Although Sylvia makes several good points on our energy debate in her conclusion (June 28), her points, a)Convince the public that they cannot continue to use coal, b) Show them how much it costs to avoid nuclear power, seem to miss the fact we have an abundance of natural gas to burn.

Other arguments tendered are high on feel good alternatives and short on engineering solutions. Regardless of the power source its engineering that will save the day and on this score we must wade in to get the necessary experience in what ever technology remains as the world struggles to reduce greenhouse.

In this less than perfect world any generating system has its own problems. I ask contributors in this debate to put themselves out in the field for a bit.

Earlier this year a nephew retired from another season of tower rigging across the country that included work on isolated wind farms. A friend also works for Vestas in manufacturing nacelle units (near our old house) that weigh sixty tons or more. Somebody has to erect them all.

During the late sixties some of us fought the extension of hydro schemes along our beloved wild rivers. We had engineering advice back then on many alternatives like reversing hydro storage on good days and believe it, a submersed cable to the interstate grids for peak versus base load stability on both sides of the strait. Later I walked peaks and ridges for pleasure with a project engineer who had the task of convincing governments to hide some of the vast scheme’s overland transmission lines further west.

As competition policy developed, states sold their enterprises. I recall the battle of a lone engineer struggling to maintain his transmission control system when another arm of our federal government retrieved his microwave link frequencies as we did with the mines on the far side of town. The premier had broken his generating monopoly into many pieces. They weren’t talking to him, us or each other and none had a technician to boot.

What’s different today?

Most Australian states have gas.

Taz

This document from the ABS

http://www.abs.gov.au/Ausstats/abs@.nsf/0/0C2AA58A90E887B3CA256E60007BAB57?Open

gives the total electricity generation in 2001-2 as 216,316 GWh, which is about 778 * 10^15 Joules, or 778 Peta Joules (PJ).

This document

http://www.abs.gov.au/Ausstats/abs@.nsf/0/706f445c586e288cca256b35007b4f30?OpenDocument

gives the known natural gas reserves for Australia as 26,000 PJ, or enough to provide Australia's total electricity supply for about 20 years, assuming 60% conversion efficiency (which represents state of the art technology).

Burning natural gas produces about half the CO2 that coal does per unit of energy. For every addition MW of capacity required, 1MW of existing coal capacity would have to be retired, and 2MW of gas powered capacity built.

Natural gas costs more per unit of energy than does coal even before the effects of retiring existing capacity are considered.

While it's true that the natural gas would not be consumed intially at a rate that will use it all in 20 odd years, the need to use 2MW worth for each addition MW of capacity means that consumption of NG would ramp up quite quickly.

There may be more gas out there, but we don't know that.

It seems to me that switching to natural gas is neither cheap, nor anything like a long term solution.

Sylvia.

Although I have never been one for stats, it’s all too academic; one of Sylvia’s links gives a map showing those vast gas reserves actually spreading through all states. But being a practical man I know something about the difficulty in converting those reserves into another form of resource.

My father got wildly excited years ago watching a rig offshore working in the shallows with binoculars. He knew when they hit gas in the Yolla field only fifty kilometres from our place. It was a long time before any of that gas came ashore. Meantime a workmate on the other side was collared for a big job, either Gidgealpa or the far away Andes. He did exquisite free hand welding on industrial pipelines. Whata choice! Google confirms it was in 1963.

Then we were converting major industry west of Melbourne from brown coal burning to oil and cleaning up a bit of smog into the bargain. Within a decade we switched much of it to gas. A that time combustion efficiencies were my bread and butter. Where there is a will there is a way.

For anyone interested in stats, I have long been curious about the quantity of energy going up in smoke every bushfire season. We have a renewable right under our noses and it is wide spread across the continent like our ancient gas reserves.

After twelve years working in the pulp and paper industry on both sides of Bass Strait I developed a soft spot for cellulose and its many uses including fuel. A times I worked with specialist teams, physicists and engineers doing research on organics in combustion.

With the right conditions we can burn almost anything but this line of thinking is only valid if as Sylvia says our gas reserves are truly inadequate.

Caustic liquor recovery was one such project and at one stage when the pilot reactor had grown up I was asked to return and help finish the controls around the largest air compressor installed in the Southern hemisphere. That was our oxygen supply for the big reactor.

In analysing the future of combustion here we must not dismiss the opportunities for better greenhouse outcomes by converting fuels from solids, to liquids or gas in the combustion process. Unfortunately a big bushfire does it so well.

On this score I recently obtained a wad of papers from Barney Foran (CSIRO – dare I suggest this lot of research is pensioned off too?). I suggested elsewhere our dreaded blue gum was an ideal target species for reconsidering crops as fuel. E. globulus now grows almost anywhere in the world as a weed.

It’s been quite a while since we played with orange peel and matches.

Taz, agree about biomass not sure about gas. The pipeline from PNG seems to confirm Australia's lack of long term gas reserves. Also the tap can be turned off by hostile forces holding us to ransom. I've often thought about the huge calorific value of tree crops which don't take resources away from food production. In Germany a woodchip based biomass-to-liquids plant will produce enough diesel to replace more than 10% of imported fuel. Here of course we chop down 300 year old trees and mash them into paper feedstock. Even with a B-T-L industry we'd have to go back to pushbikes or partly battery powered cars. The charge for those batteries could come from a grid connecting nuclear plants, windfarms, woodfired thermal, hydro, solar rooftops and so on.

before discussing the nuclear option, Australians should think about using energy as economically as water!

Why is this not the case? Because the government gives no guidelines to enforce it like in Europe.

In the housing sector there is a huge potential to save energy. With better insulation and double glassing, the standard "brick / chopstick" houses energy consumption for heating in winter and cooling in summer could be reduced by 70%.

Become reasonable and skip the SUV to bring the kids to school. A small economic car does the same for half the costs and 1/3rd of petrol. But it would not support Australia's car manufacturers, because Holden and Ford do not produce economic cars here.

Nothing is done in the industry either. Just to mention an example: I do not know one laser cutting business which would use the waste energy of a 6kW laser instead of blowing the 54kW with huge chillers outside. It would be easy to produce all hot water for free with a simple heat exchanger. Why not get refunds for that as for solar hot water systems?

We are just at the beginning of saving energy
The Europeans are 20 years ahead.

Chris