Thanks for the link Mrs_Peel....I found this bit particularly...

Thanks for the link Mrs_Peel....I found this bit particularly interesting....



....."Thomas Maschmeyer: So coal, it basically puts a new spin on an old idea. So Rudolf Diesel came up with the idea of running an engine with coal dust and water. However, that coal dust was too mineral rich for the piston to survive, so he switched to peanut oil and the rest is history, as they say. What we are going to showcase, together with the CSIRO and a number of other players during this symposium is that there is now Australian technology that is able to make very clean black coal from Australian brown coal and that coal is then able to be burned with the same efficiency in terms of power generation per CO2 emitted as natural gas, or close to it.

Robyn Williams: How do you get it to become efficient when it's such a complex mixture of all sorts of stuff?

Thomas Maschmeyer: Well, it goes initially through a process called hydrothermal upgrading where we convert it to oil as well as black coal, and that process takes out lots of the nasties, lots of the minerals and the sulphur. And once we've done that we just rely on the diesel engine principles of taking all the gases that evolve during combustion and converting them to motion which then converts to electric energy.

Robyn Williams: And what about what's left over?

Thomas Maschmeyer: Well, the remnants of course areCO2, but that happens every time you burn something fossil fuel, and then we have particles, diesel particles, but these are not a big problem because given that this will be a stationary application they can be captured with known technology.

Robyn Williams: So it could be a major industry, in other words, on a large scale.

Thomas Maschmeyer: Given that we also produce oil as a side product, the value to Australia is in the trillions of dollars...."


Cheers,
Blackpete