On January 23, Beijing time, as reports on climate change have escalated, it has become increasingly important to find an environmentally friendly way to generate and store energy. Considering that wind turbines and solar energy are not stable, people obviously need to diversify energy storage.
The Scottish team of scientists recently proposed the use of compressed air in a layer of porous rock deep in the seabed to create a battery. The proposal uses renewable energy to compress and store the air, opening the "cork" when needed, and letting the escaping air drive the turbine to regenerate electricity. Limited by extreme pressure, the air will stay in place and will not spread out on its own.
The team of researchers announced the details of this project called "Porous Media Compressed Air Energy Storage" (PM-CAES) in the journal Nature Energy this week. This is a combination of technologies that sounds simple, but it can seriously affect a country ’s energy production and ease the trend of pushing the global climate to extremes.
Advantages of compressed air
At present, the plan is only based on the theoretical level, and the thesis only carries out numerical calculations on the feasibility of this concept.
The researchers used sandstone deep in the North Sea to conduct a special study on how the PM-CAES system operates in the UK. They looked at existing geological records to simulate the terrain, and assumed that the air "well" would be physically close to the energy they would store-such as offshore wind turbines.
According to researchers, this is indeed feasible. The research results show that PM-CAES is a potentially feasible large-scale inter-seasonal power storage technology, which is critical for power systems with more than 80% of the generating capacity provided by renewable energy sources. A special study conducted in the UK also found that the potential storage capacity is approximately 160% (77-96 TWh) of the UK ’s electricity consumption in January and February 2017, and the energy conversion efficiency is 54%-59%. Therefore, the system can effectively meet the power demand of the entire United Kingdom in the cold winter for two months. It should be known that the power demand at this time is already 25% higher than that in the summer. In addition, because the infrastructure required for PM-CAES is mainly underwater rocks, and a very small ground plant is used to inject compressed air to extract electricity, the system has little impact on the environment and limited land or water resources. Regions will also benefit from it.
Solution requirements
However, there are still certain difficulties in implementing the PM-CAES system. To achieve this level of efficiency, the system will require approximately 7,000 new "wells." This is not a small number. As the researchers pointed out, after more than 40 years of oil drilling in the North Sea, only about 11,000 oil wells were generated. However, any change in a country ’s electricity production will require significant investment.
Although this is difficult, it is not impractical. In fact, the basic idea of ​​storing air deep underground to transform into future electricity has become a reality in Germany and the United States. Both countries have compressed air energy storage plants that use old salt mines to store compressed air. Therefore, this is a proven technology.
Human beings today need to take seriously the effects of curbing global warming and reducing the emissions of basic electricity demand, which is obviously a method worth considering. The researchers also pointed out that it is possible to select specific locations in the rocks of the North Sea to conduct more research, from pumped storage to traditional batteries, and there is no technology that can play such a large role in scale and efficiency like PM-CAES.
Basically, this is just a question of whether the willingness to demand is strong enough. If lucky, these earth scientists find a solution before making the environment worse. (Compilation / liangbi)
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