The World Economic Forum Talk About Gravitricity
This article on the World Economic Forum is entitled How Gravity Batteries Will Help Us Switch To Renewable Energy.
The article is a must-read and Gravitricity must be very pleased with the contents and placement of the article.
As an investor in Gravitricity, through crowd-funding, I am certainly pleased.
Drax To Pilot More Pioneering New Carbon Capture Technology
The title of this post, is the same as that of this press release from Drax.
This is the first paragraph.
Renewable energy pioneer Drax has partnered with the University of Nottingham and Promethean Particles to trial a pioneering new bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) process at its North Yorkshire power station.
Normally, carbon capture from the flue gas of a power station uses a liquid solvent, which dissolves the carbon dioxide.
However, the process that Drax are trialling, uses porous compounds called metal–organic frameworks (MOFs) to absorb the carbon dioxide.
This page on the Promethean Particles web site described how their carbon-capture works.
Traditional solvent-based carbon capture systems require a significant amount of energy to regenerate the carbon-capturing material. In power generation applications, estimates put this energy penalty at up to 35% of the power station’s output. Metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) capture carbon mainly through physical, not chemical means. This “trapping” process requires lower energy inputs to regenerate the MOFs and can therefore help achieve more energy-efficient carbon capture. By using MOF-based carbon capture, more of the power generated can go where it was intended, lowering the price of energy for consumers and CAPEX for the power generators.
Note.
- It is a physical rather than a chemical process.
- It is more energy efficient than traditional carbon-capture.
This Drax graphic from the press release, shows how this process can be incorporated into a power plant..
Note.
- The trial will last for two months and will be hosted within Drax’s BECCS incubation hub at its North Yorkshire Power Station.
- Metal Organic Frameworks are a unique class of solid sorbents offering lower operational costs and reducing potential environmental impacts.
Work to build BECCS at Drax could get underway as soon as 2024, with the creation of thousands of jobs.
Fifty years ago, I spent several months at ICI looking at the mathematics of different numbers and sizes of vessels of in a proposed chemical plant, to optimise the cost of the plant.
- I suspect a similar analysis could be applied to this process.
- It would surely be very suitable for Drax, whose main power station has four units fuelled by biomass and another fuelled by natural gas.
- Are two columns containing MOF, the optimum number?
- The calculation could involve a lot of permutations and combinations, which I’ve used to advantage for over fifty years.
I will follow this trial with interest.
Conclusion
This is another application of advanced physics and chemistry.
If Promethean Particles ever decide to go the crowdfunding route, I would look seriously at a small investment.
Longer Duration Energy Storage Demonstration Programme, Stream 1 Phase 1: Details Of Successful Projects
The title of this post, is the same as that of this document from the UK Government.
This is the introduction.
Stream 1 aims to accelerate commercialisation of innovative longer duration energy storage projects through to actual demonstrations. During Phase 1, projects will be expected to mobilise their proposed technologies to prepare for potential deployment on the UK energy system.
These are the projects.
Ballylumford Power-to-X
This is the description of this project in Northern Ireland.
B9 Energy Storage will receive £986,082 to mobilise a 20MW membrane free electrolyser green hydrogen project. Using otherwise curtailed wind power, hydrogen produced will be stored in local underground salt caverns for later use as a fuel in transport and electricity sectors, creating a full-cycle hydrogen economy (production, storage, distribution and usage) on site.
Note.
Ballylumford power station is a 600 MW gas-fired power station, that provides half of Northern Ireland’s electricity.
A 20 MW electrolyser will produce just under nine tonnes of hydrogen per day.
This Google Map shows the location of the power station opposite the port of Larne.
Note.
Ballylumford power station is clearly visible to the East of the channel towards the bottom of the map.
Ballylumford is also the Irish end of the HVDC Moyle interconnector from Scotland, which has a capacity of 500 MW.
Ballylumford would appear to have enough power for a large electrolyser.
Salt Beds In Northern Ireland
This document on the British Geological Survey web site is entitled Geological Storage In Northern Ireland.
The document discusses Irelands energy needs and gives a good description of using compressed air energy storage in salt caverns.
Then these two paragraphs describe the salt bed in Northern Ireland compare them to other deposits under Great Britain.
