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How do you do industrial heating without natural gas? Last I heard heating with electricity was ridiculously expensive.
by chocolatebunny 8y ago
How do you do industrial heating without natural gas? Last I heard heating with electricity was ridiculously expensive.
- jabl 8y agoHigh temperature nuclear reactors?
- petre 8y agoMore likely process heat from SMRs and other compact nuclear reactors.
- airstrike 8y agoHydro is an option, albeit limited by location
- benj111 8y agoDefine industrial heating? Low grade heat can be got from heat pumps. It can be topped up to a higher temperature with resistive heating. You can also lower demand for heat with heat exchangers, insulation and such. So a chemical process that required 50c would be fairly easy to do. Smelting metals gets harder.
- edejong 8y agoThat's an interesting topic. I wonder if the cooling down of steel in a steel mill can be used to increase the temperature of the smelting pots.
- bigger_cheese 8y agoFor an integrated Steel mill most of the heat comes from chemical energy (i.e exothermic reactions). In the blast furnace this comes from Coke, in BOS/LD Converter alloys such as ferrosilicon or silicon carbide "heat raisers" can be used to increase the temperature. Modern plants have things like cogeneration and recovery turbines to produce electricity from the off gas. Biggest electricity usage tends to be from things like extraction fans and conveyor belt motors.
- jabl 8y agoIf we're going to drastically reduce CO2 emissions, we'll probably have to replace blast furnaces with something like hydrogen direct reduction, which needs boatloads of electricity to produce the hydrogen.
- peterashford 8y agoThere's an aluminium smelter a 100kms or so away from where I live which is using electricity for smelting. It does use a lot of electricity but by being such a large consumer, it gets very large discounts.
- int_19h 8y agoBut for this same reason, we have deliberately built them in places where electricity is cheap, often right next to hydro power plants. I don't think existing factories that are converted could get deals that are quite as good.
- crote 8y agoIndustrial heating is one of the solutions to the problem, because a lot of processes are not that time-critical. Some processes already require electricity, such as arc furnaces. However, as the process cost is dominated by the electricity usage, they are already being run at times when the electricity cost is very low, that is, when there is overcapacity. This makes it easy to absorb overproduction of a grid which is intentionally oversized for peak demand. It's already not unheard of for industries to get paid to consume electricity.
- hairytrog 8y agoDefinitely nuclear. But you need to have a plant size that is right. That is, you shouldn't have grid scale reactors for this, as the power source has to be within a couple of miles of the factory/process location. So the size of the reactor has to be on the order of 10 to 50 mW. And you need a good method for getting the heat there - probably a molten salt intermediate heat transfer system... There are a couple of nuclear companies doing this seriously.