Alternate energy

In the 1960s, the U.K. Gas industry underwent a wholesale change as manufactured town gas was replaced by natural gas from the North Sea and elsewhere for heating homes and businesses.

This necessitated a nationwide conversion programme in many respects -

- a national transmission system to transport the methane from import terminals around the county was constructed - while local transmission systems were infilled within local distribution networks

- gasworks were decommissioned or converted to national transmission system off takes and or gasholder stations

- every home and business was visited by the gas board to either replace their appliances or convert them with new burners.

Town gas was dirty, smelly, complicated to make and could be dangerous to the user due to its high carbon monoxide content. (You put your head in the oven and turn the gas on then, you die. Now, you have an upset stomach from the odourant in the methane). However it was home sourced - from increasingly modern works (several large ones had been built in the late 1950s) powered by coal from British pits. Nice bit of security of supply there (although as we're in alternative history territory we could frack the coal bed methane too...)

Is there any way in an ATL Britain (and maybe other countries?) could remain reliant on manufactured gas? Maybe like Hong Kong we could retain a few plants and have a town gas/methane mix?

I know this is niche but would be interested in your thoughts...
 
No natural gas discovered in the North Sea. Ultimately, it would require a geological ASB for there not to be any natural gas reservoirs for Town Gas to remain viable.
 
No natural gas discovered in the North Sea. Ultimately, it would require a geological ASB for there not to be any natural gas reservoirs for Town Gas to remain viable.
More than that - plenty of places in continental Europe who don't have natural gas reserves who still use bought in natural gas rather than town gas. The only way I can maybe think of making it work is if the UK goes for a monstrously big nuclear power programme and they start injecting synthetic gas into the grid to absorb surplus power. Essentially you're using hydrogen generated from the nuclear electricity to enrich the town gas to be pure methane.
 

Delta Force

Banned
This article from 2007 discusses a new breakthrough in coal gassification that promises to produce natural gas for $5 to $6 per million BTUs, well below the then market price of $7.50 to $8.50 per million BTUs. The issue is that natural gas prices in the United States have stayed largely below $5 per million BTU since 2009.

That article also points out the difficulty of scaling operations up. Dakota Gassification consumes 6,570,000 tons of coal per year and produces 62 billion cubic feet (1.757 billion cubic meters) of natural gas per day. That's a lot of coal production, slightly less than 0.1% of total world coal consumption per plant the size of Dakota Gassification, and yet it produces only around 0.05% of total world natural gas consumption.

Since the United Kingdom is being used as an example, it could operate two plants the size of Dakota Gassification with its current coal production (from here) and would be able to use them to replace around 5% of its natural gas demand (from here).

Coal gassification could be an interesting technology for countries that would otherwise have to import large quantities of petroleum or natural gas for heat and power generation. Prices for natural gas imported into Europe have been closer to $5 to $6 per million BTUs (well above that until this year in fact), and it's easier to diversify coal supply than natural gas supply because natural gas imports require pipelines or very expensive and dangerous liquefied natural gas import/export terminals.
 
More than that - plenty of places in continental Europe who don't have natural gas reserves who still use bought in natural gas rather than town gas. The only way I can maybe think of making it work is if the UK goes for a monstrously big nuclear power programme and they start injecting synthetic gas into the grid to absorb surplus power. Essentially you're using hydrogen generated from the nuclear electricity to enrich the town gas to be pure methane.

I don't quite follow? How are you using the surplus electricity to generate gas?

In OTL at the moment lots of work being done on using the gas distribution network and local transmission system as a potential renewable energy 'battery'.
 
I don't quite follow? How are you using the surplus electricity to generate gas?

In OTL at the moment lots of work being done on using the gas distribution network and local transmission system as a potential renewable energy 'battery'.
Checking the chemistry it probably wouldn't work actually - town gas is about 50% hydrogen, 30% methane and 20% CO2 with a small amount of CO. The thought was to use hydrogen derived from the electricity to hydrogenate the CO2 and increase the calorific value, but it looks like they already had enough hydrogen in the mix to do that anyway had the chemistry allowed a simple way of doing it.
http://www.audi.com/corporate/en/co...esponsibility/product/audi-e-gas-project.html
 

GarethC

Donor
1979 Scottish referendum ends up with a resounding YES vote. Scotland is perceived as being on track to leave the UK, taking North Sea gas with it, despite the actual referendum legislation mandating that control of electricity supply will remain with Westminster. Expecting that the SNP will push for full independence and may get it, Thatcher does not "dash for gas" but instead doubles down on coal out of fear of future punitive tariffs from Edinburgh.

