No surprises... Environment Agency Fracking Pie

[skyhuck]

Yes that is mental and unfortunate, and there will be many cases where the greedy are turning to renewables to increase their wealth but this doesn't make green technologies intrinsically bad. Better that the spruce were cleared for a wind farm than a shale gas drilling site.

It would help to site the turbines in more favourable locations if people didn't throw a pathetic hissy fit if they think they might have to be within sight of one!

 

The problem is you need both, turbines have not replaced any of the existing power production, because of their unreliability (the wind does not always blow) we still need all our traditional methods of generating.

 

At the moment (and for the foreseeable future) nuclear is the only sensible option. But the green lobby don't like those either:001_rolleyes: they want to have their cake and eat it, as is their general stance

[SteveA]

I think we need to be as energy efficient as possible before resorting to generating unescesary power..... then we probably wouldn't need nuclear, etc.

[openspaceman]

At another wind farm locally they mulched about 300 acres with a mulch head on a 360. 12 seconds a tree, one after the other..... mental when you think about it.

 

They did the same around here cutting to waste 60s schedule D plantings of pine on heathland restoration. I think it really shows how inappropriate government subsidies can be.

[openspaceman]

Looks like just the jobby. Good find Mike!

That's my evening reading sorted:thumbup:

 

They've done very well since they turned up on various forums in 2008 asking about how to do it. Their crowd sourcing model and open sourcing a lot of the designs and still growing a business is fantastic.

[the village idiot]

I think that all the stuff that mankind has done to the earth is not good, bad even in some things, but to say that we have any control over this planet is just too much. The earth was here for billions of years before us heating up and cooling down as it felt like it and it will continue doing so until the sun gobbles it up. In the grand scheme of things we are insignificant.

 

I would agree about being insignificant in the grand scheme of things. The problem is that we are hugely significant in the here and now. The sun will gobble us up but not for quite a while, and in the meantime I would argue that we have a moral responsibility not to trash the joint for our fellow and future Earth travellers.

[openspaceman]

What a great idea! Do you know of any domestic scale units in production?

 

Also, what are the 'other issues' in applying virgin wood biochar to agricultural soils?

 

No but many of the TLUD designs will fit into an existing device, like a pellet stove, it's the batch loading that's a bit of a drawback plus in UK it's quite hard to maintain a supply of 10%mc chunkwood and as the mc goes up the char yield dwindles.

 

Both here and in Canada we successfully demonstrated converting conventional woodchip stokers to produce a high char ash and delivering heat into the system and this is the route I would choose. As I have mentioned before, given the total heat energy being the same, there is no great advantage in burning wood at between 1200-1600C and then heating a building to 21C when the higher temperature heat can do a little work first. The issue normally is that extra complication adds capital expense and everything to do with burning wood is much more capital expensive than burning gas. The problem is not having the skill to market the biochar.

 

We made biochar for many experimental plots, including using seaweed at East Malling research station, and results were inconclusive. It seems to benefit much poorer soils than we have here where structure has been lost and there is little SOM. EA were worried about its retention in the soil as small particles may be abraded off and carried into the water system, they mentioned worries that fish may be affected, they cited that sharp sand lost from building sites had been shown to graze fish gills.

 

To the poster that thinks the collective actions of 7 billion humans going about their business of exploiting the resources available to them don't make a noticeable impact I suggest you think again as you journey to work and look around you.

 

How many people succumbed to skin cancer as a result of the hole in the ozone layer expanding?

 

Also consider the plateau of stable temperature we have developed our societies in these past 4000 years are most unusual, maybe anthropogenic as agricultural lands were cleared of high forest, and were always unlikely to last.

[Chopper Edoff]

It's all the wrong way round, demand is the problem but no one makes profits by selling less.

 

"Wind farms, while necessary, are a classic example of what environmentalists call an "end-of-the-pipe solution". Instead of tackling the problem - our massive demand for energy - at source, they provide less damaging means of accommodating it. Or part of it. Wind farms by replacing energy generation from power stations burning fossil fuel, will reduce carbon dioxide emission by 178,000 tonnes a year. This is impressive, until you discover that a single jumbo jet, flying from London to Miami and back every day, releases the climate-change equivalent of 520,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide a year. One daily connection between Britain and Florida costs three giant wind farms.

 

Alternative technology permits us to imagine that we can build our way out of trouble. By responding to one form of overdevelopment with another, we can, we believe, continue to expand our total energy demands without destroying the planetary systems required to sustain human life. This might, for a while, be true. But it would soon require the use of the entire land surface of the UK.

 

The government envisages a rise in British aircraft passengers from 180 million to 476 million over the next 25 years. That means a contribution to global warming that is equivalent to the carbon savings of 1,094 giant wind farms.

 

In other words, there is no sustainable way of meeting current projections for energy demand. The only strategy in any way compatible with environmentalism is one led by a vast reduction in total use. What is acceptable to the market, and therefore to the government, is an enhanced set of opportunities for capital, in the form of new kinds of energy generation. What is not acceptable is a reduced set of opportunities for capital, in the form of massively curtailed total energy production. It is not their fault, but however clearly the green groups articulate their priorities, what the government hears is "more wind farms", rather than "fewer flights".

 

Economists have still not learnt to subtract."

 

I love all this stuff and as I've said earlier, it's too late too change. There is just too much vested interest, money, apathy, inertia that this thing is gonna carry on until it implodes on itself.

 

As far as I am aware, the only tech that returns slightly more energy over its lifetime than is used in its implementation is solar pv, wind is a huge neagtive Energy Returned On Energy Invested (EROEI), nuclear is just a massive joke.

[openspaceman]

To throw in another grenade to this lively thread.

Bio char whilst I realise it's burnt in a controlled way to produce it, surely this happens in a small way when forests are decimated and burnt to clear land. These deforested area soon go poor in soil quality.

 

Char from forest fires is a natural part of the soil but most of the wood has burned to ash and the char is only a thin layer on wood that has not completely burned. Producing biochar potentially increases the char yield to 25% of the dry matter mass for sequestration. Only 15% of this is truly recalcitrant but even the higher tars that form the remainder have a fairly long life in the soil as microbes devour them.

[the village idiot]

The problem is you need both, turbines have not replaced any of the existing power production, because of their unreliability (the wind does not always blow) we still need all our traditional methods of generating.

 

At the moment (and for the foreseeable future) nuclear is the only sensible option. But the green lobby don't like those either:001_rolleyes: they want to have their cake and eat it, as is their general stance

 

Surely it's anti green lobby that want to have their cake and eat it? The whole ethos of the Green movement is to eat less cake.

 

Nuclear is by no means a sensible option. I agree we will almost certainly need to continue to utilise the current nuclear infrastructure to some degree in the coming decades while we hopefully make a transition to renewables and a less power hungry population. I can see no valid justification for fracking.

[SteveA]

Surely it's anti green lobby that want to have their cake and eat it? The whole ethos of the Green movement is to eat less cake.

 

Nuclear is by no means a sensible option. I agree we will almost certainly need to continue to utilise the current nuclear infrastructure to some degree in the coming decades while we hopefully make a transition to renewables and a less power hungry population. I can see no valid justification for fracking.

 

Makes complete sense to me.