Solar-thermal energy
Australia’s leading industrial research group, the CSIRO, is announcing a major breakthrough in renewable energy, with the delightfully open ended name “Solar-thermal energy”. I’m not quite clear of the connection to a story I blogged much earlier, but it seems to run on a slightly different principle.
The idea is that mirrors (two hundred of them!) track and focus the sun’s rays onto a giant tower, preferably somwhere in Australia’s outback where it’s hot, sunny and the land is cheap (!). The intense heat produced is then used somehow to combine with water and natural gas to produce a renewable fuel source. CSIRO’s renewable energy page doesn’t really provide a lot more detail, and I don’t know whether this is just poor communication, protecting the new technology, or something more sinister (cue little pinky to side of mouth).
What’s really amazing is that they claim that just a 50km by 50km stretch of land could provide all of Australia’s power needs in 2020. That’s a pretty bold claim, and a lot of electricity, but if the media has published it it must be true (right? :))
Regardless, any positive steps towards a better energy solution is a good thing.
Les Says:
Hello Joel,
you said “somehow combine heat with water and natural gas”
I looked at what your linked page said and it looked like they were talking about using heat to change methane and steam into H2 and CO. this is a standard industrial process. Must be well over 50 years old. It is good that they are learning to use SOLAR heat to do it though! It is a good use of solar heat.
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The Solar Energy Centre will enable research, development and demonstration of a number of process and technologies including:
advanced solar reforming of natural gas to syngas (SolarGas), shifting of the syngas to hydrogen (SolarH2) and separation of hydrogen from CO2 (the pilot scale Post Combustion Capture (PCC) facility will also be used in this demonstration)
membrane reactor hydrogen production and separation from natural gas
solar gas to liquids
======endquote========
what they mean by ‘SYNGAS’ is a mixture of H2 and CO
heat + natural gas + steam = CH4 + H2O -> CO + 3H2
a number of liquid fuels and other organic chemicals can be synthesized from H2 and CO (”solar gas to liquids”)
what they mean by SHIFTING TO HYDROGEN is another reaction
CO + H2O -> CO2 + H2
this is a way of trapping the carbon so that it doesnt get into the atmosphere
you wouldnt want to store CO because it is very toxic and also it still has some unrealized fuel value—-it can burn.
So you trade CO for H2 in the “shift” reaction.
this is something else to do with solar heat besides using it to run steam engines or organic Rankine to make electricity.
It is not a bad idea. Heat can be used to drive industrial chemical reactions which build up the available energy in materials.
It sounds like they have in mind something like an overall
CH4 + 2H2O -> CO2 + 4H2
and then they SEQUESTER the CO2, like pump it back into the ground
and then they pipeline the hydrogen to some urban center where it is used for fuel.
the process uses some CH4 natural gas which is not renewable but at least it MAKES USE of a lot of solar heat energy
and you get more hydrogen fuel energy out than the natural gas fuel energy you put in. the heat actually does something for you.
Here is the rest of the paragraph from the CSIRO link you gave in case anyone is curious
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non-fossil thermochemical routes to solar hydrogen
medium temperature solar array for Solar Organic Rankine Cycle power generation
solar thermolysis of water to produce hydrogen and oxygen
development and demonstration of direct methane splitting
solar spectrum beam splitting for multiple applications
new solar thermal collectors optimised for providing the energy for Post Combustion Capture (PCC).
=====endquote======
I dont say it is the greatest but like you say it is “positive steps” and I wish Bush was not such an @rsehole and that the US was doing more projects like that
Awesome! Thanks for posting all that - I only really skimmed that page, and didn’t really appreciate it, so that’s really good to know.
Yeah, it’s nice to see Australia taking a bit of initiative. On the other hand, Bush was being positive with his recent Address and saying they needed to focus more on renewable sources. Fingers crossed, hey?