Thick halite deposits, found both onshore in Northern Ireland and immediately offshore in the North Channel, offer potential for salt cavern storage facilities. The salt deposits occur as bedded deposits with minor halokinesis (geological movement of salt) forming salt swells rather than pillows or domes so that the height of any cavern may be restricted by bed thickness. Pure salt beds tend to be thin (approximately 100-250 metres maximum thickness) compared to those used elsewhere and the presence of significant insoluble impurities and minor intrusive dolerite dykes or sills may reduce their suitability.
The Larne and Carrickfergus area of County Antrim is the only part of the whole island where thick salt beds occur. Elsewhere in the UK parts of Cheshire, Lancashire, Teesside, Humberside and Dorset have similar, or thicker, developments of salt beds and gas storage facilities are either in construction, or are already in operation.
It would appear that the thick salt beds in the Larne and Carrickfergus area could be suitable for gas storage.
Ballylumford might actually be on top of the salt beds, as Carrickfergus is a few miles to the South.
On a personal note, I used to work for ICI Mond Division and during that time and immediately afterwards, I met many people, who had been into the salt mines and worked with boreholes extracting the salt and the one thing everybody said about the salt mine, was that water must not get in.
Membrane-Free Electrolysis
I saw this in operation when I worked at ICI Mond. Most of their hydrogen and chlorine was produced using the main Castner-Kellner process at Castner-Kellner works in Runcorn. That is a nasty process that uses a lot of mercury, which got into the air and plant operators’ bodies.
But ICI also had a much smaller plant, where they used simple electrolysers, that had a metal cell, with a concrete top, with the anode and cathode going through the concrete into the brine. I seem to remember that its main purpose was to provide mercury-free hydrogen, chlorine and sodium hydroxide. I can remember seeing workers rebuilding the cells, as was done on a regular basis.
These were membrane free electrolysers and had been running successfully for many years.
Searching the Internet for “membrane free electrolyser” I found a company in Doncaster called CPH2.
The home page on their web site declares
Clean Power Hydrogen are the manufacturers of the unique Membrane-Free Electrolyser
Turning to the About page, this is said.
Being passionate about hydrogen as clean energy for the future, we wanted to find an alternative to PEM electrolysers as these had barriers to adoption. We realised that the cleanest way to produce hydrogen was by membrane-free water electrolysis, and in doing so, it would be a less expensive and more robust technology.
Dr. Nigel Williamson and Joe Scott established CPH2 (Ireland) in 2012 with the ambition to help clean up the environment for our children and future generations. Entering the green technology sector; a high growth and profitable market, they developed a Membrane-Free Electrolyser™ to produce hydrogen faster, more reliably, and more cost-effectively than other electrolysers.
They also have the ambition to be leading developer and manufacturer of green hydrogen technologies and an Irish connection.
My experience says that their technology will work. Especially, with the application of modern materials.
Have the Government backed the Ballylumford Power-to-X project, as they can back two promising technologies with one grant?
GraviSTORE
This is the description of this project.
Gravitricity Limited will receive £912,410.84 to design their multiweight energy store demonstrator project, which will store and discharge energy by lifting and lowering multiple weights in a vertical underground shaft.
Note.
- I like the Gravitricity concept and have invested through crowdfunding.
- The project will be based on a brownfield site in Northern England.
- Gravitricity’s current demonstrator in Edinburgh, which I wrote about in Gravitricity Celebrates Success Of 250kW Energy Storage Demonstrator, only uses a single weight, but this project talks about multiple weights.
According to other sources on the Internet, the demonstrator will have a storage capacity of 4 MWh and will be built on a brownfield site.
Will we see Gravitricity coming to a disused deep coal mine near you?
Long Duration Offshore Storage Bundle
This is the description of this project.
Subsea 7 Limited and FLASC B.V. will receive £471,760.00 to further develop the Long Duration Offshore Storage Bundle which will store energy as a combination of pressurised seawater and compressed air, using an innovative hydro-pneumatic technology.
Note.
- Subsea 7 Limited are a subsea engineering, construction and services company serving the offshore energy industry, domiciled in Luxembourg with headquarters in London.
- According to their web site, FLASC B.V. is a spin-off of the University of Malta, established in The Netherlands in 2019.
On the page on the FLASC web site, which is labelled The Technology, this is said.
FLASC is an energy storage device that can be integrated directly into a floating offshore platform. Energy is stored using a hydro-pneumatic liquid piston, driven by a reversible pump-turbine.
Charging Mode: electricity is used to pump water into a closed chamber containing pre-charged air.
