Friday we were on our way to Iowa for the folks’ 45th anniversary and as usual we passed one of those places where there’s a flame shooting up from a chimney; an “eternal flame” if you will. Not for the first time I had to wonder just what’s up with that and why it isn’t being used to generate usable power?
Just guessing, it’s probably an oil refinery which is flaring off volatile gases. As to why it’s not producing energy, well - our energy in this country is very inexpensive. There are lots of logistics as to what situations make some sort of fuel source like that economical to utilize.
It could be similar to this project (scroll down to “Gas Pumps” for the description of waste heat recovery plants). Just one that doesn’t have a recovery system on it (also, I don’t know that the plants in the linked story actually BURN the gas under pressure).
Were you driving past Joliet, IL?
They still have those flamming chimmneys there. Same ones you see at the beginning of the Blues Brothers.
Those flames look impressive, but there’s not actually all that much energy in them. You could maybe run a small boiler off of one, but you’d only salvage a small portion of the energy from the flame, which is in turn only a small portion of the useful value of whatever you’re doing at the bottom of the smokestack.
I’ve worked in gas plants and some of the flames are H2S flares, and they have a pilot light on them to make sure the H2S flame never goes out. It’s not uncommon to burn H2S, here’s an articlethat mentions burning H2S from a waste water treatment plant. And it’s been a while, but I seem to recall the plant operators saying that there wasn’t much heat energy in H2S
Well, that’s what I was wondering. I’d thought there probably wasn’t a lot of energy to be harvested, but I wasn’t sure.
So, basically you could use it to make afternoon tea?
I do H2s sampling at landfills. The larger, enclosed flares they run will keep you from seeing these flames, but many facilities only have smaller, cheaper, unenclosed flares, or have them as backups to their enclosed ones. These can be seen at night from quite a ways off.