Sulphur and salt? No problem. Those big furnaces can burn up anything.
Consider me confused?
Salt tends to smuckup boilers, 'cept those designed for high sodium coals aka Montana PRB coals.
Futuremodal:
“And the Orin line is at capacity, else why are the utilities only scheduled to recieve 80% of their PRB coal demand this year?”
Hello. If they are scheduled to carry 20% more then that means there is at least 20% more capacity. The rail line was shut down for days and speed and capacity constrained due to maintenance work for months. That’s why they aren’t going to recieve their coal.
All the mines have different chemical characteristics. How are you going to keep the different coals separated at the unloading point? Also you now have a HUGE traffic congestion problem because instead of being able to load trains at a couple dozen mine heads at the same time, you now have to load the trains at one single termination point. Unless you suggesting that this be done for just one or two mines. That would be an incredible expense to move a minimal problem 100 miles further away. I can’t see any one mine staying in business by making spending hundreds of millions of dollars in initial costs and millions of dollars a year in operating costs on the bet that they could load a few more trains over the course of the year.
Dave H.
I’d think a pipeline of any kind should go to the nearest navigatable place on the Missouri river where it could be shipped the rest of the way east by water. Sending it to rail defeats the economics as pipelines are expensive to build but an order of magnitude more efficient to operate provided there’s sufficient quantitiy.
I also wouldn’t view it as a complete replacement for rail. Another alternative would be to burn more coal near the mines and export electricity. Higher fuel prices should compensate for increased transmission line losses.
If logs in petroleum wont work, how about bowling balls in a Natural gas pipeline??
I’m surprised that the folks at Gunderson haven’t explored the economics of pressing prisoners into logs, and shooting them through pipelines
QUOTE: Originally posted by jeaton
Sulphur and salt? No problem. Those big furnaces can burn up anything.
NO! because then we would get more SOx in the stratosphere and that really isn’t all that great! lol
dehusman - I consider the maintenance problems of the Orin line as endemic of capacity constraints. Even if BNSF has fixed the line by now, they are still projected to only provide 80% of the coal orders for the rest of the year, according to the story.
You could have one centrally located facility processing logs for/from each mine, so that specific blends can be maintained. If the mineheads are located close enough to the log processing facility, then such short transportation shouldn’t be a problem.
Don’t get me wrong on this. I would prefer more rail capacity to slurry or log pipelines. But the reality is the closed access rail system does not allow for rail capacity to be built for future demand, rather it is built incrementally (and reluctantly, if at all) as demand exceeds supply, so there is a constant congestion problem built into the system.
If you are piping the logs a short distance then what good is it? How does it help congestion on a 200 mile line to pipe the coal 100 miles then build an entire duplicate of the congested area there to transfer the coal?
Its just another boondoggle.
If you want more capacity then build more capacity straight up, don’t add layer upon layer of management and moving parts and cost and handling and expect it to be cheaper or more efficient.
Dave H.
The Decker MT. to Superior WI. line is is 1,033 miles long, and that is just a five train per day pipeline.
IIRC the PRB sends out about 55 trains per day.
Is this a Haliburton project. [:D]
Kurt
[quote]
Originally posted by kurtconi
The Decker MT. to Superior WI. line is is 1,033 miles long, and that is just a five train per day pipeline.
IIRC the PRB sends out about 55 trains per day.
It would seem like BNSF could ship coal north out of the PRB,then east.
Making electricity on site would need even more water then coal-slurry-pipe.
Anyhoo - why the railroads just don’t add a few extra cars to the trains? Or “double” trains at the mines, and sperate when they go to their destinations?
Two comments
First, I am somewhat surprised the Mark H’s comments upset someone; he’s just calling it like it is.
Second, on water and eastern Wyoming. While it is true that you can drill deeper, and get water (which is pretty horrible quality), there is still NO WATER (sorry to shout). You can either view water supplies in terms of ‘how much can I pump today’ or in terms of ‘how much can I pump indefinetly’. Only the latter question is relevant. Sure, one can drill more deeper wells and pump them madly – and get lots of water, for a very short time.
However, friends, the only long term water one can count on is what falls from the sky: rain. If you withdraw more water from a basin than falls on the basin in terms of rain, sooner or later you are going to run out of water. And there simply isn’t enough water in that part of the world to run a significant size PBR or coal slurry pipeline; there isn’t enough water to run what is there now, for that matter – groundwater levels are dropping throughout the area, due to what is called over pumping (simply you take more out than comes in).
This simple equation seems to have escaped the notice of a great many people all through the American west, and is coming to bite us. Hard.
