German Scientists Declare Coal Bed Methane a "Renewable Energy Source."

[NNadir]

One of the big jokes about the dumb fundie German nuclear phase out, engineered by the Russian gas company executives Gerhard Schroeder and Joschka Fischer, is that it was a "bait and switch" program extraordinaire.

There was all kinds of rhetoric from dumb fundie anti-nukes about how Germany didn't "need" nuclear power because the useless and failed so called "renewable energy" industry was so great.

Eight years later, Germany produced between January to July 2009 (YTD figures for July) 33,538 GWh of so called "renewable energy," wind, solar, geothermal and trash burning combined, 14,680 GWh of hydroelectric power, 73,573 GWh of "phasing out" nuclear power, and 205,056 GWh of dangerous fossil fuel power.

http://www.iea.org/stats/surveys/mes.pdf">IEA data on German Electrical Production, page 14.

This makes nuclear energy, post Gas Executive "nuclear phase out" announcements aside (made when the gas company executives were nominally heading the German government and not Russian gas pipeline companies) the largest source of climate change gas free energy in Germany still in spite of massive German dumb fundie anti-nuclear ignorance.

Germany has no permanent repository for dangerous fossil fuel waste, has no plans to built one, no plans to site one, and no plans to design one. The waste dump for all of Germany's dangerous fossil fuel waste is earth's atmosphere.

This problem is obviously a failure not of technology but of language. Obviously the secret of improving the performance of the German renewables industry is to declare dangerous coal gas, "renewable."

German science has risen to the task.

Recently a very stupid dumb fundie anti-nuke posted a reference to a stupid paper on this website - he posts it over and over and over and over and over again as if it were the only paper in the scientific literature - claiming that um, renewable energy was going to save us all, and he could prove it by citing the same damn paper again and again and again and again. The reference reported by the very stupid dumb fundie anti-nuke was Energy Environ. Sci., 2009, 2, 148 - 173. Of course, if one thinks critically, one realizes that not everything published in the literature is true.

I'll let people judge for themselves whether this paper from the scientific literature is accurate:

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6V7P-4CX01DR-2&_user=10&_coverDate=12%2F31%2F2004&_alid=1093175428&_rdoc=3&_fmt=high&_orig=search&_cdi=5848&_sort=r&_docanchor=&view=c&_ct=3&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=5e870fd7c1248d557e1f6056b0ebbb8d">Organic GeochemistryVolume 35, Issues 11-12, November-December 2004, Pages 1537-1549.

The title of the article is "Coalbed methane in the Ruhr Basin, Germany: a renewable energy resource?"

Um...um...um...

Here's some excepts:

Total methane emissions from hard coal mines range between 25 and 45 Mt (Boyer et al., 1990; Beck et al., 1993; Clayton et al., 1993; Khalil et al., 1993) on a global scale. Within the last 5 years, more and more countries utilized a part of the coal gases for energy production. The reasons for this trend are an increasing utilization of abandoned mining areas, and a more effective and sustainable utilization in active mining. This utilization comprises all different kinds of coal gases. Coal gases are subdivided into coalbed methane (CBM), coalseam methane (CSM), and coalmine methane (CMM). CBM is coal gas produced from boreholes in unworked coalbearing rocks. CSM is coal gas released in active collieries, whereas CMM escapes or is produced from abandoned mines. The coal gases produced in the Ruhr Basin are CSM and CMM. In the Ruhr Basin, 77 power stations with a total of 70 MW converted CSM and CMM into 650 GWh energy in 2002. About 85 million Euros have been invested in these plants, which consumed 280 · 106 m3 of coal gas in 2002. The annual production and the production characteristics differ considerably between the sites. There are sites with generally rising, falling as well as stable production rates.

By the way, Germany has been doing what it can to help coal bed methane "fields" - abandoned coal mines - form around the world. The South African coal industry for instance, has big plans to fuel all of the new German coal plants.

Here's some happy talk from the Materials and Methods section of the paper:

Water samples were taken at six sites (A–F, see Fig. 1) in April 2003. Site A is a more or less natural water spring in the city of Dortmund which produces water from abandoned mine works since coal mining and water drainage measures ceased (Table 4). Locality B in the city of Essen as well as C and D in Bochum are pumping stations within abandoned mining areas which transport mine waters from depths of several hundred metres to the surface, with hardly any contact to oxygen (air). Samples E and F were received from an active mine near the town of Haltern.

Natural spring water. Can we bottle it in bis phenol A bottles?

And what's this stuff about active coal mines? In a "renewable" paradise? As Donald Fagen once sang in a slightly different context: "It just couldn't be and only a fool would say that..."

What follows is a tortured argument that really the source of the methane found in these mines is biogenic, derived from organisms living in the mines, maybe mine timbers.

So it's OK therefore. It's renewable. Problem solved and the apparent failure of the German renewable energy industry to match the "phased out" nuclear industry, the hydro industry or the dangerous fossil fuel industry is just an illusion.

Sigh...