculative commercial venture – assemble a plan, nd seek investors.

 

My guess is that such a plan would have to depend on major US government “green energy” subsidies, especially for its power transmission lines. Such a subsidy, $2,900,000,000 for the Plains & Eastern line of the Clean Line project, has been much in the news lately.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

My guess is that it’s not economically viable to do so. Some reasons:

  • Centralia and Byrnesville and the whole of Columbia County PA don’t have many people or other electricity consumers, so electricity generated there would have to be transmitted a long way to find paying customers.

 

If the power could be produced cheaply, wouldn't that be a good draw for industry?  Coordinate with nearby towns to recruit business, and the power may not have to be transmitted very far.

 

 

  • It’s illegal to build anything in these towns. They’ve been effectively condemned for health and safety reasons, all the land bought by the state, buildings demolished, except for a few old folk who are being allowed to live in their homes ‘til they die. A commercial venture would need to get those regulations changed.
  • The vicinity of the Centralia mine fire is dangerous. It leaks a lot of CO, which can asphyxiate you literally before you know it, and occasionally suddenly opens deadly flaming sinkholes that can swallow up equipment or people.
  • Weirdly, there’s still an issue of who owns the coal being burned in the mine fire. Some of the early proposal to put out the fire got shot down over these kinds of property issues.

 

Suppose you were to make a modular power plant?  Then you wouldn't need to actually "build" anything onsite.  Just find a piece of stable ground nearby, level it, and then it's just a matter of parking the power plant and plumbing it in.  If you use directional drilling, you don't need to be directly over a hot spot to tap into it.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I just noticed that this question was addressed at a website dedicated to Centralia, in its 9/25/14 article “Electricity from the Centralia Mine Fire?”.

 

It mentions that “a few enterprising individuals have suggested that the fire might be harnessed and turned into something more productive – like electricity”, but concurs with my guess about a lack of commercial viability, with this

”the financial returns on such a project would have to outweigh the initial money invested. Digging hundreds of feet underground in order heat pipes of water would certainly be costly. Electricity is sold for relatively cheap in the United States. This doesn’t provide much confidence that a hypothetical power plant would generate much of a profit.”

It mentions some technical challenge that hadn’t occurred to me:

  • Since the burn zones of the Centralia mine fire move at about 75 feet (23 m) per year, the system would have to move its pipes to stay in the hottest places – in short, it would have to be permanently under construction.
  • Centralia is on the top of a mountain, far from natural water supplies, so getting water for the cheapest, simplest steam system would be difficult.

Suppose you were to make a modular power plant?

Maybe something like these

modular-unit-1.jpg

which I think were made by Altarock Energy. Altarock, with which Microsoft’s Paul Allen has been much involved, has focused mostly on drilling into volcanic geothermal fields, which I think is much more challenging than drilling into a mine fire.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I just noticed that this question was addressed at a website dedicated to Centralia, in its 9/25/14 article “Electricity from the Centralia Mine Fire?”.

 

It mentions that “a few enterprising individuals have suggested that the fire might be harnessed and turned into something more productive – like electricity”, but concurs with my guess about a lack of commercial viability, with this

”the financial returns on such a project would have to outweigh the initial money invested. Digging hundreds of feet underground in order heat pipes of water would certainly be costly. Electricity is sold for relatively cheap in the United States. This doesn’t provide much confidence that a hypothetical power plant would generate much of a profit.”

It mentions some technical challenge that hadn’t occurred to me:

  • Since the burn zones of the Centralia mine fire move at about 75 feet (23 m) per year, the system would have to move its pipes to stay in the hottest places – in short, it would have to be permanently under construction.
  • Centralia is on the top of a mountain, far from natural water supplies, so getting water for the cheapest, simplest steam system would be difficult.

 

It sure is hard to come up with an original idea!

 

Okay, to solve the water issue, go back to sterling engines, then you just need heat and not steam.

 

I love the photo you posted above!  It's great that someone is already doing that part.  Now, if you put the system on giant tracks, you can make it mobile.  Then put it behind one of those huge tunneling machines like they use to tunnel under mountains, have it guided by a thermal guidance system, and have the whole system underground, mobile , and automated!  Simple, right?!

