Fri, Apr 07, 2006 page5

• Eco-friendly Australians turning sunshine into gas

  • THE OBSERVER
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  More signs of the "greening" of Australia have simultaneously appeared on opposite sides of the continent.

  Near Perth, the state capital of Western Australia, a sea of wheat fields and a petroleum refinery do not appear to a casual observer to be the components of an energy breakthrough.

  But they have come together as the country's first wheat-to-ethanol project, accelerating efforts to cut the use of gasoline in Australia by up to half within 20 years by growing bio-fuel substitutes for gasoline on a scale only Brazil, which uses sugar cane rather than grain as the feed stock, has so far achieved.

  And what looks like a dazzling cutting-edge breakthrough has been revealed over on the eastern side of the country at Newcastle north of Sydney.

  There, resembling a huge work of contemporary art, an arrangement of 200 mirrors surround a slender 24m silver tower supporting a metal and glass ring shaped like a basketball hoop minus the net. Not artwork, though, but a source of fuel which turns water and natural gas into a storable "solar gas," which packs 26 percent more energy than liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) and already powers road transport across the world.

  "Think of it as bottled sunshine," said John Wright, director of the Energy Transformed national research group.

  "The old bogey of solar power -- what happens when the clouds roll over, or it's night -- is banished by this. We are turning natural gas into a super efficient gas," he said.

  In fact the Solar Tower now running at Newcastle is sufficiently efficient to generate, in theory, all of Australia's electrical needs from a 50km2 site located in the continent's remorselessly dry and sunny desert zones.

  And it looks deceptively simple. The tower which is the focus of the newly named National Solar Energy Centre scavenges every ray of sunshine by the use of several types of collectors and very complex computerized management systems for which the software proved the major challenge.

  Between the compact layout of near vertical mirrors are a set of trough-like solar energy absorbers which create a parallel path by which the concentrated heat drives a closed cycle of hot high pressure fluid through conventional turbines able to feed power into a normal electricity grid.

  Wright said the essential design is sufficiently compact to install on a variety of scales in industrial estates, large retail malls, and landfill sites, which are a rich source of methane or natural gas.

  "You could for instance, use one of these towers to generate the hydrogen fuel the automotive and trucking industries are looking at to replace gasoline right on the site of a major hydrogen fuel depot -- solving the challenge of transporting it in pressurized, refrigerated tankers or by special pipelines," he said.

  The prototype tower produces more than 500KW of energy and can create industrially useful temperatures of more than 1,000oC at the focus points used to turn natural gas into the hydrogen enriched "solar gas."

  The Energy Transformed group, which is jointly-funded by the state and private energy industry partners, is cooking up a lot more than large scale applications for capturing solar energy. With the government in Canberra backing "clean coal" as a means of keeping Australia's massive reserves of coal competitive with nuclear power, the research group is already involved in a multi-billion dollar programme to capture the carbon dioxide pumped into the atmosphere by coal burning power plants.

  And this despite Australia's enthusiasm for selling its own very large uranium reserves.
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