Meanwhile, over in Montana, the Governor is talking about a couple of the solutions mentioned in this thread.
QUOTE: Originally posted by TheAntiGates
I’m surprised that the folks at Gunderson haven’t explored the economics of pressing prisoners into logs, and shooting them through pipelines
Why when they have all those Auto-Max cars?
Slurry pipelines in much of the West are not feasible due to the lack of water. As mentioned above, sustainable output from wells and other sources is what matters when it comes to water and a closed loop to return the water to the original source for re-use raises the initial cost and operating cost (both pipes need to be maintained) appreciably.
Building excess capacity in advance of possible demand requires a much better crystal ball than most people have. “If you build it they will come” rarely occurs in real life. Also, the bee in futuremodal’s bonnet does not create excess track capacity, either.
Some comments from an electric utility guy…
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Unless a project is going to make a substantial difference in the amount of avialable coal from the PRB, it will not realistically make a difference. According to the forcasts the PRB production will have to increase something on the order of 50% to keep up with the anticipated demand over the next few years. We need to be talking about how to serve that increased demand.
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Slurry pipelines sound great on paper, but have problems. One that has been mentioned is water. You have to buy the water in order to have it, not matter what you think is or is not in the ground. Reality is that there is NO excess water, and what is there is scarce and poor quality. Wars have started and people killed over water in the west. Water is life. You take my water, you die. It’s that simple. Unless you can convince a LOT of farmers to dry up and blow away you’re not going to find the water.
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If you’re going to build a slurry line, AND if you have the water and financing lined up, it takes at least 5 years to get all of the approvals and start construction. All the while some rabid environmentalist is filing suit on your for disturbing a prarie dog town…
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Local generation is a great idea to by pass the RR’s, as you could build a transmission line(s) and simply burn the coal. This has problems as well. First, have you tried to get approval lately for routing a big transmission line? Power plants also prefer to have water, as it greatly reduces their construction costs and increases the efficiency of the plant. You’d probably have to ship the coal to at least as far as the Missouri before you can have enough water, but THEN you’d have to buy the water rights, and negotiate with 87 Federal agencies, and fight the environmentalists over some little snail that nobody likes anyway…
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The RR’s won’t build more rails until somebody starts to build their OWN RR service into the PRB. You can bet
Mark_I_U,
All you have to do is to look at the DM&E PRB saga to see the challenges for a nearby railroad trying to build tracks into the coal fields. For a new company to try the double track you have suggested would easily be a 20 yr or longer project fraught with difficulties all along the way. The easiest would be for the UP and BNSF to add one or two tracks to the lines they already have in place. Probably the best solution would be for the UP and BNSF to build parallel lines along different routings to sites of future mining activities.
The original Orin Line engineered by the BN in the 1970s was built as the shortest distance between the mine loadouts. It is fraught with steep grades in many locations and operational difficulties marked by racks of spare knuckles at more than one location. One or two new lines engineered to higher standards to reflect coming trains of over 20,000 tons planned in conjunction with the larger mines creating new mine loadouts in addition to the ones they have in order to increase capacity would increase the capacity of the rail lines and provide alternatives when derailments and maintenance disrupts the lines in place now. It will make Orin Jct a very busy place.
Another coal log pipeline disadvantage is the inflexibility of the system. Junctions in slurry and log lines are difficult. Even petroleum lines don’t just throw in a switch to split the line but have to resort in tank farms in order to collect the product from one line and then split it into two or more new routes. The coal logs would require a similar kind of facility to serve more than one generating plant on the delivery end. Since a higher volume line would have the greatest effeciency the destination power plant would have to be built to consume truely massive amounts of coal. One massive plant would need more power lines to be constructed to serve customers than four smaller plants would. Rail service simply allows more flexibility than any coal pipeline ever w
mark_in_utah: a utility guy question-Is there such a thing as a “closed link”? type of power plant that condenses and re-uses the water?
QUOTE: Originally posted by CSSHEGEWISCH
Building excess capacity in advance of possible demand requires a much better crystal ball than most people have. “If you build it they will come” rarely occurs in real life. Also, the bee in futuremodal’s bonnet does not create excess track capacity, either.
Building excess capacity ahead of demand is a concept best borne by the government aka the Interstate Highway System. Much of that system in the West was constructed under the tenet of “better to have it and not need it, then to need it and not have it”. If this country is going to avoid a future crisis in electric energy generation, the government is going to have to deal with the obvious and odious drawbacks of the current rail system with regards to coal fired generation, because that’s where the bottlenecks are occuring.
BTW, “bee in bonnet”? What kind of patsy pastel literature do you read?[:I][:O][][D)][zzz]