THE MAGIC ROUNDABOUT
7 November 2007
Hazel Prowse

Report of the President’s Address on cycles of energy by John Loughhead to the Institution of Engineering & Technology, 4 October 2007. He is Executive Director of UK Energy Research Centre, after a career in GEC Labs.

The first slide was of Swindon roundabout; the name from the children’s cartoon, originally French but it was not SO successful in France.

A picture of Earth from space, centred on Moscow, shows the Earth is self—illuminated, proof of a civilisation.

The drivers of climate change are carbon emission, and the well— known graph was shown of carbon dioxide levels over time. Worse, the atmospheric concentration has risen from O.O3% to
0.04% CO2 in atmosphere in one generation. We also saw the photographs of Kilimanjaro for 1993 and 2000, and of the Qori Kalis glacier in Peru for 1978 and 2002.

The CO level today is 386ppm, and rising about 2ppm a year. We need to halve emissions, starting now, to delay a catastrophe until 2050. How?

Here are the gross GigaJoules/tonne for different fuels:
Coal 25. 7
Oil 43.3 (in power stations)
Natural Gas 39.8
Wood domestic 10
Wood industrial 11.9

The volumes required per unit of energy varies tremendously, but are far greater for sun, wind and wave.

Australia is trying underground gasification, extracting coal as ‘syngas’ , a liquid fuel. The next step is to capture and re—inject the carbon.

Just inland of the UK' s ‘power coast’ there are underground geological formations where we might recover fuel from coal deposits in this way, ie, where the ordinary mechanical recovery
of coal is now too costly. There are similar sites to the SW of Manchester.

Does carbon—capture work? There has been an experiment in the North Sea (Sleipner Gas Field) where CO has been stored in 2 sand layers, above and below previous deposits; this has been
tracked form 1997 to 2001, and the CO is still in place! There is thus scope for using North Sea natural gas to get carbon—free power..

Then there are two sorts of fuel cells —
a) proton exchange membrane fuel cell (can only use hydrogen)
b) solid oxide fuel cell

The SOFC takes any fuel, including natural gas, but runs at 6O0—900 degrees. A company in Crawley is developing fuel cells to run at more reasonable temperatures; Ceres is aiming to make
such a cell for domestic gas boilers. There is lots of mechanical engineering in building them and making stacks for a ‘battery’, but the prospects are to get the same output for
30% less fuel.

The Earth receives 3 x 10/23 kJ of energy from the sun, per year. Of this, 6.3 bn people need very little, but need to get at it.

Nuclear fusion, using deuterium and tritium, does not work yet.

Look at organic processes. The world’s population consumes about 20% of the world’s plant life/year, at 2000 Cal/day each (actually kCal) = 100W.

Solar energy = 4kWh/m2/day, and the efficiency of peak storage is about 1%. Hence we need 2.4 kWh/day, or 60m2 per person, which might do for stay—at—home vegetarian allotment holders.

Take urban London, 8.2M people, 40km x 40km
Consuming l6OMWh/year, 55kWh/man/day
Sunlight incidence, 4.8 MWh/day, or 585 kWh/person/day NOW,
ie lOx what is needed.
Could we capture this?

What about windpower? The total UK windpower installation is 1954 MW, generating 4225 GWh i total. To close the gap we woul dneed 10,100 more large turbines Do we have the space?

John Loughhead then outlined the workings of plants - how they capture carbon dioxide, adn how one particular green algae cannot capture sunlight, but dumps excess energy by splitting water to give free hydrogen - a possible efficient way to get hydrogen from water.

The political will to reduce carbon emissions has great implications for the basis of modern life. There is no shortage of energy, but C-free energy is not easy ot access. Instead of lowering western living standards we must use technical possibiliites - better use of fossil fuels, or new ways of explointing the sun.

There wasa no question and answer session.

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