There is no miners' strike. Thatcher is actually moderately well-received in working-class mining communities in Yorkshire, Nottinghamshire, and South Wales, whose continuing high employment, education outcomes, and earning prospects lead the country apart from the south-east.

However, the issue remains that domestic gas supplies have to come from somewhere, and with only those modest requirements to fill, a national distribution network from Milford Haven or wherever is costed out as an unnecessary luxury, so local gassification plants, or commercial recovery from biodigesters, or something to do with wood and methanol IIRC probably all see the light of day because the scale is small enough to just try some cool things out.

Over the next 30 years, the viability of domestic coal will continue to fall, of course - there has been a lot of mining of the easy stuff already. Gas-fired plants may creep in at ports in the first instance - Aberdeen most obviously - and as green pressure increases if Scotland does not leave, then a shift to a new generation of construction post-1990 is likely. The additional infrastructure costs may keep nuclear, or big renewables like a Severn Barrage on the table.
 
Checking the chemistry it probably wouldn't work actually - town gas is about 50% hydrogen, 30% methane and 20% CO2 with a small amount of CO. The thought was to use hydrogen derived from the electricity to hydrogenate the CO2 and increase the calorific value, but it looks like they already had enough hydrogen in the mix to do that anyway had the chemistry allowed a simple way of doing it.
http://www.audi.com/corporate/en/co...esponsibility/product/audi-e-gas-project.html
I think your composition figures are a bit off, they appear to me to be typical of digester gas (or biogas) produced by anaerobic decay rather than coal gas produced by coking.
Coal gases typically had very little carbon dioxide, usually ~1% (the gasification was done [deliberately] in an oxygen poor atmosphere] and perhaps 7-10% carbon monoxide (hence it's toxicity) with about 30-35% methane and 45-50% hydrogen as the main constituents. Other gases would include around 4-8% other hydrocarbons such as ethene (ethylene) and ethyne (acetylene), some hydrogen sulphide (<1%), nitrogen (3-5%) and water vapour (<1%).
Though this is dependent on the source and process used.
 
Could be - I'm not a chemist (particularly not at 6am) and I agree that they do look a bit odd, that was just what google threw up. Even with your numbers however the point holds - adding hydrogen to enrich the mixture leaves you with a very explosive gas, and can't be absorbed by hydrogenating the CO to CH4.
 
Could be - I'm not a chemist (particularly not at 6am) and I agree that they do look a bit odd, that was just what google threw up. Even with your numbers however the point holds - adding hydrogen to enrich the mixture leaves you with a very explosive gas, and can't be absorbed by hydrogenating the CO to CH4.
And a mix that's likely to cause even more problems with hydrogen leakage, given the smaller size of the molecules.
There is the Bergius Process (wiki), which is a technique for producing hydrocarbons by hydrogenation of coal (it played a major part in the WW2 German synthetic fuel industry). IIRR (and it's been a quarter century since my industrial chemistry lectures) the output can be 'tuned' by manipulation of the feedstock, pressure, temperature and catalysts. Given a requirement, a source of hydrogen (cheap nuclear/hydro for electrolysis perhaps) and lots of coal this might be a runner, possibly the gas is a byproduct from producing longer-chain hydrocarbons for fuels?
 
Given a requirement, a source of hydrogen (cheap nuclear/hydro for electrolysis perhaps) and lots of coal this might be a runner
Given that, iOTL, the cheapest way to get hydrogen is to strip it off natural gas, have fun getting hydrogen cheap enough to make MAKING natural gas economic.
 
Given that, iOTL, the cheapest way to get hydrogen is to strip it off natural gas, have fun getting hydrogen cheap enough to make MAKING natural gas economic.
Exactly. If you've got plentiful methane and a need for heavier hydrocarbons you don't need to mess around with coal, thee are better techniques.
Maybe for a situation where coal and nuclear/hydro/aero electricity are plentiful and there is a demand for liquid hydrocarbon. But even there I suspect a switch to alcohol fuels and using the coal to generate electricity would be more efficient.

Curiously my GURPS Traveller campaign featured such a world; it was basically Space!Wales inspired by the old TV series Ivor the Engine complete with a sentient steam loco (nuclear powered), a slightly mad ex-Scout with suspicious amount of lanthanum and gold, small draconic aliens and a host of Welsh stereotypes...
Maybe it's time to re-visit.
 
