Biomethane not viable for widespread use in UK home heating, report finds
OK.
Gas derived from farm waste will never be an alternative to the widespread adoption of heat pumps, research shows, despite the claims of fossil fuel lobbyists.
And that’s the real claim here. Biomethane will never heat everyone so instead everyone must have electric fired heat pumps.
Because planners are never, ever, going to allow a mix and match according to circumstance and taste now, are they? Why, that would be a market and we know what planners think of those.
“… the widespread adoption of heat pumps …”
Will never happen.They can’t even bribe (most) people to take them. All we have to do is keep saying no and the planners can get stuffed.
I wonder what a suitable bribe would be for a person living in a house that has been converted to multiple small flats. Especially ones with no garden so the noisy heat pump would need to be attached to the wall. Ones where an extra layer of insulation would be needed to allow for the lower working temperature of the radiators even though the room sizing has no margin to allow for insulation.
In some cases it’s conceivable that even without a thermal store due to the lack of space the required work would make the flat permanently uninhabitable so the “bribe” needed would have to start at the current market value of the house.
Yes, there are a lot of properties where they’re completely infeasible. But I doubt the author of this report know much physics.
They are “Concept People” …..
They don’t need to account for physics , or chemistry, or anything esle in the Real World™.
Because the Concept is sound, and fits the current Narrative.
Even if the Real World™ doesn’t work the way they want , it should, because of fairy farts or something.
Don’t forget a hot water storage tank and immersion heater would also be needed, since heat pumps cannot provide on-demand hot water and cannot heat stored water to 60C which regulations stipulate.
And if you had a condensing boiler installed they’ll have removed the hot water tank. More expense even if you still have the space to put one back.
If you think the cunts in charge care two tits about whether or not you have on demand hot water I fear you’ve been living in some sort of Japanese soldier unaware the war has ended bubble.
How can people support Farage?
Farage said his hero is Enoch Powell.
And then he said anyone who criticises Farage is inciting violence.
Well Farage called Obama a loathsome individual.
While Richard Tice compared Starmer to King Jong Un.
I made the mistake of looking up Tamsyn Lonsdale Smith who wrote the report. Not so much ‘butter wouldn’t melt’ as ‘butter would freeze into a housebrick’.
You can’t argue against fanatics like this. Facts are irrelevant.
One presumes a degree in poetry appreciation.
She has a masters in social anthropology and one in environmental policy. So, about as much practical use as poetry appreciation but with the total absence of joy.
I can imagine she gets on very well with chimps. She has the face for it.
And a Business Class seat on the ‘B’ Ark.
She’ll probably deny that when she gets out of the bath.
So she completely ignores the most important music ever to come out of the Twin Cities, namely that made by Prince and his prodigies. Perhaps it’s because those bands were always mixed, and almost always included female musicians? It rather goes against the narrative, doesn’t it?
Fuck me. The first things coming off are your balls.
From the look of her insta she likes to travel and consume nice (unnecessary) food and drink.
https://www.instagram.com/tamsynels/?hl=en
Ve vill make you use the most expensive, inefficient way to heat you home. Ve, being important people, vill make you pay to heat our homes with deadly gas.
Ha, ha, ha,ha…
Marvellous. Nearly 20% of our gas needs from rubbish and poo!
Only a joyless zealot would see this as a problem.
Heat pumps seem to work for well-insulated new builds (which hopefully have adequate ventilation too) but I every one I’ve seen has been paired with a big fuck off log burner for winter.
I often hear “They work in Norwegian winters”, which disregards the fact that Norway has mostly dry cold, whereas we get wet cold, that means the cooling elements in an ASHP freeze up and must be defrosted regularly.(quite spectacular as it emits a big cloud of steam). And also disregards the log burner.
Biomethane (i.e. anaerobic digestion to make methane from waste) can’t compete on price against natural gas- it has to be subsidised. Where there is a waste problem to be solved, it is a good technical solution but the plants are small & widely distributed around the country. Collecting & purifying the gas to put into the gas grid is a problem. There are also long term problems running anaerobic digestion plants, due to the build up of small concentrations of inorganic compounds that are not purged from the system (“but it’s only a small baby, sir!”). The solution is to burn the gas on site to produce electricity & export that to the grid to recover some benefit from running the plant, although it’s never enough to run profitably. So, our expert in Vogon poetry is sort of correct, except that domestic heat pumps are useless too (having built a number of industrial heat pump plants I’m well aware of their shortcomings).