Discharging Mode: the pressurised water is released through a hydraulic turbine to generate electricity.
FLASC leverages existing infrastructure and supply chains, along with the marine environment itself as a natural heatsink, resulting in a safe, reliable and cost-effective solution.
There is also this video.
The news page on the FLASC web site is a comforting read.
My knowledge of modelling vessel systems for chemical plants, tells my brain to like it.
Vanadium Flow Battery Longer Duration Energy Asset Demonstrator
This is the description of this project.
Invinity Energy Systems will receive £708,371 to demonstrate how a 40 MWh Vanadium Flow Battery could deliver long duration storage-enabled power on demand from UK-based solar generation.
Note.
- I wrote about Invinity Energy Systems in UK’s Pivot Power Sees First Battery On Line By 2021.
- Invinity Energy Systems was formed by a merger of RedT and Avalon Battery.
- The project appears to be located at Bathgate in Scotland.
This picture from EdF shows a large vanadian flow battery.
Invinity Energy Systems flow battery at Energy Superhub Oxford
If this project works out, vanadium flow batteries would be a good replacement for lithium-ion batteries.
Cheshire Energy Storage Centre
This is the description of this project.
io consulting will receive £1 million to enable its consortium to develop an electricity storage facility which could use mothballed EDF gas cavities in Cheshire utilising Hydrostor’s Advanced Compressed Air Energy Storage technology
Note.
- This is another project based on salt caverns.
- I wrote about Canadian company; Hydrostor in Gigawatt-Scale Compressed Air: World’s Largest Non-Hydro Energy-Storage Projects Announced.
- Hydrostor have received at least one large order for their system.
I have put Hydrostor on my list of tecnologies that should make it.
Conclusion
This is a well-balanced list of projects.
I would rate success as follows.
- Ballylumford Power-to-X – 60 %
- GraviSTORE – 80 %
- Long Duration Offshore Storage Bundle – 60 %
- Vanadium Flow Battery Longer Duration Energy Asset Demonstrator – 70 %
- Cheshire Energy Storage Centre – 80 %
But then all these projects are a bit of a gamble
EMEC And Gravitricity Pick Up Scottish Green Energy Awards
The title of this post, is the same as this article on renews.biz.
These are the first two paragraphs.
The European Marine Energy Centre (EMEC), energy storage innovator Gravitricity and Crown Estate Scotland were among the winners announced last night at the Scottish Green Energy Awards in Edinburgh.
EMEC won the Champion of Renewables award for its ocean energy test facility, while Gravitricity’s energy storage system, which uses excess electricity to winch weights to charge the system and then releases these when energy is required, was announced as the Best Innovation winner.
I am pleased, as I own a small part of Gravitricity, which I contributed through crowdfunding.
All You Want To Know About Highview Power
This article on Power is entitled Market Prospects Heating Up for Cryogenic Energy Storage.
It talks in detail about the technology, financing and market prospects for Highview Power and their CRYOBattery.
- Their batteries store energy by liquifying air and storing it in large tanks.
- To recover the energy, the air is encouraged to go to a gaseous phase and put through an air turbine.
- Their first commercial system is being built at Carrington near Manchester.
- The Carrington system will have an output of 50 MW and be able to store up to 250 MWh.
- Other systems are under development for Vermont and Spain.
- The systems are built like Leho from readily available components from the oil and gas industry.
One of my regrets in life, is that I missed the crowdfunding for this company!
Read the article as you might find one of Highview Power’s CRYOBatteries coming to a site near you.
Power’s article is the best yet on describing the technology.
Gravitricity Celebrates Success Of 250kW Energy Storage Demonstrator
The title of this post, is the same as that of this article on the Solar Power Portal.
I have already posted about this success in Gravitricity Battery Generates First Power At Edinburgh Site.
But the news story has now been mentioned in several respected publications and web sites.
So this idea, based on traditional Scottish products of heavy weights and girders seems to be getting valuable publicity.
The demonstrator is only small and uses two 25 tonne weights and a fifteen metre tower.
This is only a storage capacity of only 2.04 kWh, but the company is talking of weights totalling up to a massive 12,000 tonnes.
With a fifteen metre tower, that would be 490 kWh.
Note.
- The shafts at Kellingley Colliery in Yorkshire are 800 metres deep.