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 6 months later...
The only pro reason I can think of is that, by arguing that the fire is likely to be there for another 250 years or so, greenhouse gassing and polluting whether it’s put to useful purpose or not, making it arguably a natural phenomenon, a venture to generate electricity might be deemed green energy, and be eligible for government and private subsidies.

 

 

I seriously doubt burning coal for electricity qualifies as green energy, whether in controlled or uncontrolled combustion.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I had to do an inspection at the EDF Bio-Mass Energy facility way down in Allendale County, SC early last year.  The power generating facility was already set up when I went to look at the new 3 section modular office building set up on site.  They have two wood-fired steam boilers generating 20 MW each.  I cannot think of a better example of green technology as the plant consumes wood chips from the thousands of acres of surrounding pine forests, releases CO2 (sequestered carbon) that is absorbed by the surrounding forests to be turned back into trees.  In a way it is using the sun's energy indirectly to produce electricity without a net increase in CO2 emissions.  Of course the boilers can accept most any organic waste, such as corn stalks (or plastic-free trash keeping it out of the landfills), and there are many thousands of acres planted in corn down there.  BTW, the facility has since been sold to enXco.  I would have liked to spend more time exploring the generation facility, but security was very tight.

 

 

http://www.edf-re.com/project/pinelands-biomass-allendale-dorchester/

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Keep in mind much of the wood chips come as a byproduct of our robust forest product industry.  I see many trucks and train cars loaded with wood chips or logs going up and down I-26 to the Norbord OSB plant in Newberry, the GP Platinum Plywood plant, the International Paper plant in Charleston, and numerous saw-mills making utility poles, shaving logs for plywood, or cutting for finished dimensional lumber.  I think forest products count for 3.8% of South Carolina's total agricultural output, but I can't find any hard numbers.

 

https://www.state.sc.us/forest/fproductsfacts.pdf

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I really like this stuff.  I have been in many attics where they applied plywood roof decking with a radiant barrier under an asphalt shingle roof and it was noticeably cooler than those without a (generic) radiant barrier.  Not endorsing a specific brand or product.

 

http://www.buildgp.com/thermostat-radiant-barrier-plywood

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Again, not endorsing a specific brand or product, but spray foam insulation applied to the bottom of the roof deck GREATLY reduces attic temperatures, which is vital considering most HVAC equipment is mounted in the attic in newer construction and the duct insulation is only required to have an R-8 insulation value in unconditioned space and R-6 in conditioned space  An insulated attic would count as conditioned space.

 

http://www.icynene.com/en-us

https://www.epa.gov/saferchoice/spray-polyurethane-foam-spf-insulation-and-how-use-it-more-safely

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Spray foam generally has an insulation value of R-5+ per inch (depending on type), and also forms an air infiltration and vapor barrier.  Of course making a house so tight and energy efficient requires considerations regarding indoor air quality and make-up air for fuel fired appliances (and clothes dryers, kitchen, and bathroom exhaust fans) in the design and construction.  Economizers that pre-heat or pre-cool incoming replacement air using exhaust air are generally limited to commercial applications. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

When I worked for the City of Atlanta (January to September of 2014)(I was never so glad to leave such a politically f**ked-up place) I inspected a Photo-Voltaic array addition on the roof of a senior housing community.  They used net metering, so there was no need for storage batteries.  Much simpler and safer IMHO.  Basically all I had to look at was bonding and grounding of the array, inverters, and the electrical panels.  The Tesla Powerwall system is an attractive alternative to lead-acid batteries for off-grid applications.  Again, not making any specific product recommendations.

 

https://www.tesla.com/powerwall

http://www.usoffgrid.com/?gclid=CNSY_pqMvc8CFYpZhgodiCUIQA

Link to comment
Share on other sites

As a Commercial Building Inspector, I will say the general public has no idea what kind of crap is packed into the space between the roof deck and the nice smooth acoustic tile ceiling they see in schools, mental hospitals, veteran's hospitals, etc...(I work mainly on state government projects as a 3rd party inspector).

 

--International Code Council Master Code Professional

South Carolina G-1 Building Official

Edited by fahrquad
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

Loading...
×
×
  • Create New...