The ‘domestic gas’ argument is a straw man anyway. The most efficient way to use biomethane is, as you say, for generation. This was a policy in Germany ( dunno if it still is ) where local based utilities in the country would buy small turbines and feed into the grid. There is a company in Austria that specialises in these mini plants.
I thought that it was a really good idea. I have not kept up with it, so I do not know if it is still going on.
Is it possible to liquify and bottle this gas for domestic use ?
It’s bog standard methane, regardless of origin, so yes.
Does take energy to liquify it, though…. Same as liquifying anything that’s a gas at room temperature.
Not impossible, actually relatively easy, to engineer a plant in such a way the liguifiers can run on the electricity generated from part of the output.
You could even feed back the “waste” heat extracted during liquefaction into the process.
You’d have to have a pretty decent output, so a serious amount of reactors, to get anything like commercial quantities of LNG out of it.
Seems to me that it’d be more ….practical… to just store it onsite and use it to fire up one or more gas generators , also onsite, to feed into the grid when needed.
*Maybe* sell the LNG locally as a sideline if you run out of storage.
But it probbly wouldn’t make (much of) a profit
You’d always treat it as a Very Efficient ( so relatively cheap ) waste disposal system with added perks.
If you do it right…. Which you can’t trust any form of Government to do, because efficiency means they’re losing their perks…..
Thanks Grikath
Learned something today from you and Charles.
These are the turbine guys in Austria. A pal used to work with them and they are just down the road from a cousin.
https://www.jenbacher.com/en/gas-engines
My understanding is that Bio Methane has quite a high CO2 content, and cannot directly replace what is presently flowing through our gas grid. My bill includes a correction factor (when converting from Cubic Feet to KWHrs) to account for the actual calorific value. It would have to change if a higher proportion of Bio Methane was used. The performance of appliances using such mixtures would also be affected.
yes, that’s true, and shows how *badly* and inefficient the stuff is produced….
It’s incredibly easy to liquify CO2, you don’t even need cryogenic temperatures to separate it out from the gas mixture. 50 bar at 15 degrees centigrade will do it..
Well within the range of what you can accomplish with a watercooled system…
And you can use the CO2(l) as feed for the reactors ( the bioreaction runs off CO2…..it’s CO2 into CH4, after all…) or bleed it off by adiabatic expansion in the cooling stages to get the methane to liquify ( which *does* take cryogenic temperatures at any reasonable pressure..)
Of course, the Greens do not like an efficient solution to this kind of plant… At all….Neither would the NIMBY’s..
Because the plant would look like a chemical factory. All the way…
Ideally, you’d have a sizeable greenhouse complex right next to it, Because Reasons.
And ultimately… would still “insert” the same amount of CO2 into the atmosphere in general as normal decomposition would.
( you’re just getting paid twice/thrice while doing it, with minimal energy input..)
So it would look like the things they Hate, while doing the things they Hate, while at the same time, if designed right, would at least *approximate* their Idea of “Circular Production”.
So they Hate it…. with a passion… And will block any attempt at even trialling it.
Which (unlike most others) wouldn’t need gas burning “CO2 generators” to encourage plant growth!
And thanks for the in-depth explanation.
Since you seem to be an expert, perhaps you an explains something to me. How do you extract atmospheric heat at temperatures close to zero & high humidity? The external heat exchanger has to be below zero, so there must be ice build up. Ice is an excellent insulator so will stop heat transfer.
All the blurb about air source heat pumps wax lyrical about Canada & Scandinavia. But they have winters below zero with zero humidity. The default for an English winter is close to zero & 100% humidity. Why the roads don’t dry off for weeks at a time.
I’m no expert but I think the claim is that every now and then heat will be diverted to melting the ice so it drains away. This will, I suppose, be both practical and entirely cost-free. Ho Yuss.