There's another possible POD.

IIRC, back in the Sixties, 'Imperial College', London, ran a project on improving coal mining. They proposed 'tele-operation', with most of the equipment run by remote control from the safety and comfort of surface offices. The mine shafts & galleries would be 'inerted', like the tanks of oil-tankers. Any maintenance that could NOT be done by tele-operated 'robots' would be done in air-conditioned 'space suits', much like North Sea rigs' saturation divers...

Upside, miners no longer had to get 'down & dirty', tediously, inefficiently travelling on 'man-riding' belts to the hazardous 'face'. They could work steady, safe shifts at the comfortable 'control centre' on the surface. They could burrow the down-sloping seams beneath the North Sea without concern for the temperature, humidity, weeping faults and half-hour commute...

Down-side, early development work soon revealed that, in those distant days before video-games, the best tele-operators were nimble-fingered young women.

As you may imagine, this latter finding did NOT play well with the macho Miner's Union, who flexed their political influence and got the proposal killed dead, dead, dead.

This was so cruelly short-sighted, as all these tele-operators would have been 'Unionised', the men-folk still got to wrangle dangerous machinery, their skills and tech could have been rolled out across the planet and beyond, literally as far as the Moon.

{ Mars would need a manned mission due to the variable, but much longer delay... }

Had coal-mining up-tech'd, a lot of the nuclear stuff would have been shunned, though *fusion* research would surely have continued. 'Pressurised fluidised bed' combustion would clean up power generation, the North Sea gas would have been seen as more of an 'industrial' feed-stock than a 'national' domestic fuel, and fuel supplies were assured, along with global-scale income from licensing fees...

FWIW, 'smokeless' solid fuel would still have cleaned up those ghastly, ghastly smogs, while the reliable electricity generation would mean we had electric heating with storage heaters rather than gas central heating...

Another butterfly is that I can't see Arthur Scargill calling an all-out miners' strike when the majority of NUM members were highly proficient and justifiably proud ladies...
 

Delta Force

Banned
There's another possible POD.

IIRC, back in the Sixties, 'Imperial College', London, ran a project on improving coal mining. They proposed 'tele-operation', with most of the equipment run by remote control from the safety and comfort of surface offices. The mine shafts & galleries would be 'inerted', like the tanks of oil-tankers. Any maintenance that could NOT be done by tele-operated 'robots' would be done in air-conditioned 'space suits', much like North Sea rigs' saturation divers...

Upside, miners no longer had to get 'down & dirty', tediously, inefficiently travelling on 'man-riding' belts to the hazardous 'face'. They could work steady, safe shifts at the comfortable 'control centre' on the surface. They could burrow the down-sloping seams beneath the North Sea without concern for the temperature, humidity, weeping faults and half-hour commute...

Down-side, early development work soon revealed that, in those distant days before video-games, the best tele-operators were nimble-fingered young women.

As you may imagine, this latter finding did NOT play well with the macho Miner's Union, who flexed their political influence and got the proposal killed dead, dead, dead.

This was so cruelly short-sighted, as all these tele-operators would have been 'Unionised', the men-folk still got to wrangle dangerous machinery, their skills and tech could have been rolled out across the planet and beyond, literally as far as the Moon.

{ Mars would need a manned mission due to the variable, but much longer delay... }

Had coal-mining up-tech'd, a lot of the nuclear stuff would have been shunned, though *fusion* research would surely have continued. 'Pressurised fluidised bed' combustion would clean up power generation, the North Sea gas would have been seen as more of an 'industrial' feed-stock than a 'national' domestic fuel, and fuel supplies were assured, along with global-scale income from licensing fees...

FWIW, 'smokeless' solid fuel would still have cleaned up those ghastly, ghastly smogs, while the reliable electricity generation would mean we had electric heating with storage heaters rather than gas central heating...

Another butterfly is that I can't see Arthur Scargill calling an all-out miners' strike when the majority of NUM members were highly proficient and justifiably proud ladies...

The United Kingdom was probably a leader in remote control technologies in the 1960s due to its nuclear program, but this seems more expensive than the alternatives. Japan did undersea mining in the area around a coal rich island but operations became uneconomical in the 1970s, so it's unclear how long something using such sophisticated technologies could remain economical, if at all. How could it compete with simple open pit mining in coal rich parts of the United States, Canada, Australia, and South Africa?
 
Top