Real enviromental thinking and engineering
update 05/10/2025 With COP 30 coming up , it will be interesting to see if the previous failures will get any new redress, and by now it must be pretty obvious what sea level rise is going to cost every country in the long run.
I am often asked why I should promote a combustion form of technology ,well high temperature combustion offers significant waste disposal benefits , as once over 1200oC then every molecule thermally disassociates, giving the resultant products to mostly reform as simple oxides which have little environmental problems, and they could be removed into useful products.
The real bonus of this technology is its efficiency and being able to use wastes as a fuel , and make a useful fuel of CH4 as transport fuel, which has been used in HGVs for over 10yrs and has some benefits over Hydrogen/battery fuel systems.
Exact efficiencies are difficult to give until a large scale example can be built , the H class gas turbine has attained 64% thermal efficiency , that is 64% of the KJ value of the fuel is made into KW electrical energy , which is vast improvement on the 30-40% of most of the combustion technology deployed throughout the world.
I expect sequential oxygen combustion to exceed the H Class gas turbine in thermal efficiency , which for a solid/waste fuel will be world class , but it is also capable of zero emissions , where any CO2 is used in other processes including conversion into CH4 , and reducing emissions by using the CO2 molecule more than once.
These emission effects are considerable in the uk total emissions including NOX and SOX would be reduced by over 50%.
A conservative figure is a thermal efficiency of 75% , the purely gas fired variant attaining a higher efficiency , which means that Bio genesis gases are able to play a much more important role in our energy systems.
So if you operate or live near a waste incinerator , and its running at 30% efficiency and making emissions , its pretty obvious your going to select , a waste incinerator , that makes no emissions and using the same amount of fuel produces perhaps twice as much electricity, which should in theory make electricity cheaper.
In the future, in energy systems, efficiency will count in all aspects , and sequential oxygen combustion can produce the cleanest electricity from wastes , as a system.
Update:-15/10/2024
The new labour government has just celebrated 100days in office , and so far its not very green/eco thinking, very little on materials and definitions , we also have COP 29 coming up and it doesn't look like much is going to change there. The recent Hurricanes Helene and Milton in the USA look to have costs of around $60bn and the question is , if we should be moving faster on removing fossil fuels from the energy systems.
The Sequential Oxygen combustion system which i have designed offers a great leap in electricity generation efficiency , even beating the H class gas turbine . There are a few differing views on what exactly the real eco/green technology future should look like , but the most alarming thing is lack of comparison between technologies . In 2010 i did advocate massive roll out of nuclear fission , but by 2016 i could see that this wasn't such a good solution , as it wastes a lot of materials as well as storing the spent fuel problems.
The wind array and solar pv arrays are ok for some energy demands , but using them for a national energy solution has a number of risks and management problems , and having power stations of constant output has advantages.
I have improved the efficiency of the waste burning plants and am confident they should deliver the most efficient sorted waste burning system yet seen , I still think we are looking at 300-500MW size boilers and USC steam turbine parameters. Other advantages are converting Co2 into fuels and other products that can be made from Methanol ,including lubricants and oils , offering a far more circular recycling system for many products used in human living , which is something wind and solar pv arrays cannot do , which is why i think this is an important technology in Eco/green thinking , its use is greater than just cheaper electricity.
The modalities of the power stations ,offer various interesting possibilities , including making Hydrogen and large scale battery store , which change management of the power stations , dependent upon demands to grids being encountered .
The electrical grids of the future , are a more complex problem , I estimate the uk distribution grid looses 1000mw due to having lower efficiency transformers and cables, all of which have appeared over the last 10-20yrs , however simply replacing old equipment with new equipment is not really the future thinking , the distribution grid for the fully electric home ,is straight forward enough but would require far more electricity generation ,in the cold months , commercial and industrial switches from gas to fully electric are more difficult , as the power flows at the more central parts of distribution are much higher , to enable more power to be sent to the furthest points , the maths is very challenging , but its not just a maths calculation , its getting good cabling , as underneath roads and pavements there are other utilities competing for the space , and you often find cabling compromises , which I don't think is how we should be thinking , if we are to replace cables with vital increased power cables . That's the trouble with the politicians thinking this is just maths and money , you can open a trench in the road and find unexpected things. There are underground works standards , but somehow i think we need how to create priorities and standards for electricity cables.
The fuel standard for the waste burning power stations , does mean wastes will need to be sorted , but I hope that we can develop a system where no wastes go to landfill , current recycling for the uk is around 40% , but even so materials come to an end of life and will need a waste disposal route and high temperature combustion is a good route , and my design i believe can give a zero CO2 direct emissions to atmosphere power station , as i can use the CO2 to either make CH4 or other products
as glimpse of calculations so far 400MW using 64 tonnes/hr of a fuel at 18000kj/kg .
Thanks for reading John Jackson
