Coal

[BlasterBates]

King Coal

[EternalOptimist]

Whats Arthur Scarghill doing these days ? How did his new political party get on ?






tosser

[thunderlizard]

Coal? how mundane. Sothebys' evening sale tonight just took £116m and it only had 77 paintings. Including £400k for a dull Klimt pencil sketch that I wouldn't even hang in the bog.

[BoredBloke]

Yes but that little lot is not going to keep the fires burning for very long is it. You cannot substitute burning expensive art as a means of producing power

[Troll]

I was chatting to an old geezer engineer chappie t'other day about power generation - he reckoned coal was viable as long as it wasn't dug out (as in by miners) in the traditional way.

He reckoned the best way was to leave the stuff in the ground and use super heated steam to turn it into coke & then dig it out.

Also while pondering cladding my house in photovoltaic cells I found that they now have cells that use sunlight to split water molecules into Hydrogen - only seems to be 10% efficient at the moment but if you can use sunlight to produce Hydrogen then collecting & using for car power & electric generation would appear to be a step away!

http://www.hydrogensolar.com/index.html

[TimberWolf]

Also while pondering cladding my house in photovoltaic cells I found that they now have cells that use sunlight to split water molecules into Hydrogen - only seems to be 10% efficient at the moment but if you can use sunlight to produce Hydrogen then collecting & using for car power & electric generation would appear to be a step away!

http://www.hydrogensolar.com/index.html

The biggest problem with hydrogen is storage rather than manufacture. If you’ve a cheap energy source hydrogen can be produced by electrolysis at around 50-70% efficiency. But it then needs some chemical wizardry or cryogenics to get it anywhere close to the energy density of hydrocarbons for use as a fuel.