Why Not?

[fahrquad]

I have been observing a lot more long-leaf pine reforestation's than loblolly pine in harvested areas.  Particularly in the coastal plains and mid-lands.  See link for reason.

 

https://www.treefarmsystem.org/-standard-3

[fahrquad]

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.

 

I would add that the loss of power transmission due to electrical resistance is considerable over distance. All transmission lines are aluminum which has a higher resistance than copper.  Gold has a lower resistance than copper, and Silver has the lowest electrical resistance of all metals.  Obviously price is a big consideration in the selection of materials.  You can just select a larger conductor to carry the same amount of current (see chapter 310 of the NEC). 

Edited October 3, 2016 by fahrquad