Engineering is really easy if you ignore the Physic and Economics.
Well the idea is that you bypass the compressor and heat is generated inside the gas loop by sloshing the gas around, and this melts a tiny portion of the ice around the boundary layer and the rest of the ice falls off. It’s quite a mature concept because it’s how ice makers work.
Whether heat pumps are actually designed with an understanding of this or not, I couldn’t say, but they always look pretty huge, which suggests an evaporator design that’s not “cram in literally as much surface area into as small a space as physically possible”.
As dearieme says, in domestic heat pumps icing is avoided by using some high temp heat to ensure the inlet air is above freezing point. The larger problem is that heat pump systems like to run at a steady rate. If you try to increase heat load the temperature of that heat at maximum duty will fall. At my last job (in Carlisle in Winter) the offices were heated by a heat pump system. Arriving at 7:45 am the offices were warm, by 9:30 you needed to put your coat on. They work in Scandinavia because they have to run 24h/d in Winter, demand in the UK is much more variable…
When the cold-side ices up, the airflow stops removing heat and it cools a lot quickly. This activates a thermal switch which triggers a defrost cycle: hot gas from the compressor is diverted to heat the cold-side until the ice is melted, then normal operation resumes.
Thus the heat pump spends some of its time pumping heat into your room from outside, and some of its time using your expensive electricity to heat the outside neighbourhood.
In typical Brit winter, of chill damp days, the defrost consumption far outweighs the effciency gain of the heat pump (which is far below that claimed, since the temperature difference is greater than the rigged “performance” figures in the brochure) and you are better off using a fan heater.
I have considerable experience with outbuilding dehumidifiers which are basically heat pumps in a box. If the weather is right, they can generate kilograms of solid ice around the cold heat-exchanger. This also causes mechanical fractures and freon loss. Ooops. Another eco-loon own goal.
>there must be ice build up
Note that the enthalpy of fusion for water is nearly seventy times its specific heat capacity, so there is a lot of heat to be had in freezing water, remelting a small proportion of it, and letting the rest of the ice blow off or fall away. Say you have to melt fifty percent of your ice to get it to fall off, that’s still a surplus of energy equivalent to cooling that water from 35°C to zero. Allow a further 50% margin for inefficiency, it’s still going to be as if you’re pumping from 18°C atmosphere.
So where’s the falling off ice & water actually going to? Typical cold winter’s UK day, you chuck a handful of ice cubes on the ground & they’ll still be there 4 hours later, even if the air’s above freezing. It’s that enthalpy thing the other way round. It takes a lot of heat energy to melt ice.. You’re going to have a glacier building up under the unit. What do you do? Go out & chip it away every few hours?
Although I’m not convinced the “ice falling off’ scenario reflects reality. As soon as there any ice build up on the exchanger the heat exchange stops dead. Because ice is a good insulator. Leave it running cold & there’s no heating. Cut in the defrosting mode & there isn’t enough ice to fall off. It melts & some drips off. Go back to heating mode, you’re pretty well back where you started. But from an engineering point of view this is a system killer. You don’t want any system “hunting”. Valves & switches constantly opening & closing. It all wears out very quickly. Maybe that accounts for the reported high failure rate of heat pump systems
We have one of those locally. The old part of the waste tip was covered with an impermeable membrane with soil on top. It’s now a low hillside with grazing sheep and a lot of pipes. The generator can’t be very big as it only connects to the local 11kV feed.
I propose we refer to the people pushing Heat Pumps as heat pimps.
People arguing for the use of bio-gas are – by definition – not “fossil fuel lobbyists,” sweetheart. Show me the fossils, and I’ll change my mind.
I’ve never come across a Tamsyn (or Tamsin) who wasn’t furiously well-bred and very attractive. This bird is a first in terms of the second element. In the old days she’d have been married off to some dimwit vicar. Now – just as with vicars – the women do a lot of the religious preaching. Time to nail some words to a door.
I’ve never come across a Tamsyn (or Tamsin) at all. Maybe I don’t move in the right circles. Or would that be the wrong circles?