- The TauTona mine in South Africa is 3.9 kilometres deep
- In this article in The Engineer, Gravitricity talk about weights of up to 12,000 tonnes.
These are typical storage capacities.
- Kellingley – 50 tonnes – 109 kWh
- Kellingley – 12,000 tonnes – 26.15 MWh
- TauTona – 50 tonnes – 531 kWh
- TuaqTona = 12,000 – 127.5 MWh
Accountants before they invest in a company look at the financial figures. As an engineer, I look at the numbers in the science behind their claims.
If the engineering can be made to work, these figures are to say the least; very promising.
They are also beautifully scalable.
If say your application needed a 2 MWh battery and you had a 400 metre shaft available, you can calculate the weight needed. It’s around 1836 tonnes.
The Solar Power Portal article finishes with these two paragraphs.
The company will now look to rollout the technology in a series of full-scale 4-8MW projects, with conversations already underway with mine owners in the UK, Scandinavia, Poland and the Czech Republic, it said. Additionally, in South Africa Gravitricity is working closely with mine operator United Mining Services as part of a programme funded by an Innovate UK Energy Catalyst programme to identify potential schemes.
“A key feature of our full-scale projects will be their long life” added Blair. “Once built, our system can last for over 25 years, with no loss in output or degradation over time. This makes gravity storage cost-effective. And unlike batteries, we have no reliance on rare metals such as cobalt and nickel which are becoming increasingly scarce in the global drive to electrification.”
Note.
- I assume that they are 4-8 MWh projects.
- Charlie Blair is the Managing Director of Gravitricity.
- A weight of 1836 tonnes would give 4 MWh in the 800 metre shaft at Kellingley.
I wouldn’t be surprised that those owning a deep empty hole in the ground will be starting conversations with Gravitricity!
Conclusion
I am not worried, that I bought a few shares in Gravitricity in the crowd-funding last year!
All this good publicity from the BBC, Good News Network, Science, The Engineer, The Times and other media sites won’t harm my investment.
Gravitricity Battery Generates First Power At Edinburgh Site
The title of this post, is the same as that of this article on the BBC.
This is the first paragraph.
A project to create electricity from gravity has generated its first power at a demonstrator site in Edinburgh.
This is only a demo to prove the technology, but all great oaks start as acorns.
I have great hopes for Gravitricity and I should declare an interest, as I bought a few shares in a crowdfunding.
Lithium Project Raises Millions In A Day
The title of this post, is the same as that of this article on Cornish Stuff.
This is the introductory paragraph.
Cornish Lithium raised over £3m yesterday to fund new exploration and today opens up the crowd fund to the community.
It does seem to have been a very successful funding.
This to me is a key paragraph.
The company say they are delighted to note that approximately 15% of the pre-registered investors were from Cornwall.
The Cornishmen and Cornishwomen seem to be backing their local business!
Alternative Funding Seems To Be Doing Well
I watch a couple of crowdfunding sites and they certainly seem to be still attracting funds.
I have recently invested a small sum in Cornish Lithium, as I like both the technology and history of the company.
Their round of crowdfunding is coming to an end, as they have raised £4.5 million against a target of £1.5 million.
It certainly appears that there is money for a good company in these troubled times.
Powered By Footsteps
These lights at Canary Wharf were on BBC yesterday morning.
The company is looking for funding on Crowdcube.
I think that this sort of technology could have its uses. But possibly more when it is integrated into a common unit!
London and other cities have thousands of entry gates for the rail systems. Think how you use these!
You walk up and as you go through the barrier you either enter your ticket in a slot and pick it up again or touch your contactless card on a reader. You may not come to a full stop, but you will check your walk and this will result in you feet pressing a bit harder on the space between the sides of the gate. Thus a pressure pad in every gate would generate a bit of electricity for the station.
Ticket Gates At Homerton
Such an application could be part of a comprehensive energy system for a station, where the warmth from passengers, solar power from the roof and other power sources are collected to make the station less dependent on electricity from the mains. Network Rail have already used energy collection in stations like Blackfriars and the new London Bridge, so footfall collection could be another tool to help.
It could also be used in say a remote unmanned ticket gate on a station, such as where a platform is very long and some passengers need to entry and exit perhaps a hundred metres from the staff.
But although there is a large number of entry gates in the UK and worldwide, I would suspect that the gate manufacturers would develop their own systems.
I wish Pavegen well, but I don’t think I shall be investing.
The Anonymous Widower 