Coal Water Slurry Fuel
A reader asked my opinion of Coal Water Slurry Fuel (CWSF) as an alternative to conventional coal power generation and the greatly reduced or limited emissions.
I responded that I actually don’t know much about it. From a quick read just now, it sounds like a great improvement over the dirtiest forms of coal. The claim is that the presence of water in CWSF reduces harmful emissions into the atmosphere.
I suppose this could facilitate the trapping of heavy metals and certain other noxious byproducts. But it isn’t possible that CWSF results in less CO2 emitted; the power output is the result of burning a hydrocarbon, and the carbon has to go somewhere; it doesn’t just disappear. Obviously, the world will be a better place when we knock off the burning of fossil fuels to produce our energy.
If anyone knows more about this, I’d be delighted to hear it.
Craig,
This is the first I’d heard of it… and I listen pretty closely.
It seems that the major benefit is that it can allow the coal to be filtered, indeed reducing the heavy metal, halide, salts, radioactive isotopes, and soot in the emissions pre-burn.
The biggest advantage that they claim is that it allows the coal to be burned in a high efficiency diesel generator rather than a low efficiency coal boiler. If that is true, it effectively doubles the efficiency of the coal, which would reduce all post-combustion emissions by ~40%.
I’d have to actually see the experimental results of burning coal slurry in a diesel generator before I am convinced it would work (it seems like that would shorten the life of the generator by quite a bit, and it would result in a larger percentage of un-combusted particles… But I don’t actually know this to be so, I’d have to consider it more).
If this article is true, then the extraordinary amount of diesel spare capacity on the grid would allow this to – in one single year – do more for the environment than all advocacy for renewable energy has done in the past 20 years…. (I bet THAT got your attention).
But of course, again, I have my reservations as to how accurate that Wikipedia link might be… It reads like it was written by people promoting new technology, which means it could be vaporware or it could be some poorly conceived idea that has no economic merit (if the coal particles grind the piston to bits in hours, then the efficiency of the diesel engine will drop over the course of hours, and all of the gains might literally be gone in hours, etc…).
Still, it’s probably worth further investigation.. I’m intrigued… But I cannot imagine when I’ll find time to hunt down the info on that.
Sorry I couldn’t help more.
Hello. We are the producer of “Coal Water Slurry Fuel.” What do you want to learn?
Hakan
Please see my email and tell me all about it.