^Qwerty^

A lot of videos and pictures have appeared on the net over the last few days of Kellingley. The shafts are huge. I guess the site will end up with a methane extraction plant as they are only capping them and not filling them in.

johned

As basil would say BOOM BOOM.

BrownPantsRacing

iTrader: (6)

This was always going to happen sadly. As the government have now announced in the last couple of weeks the final closure date of 2025 for our last remaining coal fired power stations in this country, it was only a matter of time before the supply chain closed up to follow.

This is a massive shame as we still own one of the largest generation stations in europe (Drax Power Station) which is coal fired. Currently it's undecided if this will also shut or be converted in part to biomass or something similar to allow it to run for a few years past the date. From similar projects on other coal fired sites this has never proven successful in the long run either unfortunately.

The problem is that with emissions regulations being posed upon this country by the EU all of the power station owners (majority of which in this country are French) have been forced to close these sites or invest millions of pounds in fluid gas desulphurisation plants to reduce emissions at coal sites. As a result it has been cheaper for these large energy companies to buy power stations to add to their portfolio simply to close so that they can demonstrate an overall drop in emissions over their portfolio by virtue. This has lead to the demise of the UK power industry over the last 15-20 or so years now and subsequently the coal industry.

As a country we should have been investing in new nuclear power stations some 20 years ago so that they start to come online now, but yet again these are difficult decisions to make and no government wants to commit to things like this in their relatively short power period as they can be seen as negative against their image. Strictly speaking nuclear is the only option and way forward in these times as all other renewable sources provide too little output for our needs as an energy hungry society.

We may well experience rolling blackouts in the coming years due to the lack of supply facing us. We will see.

I have worked in this industry for many many years now and seen our customers slowly drop away. For us the UK power sector is nearly non-existant now and certainly not enough to support our company in this country alone. We are working more and more abroad in emerging countries who have investment and planning unlike the UK. Very sad.

^Qwerty^

Drax is already 50% bio mass. It seems chopping down trees in the US and shipping them thousands of miles to the UK is green, whilst burning coal from 7 miles away is not. Of course they plant another tree for each one they chop down but I can't even begin to do the maths on how many acres of land are required to make that a sustainable model. And if two or more power stations start burning trees........

BrownPantsRacing

iTrader: (6)

Completely agree, but in my opinion the long term future of Drax is still in question due to this (temporary) solution. Bio mass is very dangerous as the material is more combustible in its raw form. Coal is crushed to a powder and fired into the boilers normally. Before it's crushed it's relatively stable. However bio mass is more flammable in its raw form.

Tilbury power station converted to bio mass and in a very short time they had a devastating fire that closed them for good.

^Qwerty^

I don't think that's just your opinion, seems to be quite a common one around here. I expect the US will pull the plug on chopping down the trees in the next year or so and then Drax will announce its closure as it can't afford to run if just burning coal due to the taxes. At this point somebody will realise that we should have carried on down the carbon capture route, but it will be too late.

At full load each converted boiler is capable of burning 8,200 tonnes of biomass every day. That's a lot of trees.

The house of cards is going to fall down very hard.

BrownPantsRacing

iTrader: (6)

I don't understand why this isn't a bigger issue in parliament as it's only a matter of time before we have serious power issues in this country.

The majority of our high demand smaller power stations are gas turbine or combined cycle gas turbine, but gas prices are significantly higher than coal prices and this is only for peak demand electricity. Coupled with the fact that with some gas turbine sites having fixed gas purchase prices the raise in natural gas prices means they actually make more money selling their gas supplies on now than they do using it to generate electricity. Daft!

Nuclear is realistically the only way forward. We have just supplied a large system for the new Urenco Tails nuclear fuel re-processing facility currently being built. At least this is a little advance for this country and step in the right direction. Prior to this Sizewell had more nuclear waster than they could possibly process in their remaining years of life. Again, a daft situation to be in.