Using mine ventilation air to generate power

[Joe Blake]

http://www.gizmag.com.au/go/8291/

Caution: Logical thinking in progress. A coal mine releases methane, a greenhouse gas which is explosive in certain ratios of air, so the miners dilute the methane with ventilation air to reduce the danger, and expel the methane-laden air. A wasted resource? Sure. So they're now working on burning the methane to generate power.

Took a long time to get there, but congratulations to BHP Billiton.

Joe

[Rob Beckers]

That's a neat application! I bet there's quite a bit of methane coming out of mines, and at the same time a mine is pretty power hungry. While I'm not a great fan of coal mines it'll be a reality we'll have to live with for some time to come. Might as well make it just a little bit greener (if that term applies for coal mines).

-RoB-

[Joe Blake]

Just a few minutes down the road from where I have (nearly the past tense - it's up for sale) 5 acres of land there's the Red Hill waste transfer station which is capped to recover methane and apparently drives a 1 MWatt generator. I hope this is not an uncommon thing, and that there are many local shires etc doing this.

Joe

On edit: In re-reading the article I note Each hour, the installation is treating 0.9% of methane content in 250,000 square meters (2.69 million square feet) of ventilation air. SQUARE metres. Hmm. I wonder how they measure it?

Joe