May be this and the closure of the blast furnaces at Port Talbot should be a wake up call to those of us who have coal fired models to stock up with fuel ? Our boilers are designed for coal and although gas can be used with some modifications or possibly oil at a pinch neither has the smell of coal, hot oil or steam ! That we may be able to get some coal from other sources is fine but good proper steam coal may soon disappear.

I hope the man from Signal Fuels will be at the Midland Show.   Noel.

Some claim that biomass (wood pellets) are eco-friendly but the energy consumed in chopping down trees, transporting to site, processing into pellets is substantial. Then you transport by train to a dock, load a ship and cross the Atlantic, tranship to another train and transport to Drax. The energy consumption to get from a Canadian tree to a Drax wood pellet is huge. no way can this be eco-friendly, green or whatever.

John

This type of electricity generation was first developed back in the late 1950’s at a pilot plant near Ffestiniog and it was the lower storage reservoir that flooded the original track bed of the Ffestiniog railway. This led to the construction of a much larger version at Dinorwic in North Wales.

This was at a time when we had mainly coal fired power generation and these couldn’t be shut down at night so it was a useful way of using up surplus power.

Andy

http://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk/index.php

Grid watch shows 1% 0.34GW from coal at 3.25pm.

I guess it takes a while to run a power station down.

regards Martin

The Chinese have recently built a new line, the Haoji Railway, to transport 200 million tons (yes, 200 million!) of coal per year from Inner Mongolia to Jiangxi Province at a cost of 27 billion USD. The line is 1,600km long, has a design speed of 75m.p.h. and was completed within five years.

The Haoji Railway viaduct, at 8Km in length it is just a bit longer than the Colne Valley!

Clearly, the Chinese are not going to abandon coal anytime soon and maybe they could give the country that gave railways to the world a hint or two about how to build a 118mile long line from Euston to Curzon Street which is three times over budget, taking over 10 years to build and hasn’t even got a station design for the London terminus yet.

I saw a video the other day on Facebook, but can’t remember the original source, but it seems to relate to this product.
OK it will never power a steelworks furnace, but might be part of a wider solution.

Bill

Also the last day I believe for Britain’s last steel making blast furnace.   Port Talbot is shutting down.

Unfortunately, in the UK today coal isn’t a cost-effective way of generating electricity, making steel in the UK, or supporting other industries like Heavy Chemicals.  Since there’s no local coal left in the UK to speak of, any industry that relies on coal has to import it.  Mostly comes from Brazil and the USA.

Shouldn’t be a surprise.   The change started in 1984, when the government spotted that Britain’s depleted coal-fields were on the way out.  Since then, British industry has changed enormously, and there’s more to come.  Gas and Oil are also finite natural resources, and they too are depleting…

Dave

“The change started in 1984, when the government spotted that Britain’s depleted coal-fields were on the way out.”

I rather think the ‘change’ began a lot earlier than 1984, which was the year of the miner’s strike. The British government was well aware of the decline in the demand for coal and, even under the National Coal Board, pits were closing throughout the post-war years. Peak coal production in Britain occurred in or around 1913 and had been declining ever since. This decline was initiated when the navy under ‘Jackie’ Fisher as First Sea Lord and Winston Churchill as First Lord of the Admiralty began to move the fleet over to oil. In short, the Anglo-Persian Oil Company which was prospecting for oil in what today is Iran, refused to supply the government with the fuel at a price it wanted to pay so the company was effectively nationalised by the purchase of a controlling number of shares and eventually became known as British Petroleum. The Clean Air Act in the 1950’s, the move away from steam traction on the railways in the 1960’s and the contraction of the steel industry in the 1970’s also contributed to a fall in demand for coal. Obviously, a more detailed history of the coal industry is not possible here.

Actually, Britain’s got about 300 years worth of coal in the ground at peak (1970s-’80 rates). It’s just that the mines that were producing the active reserves are now all shut and, mostly, flooded.

Ratcliffe had a good life and Drax is trundling on. Drax could burn coal, but the mines that fed it are all shut, so it survives on clever greenwashing. The real shame is that we take 50 years to permit, plan and make a nuclear power station these days.

I’m all for wind, solar and nuclear because they all have the advantage that, whatever the capital cost, the fuel cost is effectively zero. Compare that with cost of 20,000 tonnes per day of wood or 15,000 tonnes of coal to drax (36,000 tonnes before some of the units were decommissioned) over 50 years, that’s quite significant.

On 30 September 2024 at 13:42 Andrew Crow Said:

P.s. the wind doesn’t stop blowing at night either so why not use it.

Or a solar array + inverter.