The communication came in the form of a filled up feedback form
from my erstwhile website. It was written in very poor English, which
was all right as the sender was not from an English speaking country,
but the tone was nasty and its insinuations, simply preposterous; that I
had stolen his technology!!
I had never heard of this person, his technology or even seen the
website, which he highlighted in his note. I replied back in the best
Russian that I could muster( as I don't know Ukrainian) , that Fuel
Emulsification wasn’t exactly rocket science, and I needn’t copy
anything from him and wished him luck. He was apparently not satisfied
and in his updated website goaded about how the Americans stole his
technology, the Indians (that’s me) pinched it from the Americans and
the Chinese just copied from the Indians. At least we were not at the
bottom of the list!!
Last month it was I, who was sending emails to several companies
offering Fuel Emulsions related services and technologies, even to
former employees of the now defunct ones. But instead of issuing
threats, I was pleading for references about their clients, specifically
power stations so that I could highlight them at a forthcoming
technical presentation with a government company. I didn’t receive a
single reply and I suspect it was not due to secrecy but because they
had no clients to talk about. As a result I couldn’t provide any
examples except Santa Rita in Philippines (now on natural gas), the
Planta Arizona unit in Guatemala and an obscure power station in
Albania. Anyway the presentation was doomed from the start, as the
obnoxious “
His Engineer-ness”
who headed their team ignored or shot-down everything I said and we
would have still been treated like dirt had we brought them all the
proof on earth or teleported them to Vlore ( that's the Albanian
Station's name).
It just all bottles down to the sad fact, that ever since Venezuela
stopped shipping Orimulsion, usage of Emulsified Fuels worldwide,
especially HFO has been negligible to the point of being non-existing.
Probably the same scenario is with emulsified Diesel as we stopped
hearing about Purinox & Aquazole for a decade now.
During a recent Skype conversation with
Bill Howe,
the former CEO of Quadrise, the man who got both Wartisila and Maersk,
not only to conduct trials but also approve their MSAR II Fuel Emulsion,
I asked him same question I made to myself a thousand times before “Do
you feel Fuel Emulsions have a future?
Bill, who has now moved over to the world of LNG, replied slowly and
introspectively, “I don’t know.” Bill probably meant things exactly as
he said, but I only heard a "NO" at the end! Later he also mentioned
that to the best of his knowledge Maersk has not given up on MSAR II and
it was now just the question of working out the how’s and where’s.
Well, a "sigh " of relief!!
Also dwelling on the future of Fuel Emulsions, the “Pitbull of LNG -
Rudolf Huber” who had himself shortly dabbled with emulsions, in his article “
LNG or emulsion fuels – what’s it gonna be?” made a few extremely valid observations. One, that there is “
a solid kernel of science behind Emulsion Fuels,”
but also that it would always remain a niche segment fuel. He also
remarked that any breakthrough announced in the world of Fuel Emulsions
should be taken with a generous pinch of salt and that the technology is
notoriously difficult to implement in the real world. Rudolf has since
returned to his LNG world of gaseous bliss and on my part I can’t help
agreeing with everything that he wrote, especially the pinch of salt
part.
India's former President and the country’s favorite science icon
Late Dr. A.P.J Abdul Kalam
enthusiastically spoke about the advantages of fuel emulsions in
several of his speeches till he realized that the person who introduced
him to the subject had gone so completely overboard with his tall
unsubstantiated claims, that he consequently refused to have anything
to do with this field.
After all, when someone spouts absolute drivel like,
“.. the
MOLECULAR ENGINEERED EMULSIFICATION by the patented ________'s
EXCITATION PROCESS and the SYNTHESIZER makes HYDROPHILIC ADHESIONS due
to changed VAN DER WALLS forces due to COLD PLASMA CATALYSIS
facilitating mixing of several blends easy ensuring stability of the
fuel for a longer time,” you can't blame people for regarding this technology as Snake Oil.
Nonetheless, to understand what makes Fuel Emulsions so special and
why they are still relevant in today’s world, one has to first
understand what its all about, as going by patents filed worldwide, the
first attempts in blending fuel and water go back to the 1930s.
Thereafter like a Phoenix, the technology kept fading away and
resurrecting itself every decade especially when petroleum prices hit
the roof.
When industrial fuels like Heavy Fuel Oil (HFO) or Refinery residues
are emulsified, the process inserts microscopic water droplets into the
oil phase or vise versa. During combustion, these water droplets
explode into steam in a continuous series of micro-explosions in a
process called Secondary Atomization, ripping apart the oil droplets
into a nano-sized mist that burn-out completely releasing slightly more
thermal energy and far lesser pollutants like particulate matter, NOx
and CO.
Well, that was the good part, but as Rudolf said, in the real world
things are far more complicated and I would say the correct word is
“ugly.”
First, there is the mountainous effort of surmounting the prejudices
related to mixing oil and water. Secondly, in order to avail the
promised fuel savings of HFO Emulsions, it is crucial to readjust the
Burners for least excess amount of air, in fact far lower levels than
with stock fuel. Which is easier said than done, at least in the Indian
SME sector, where we have come across Boilers running with 30% and
Furnaces having over 150% excess air. Furthermore, the people manning
them are usually poorly educated if at all, who mostly learned their
skills on the job and have uncompromising egos and convictions as how
things are to be done and adjusted. Let also not forget that virtually
none of these plants have a fuel flow meter, and it is always the person
handling the burner and the dipstick who has the last word about fuel
consumption. So in the best of cases the fuel economy remains unchanged
but usually the complaint is that it goes steeply downhill. I shall
leave out the part about
fuel adulteration and pay-offs as I had written about it in an earlier post.
In the case of HFO engines used in ships and for captive power
generation Emulsified Fuels could play a far-reaching positive role in
providing better economy, reducing maintenance and emissions, but here
too there are numerous obstacles to overcome. Predictably most of the
owners don’t want to experiment with new fuels without the
manufacturer’s consent, who on their part despite claiming in brochures
that their engines are emulsion-ready, rarely address any queries on
this subject. And even when a trial is agreed upon, there are still
plenty of other unforeseen technical issues like for example, how to
bypass the moisture transducer of modern Centrifugal Separators such as
Alfa Laval’s S – Models, where it acts like an electronic gatekeeper to
stop any moisture containing fuel from reaching the engines.
Lastly, with the current low oil prices, there is hardly any
incentive for most bulk fuel consumers to walk the extra mile for
adopting a new technology and work procedures that would at best provide
them with a 5% improvement in fuel economy, that too one as
controversial as mixing Oil and Water.
Unless!! Unless they are in a fix and with no other viable solution
in sight, and the only industry in such a quagmire that I can think of
today, is India’s Power Sector. With over 8000MW of generating capacity
either standing idle or working intermittently, these are Gas Turbine
based combined cycle plants that had been built atop promises of cheap
and copious soon-to-be-available domestic Natural Gas. However, the
forecast soon turned out to be a gas bubble by itself as both the
private and government Gas companies failed to deliver. Meanwhile
running these plants on imported Gas or Naphtha is just to expensive
for economical power generation.
So the only way to get these Power Stations up and running would entail one of the following ways:
- The government starts giving the power companies’ hefty subsidies on
imported gas price, which is what they are lobbying for but what would
cost heavily to the public exchequer.
- The power stations set up Syn-gas plants to make gas from coal or
coke, which is not likely considering that most are not even able to
service their bank loans.
- Some of these Gas Turbines can be made to switch over to HFO
Emulsions, which is not such a far-fetched or improbable idea
considering that most legacy and multi-fuel turbines such as GE’s B
& E class, Siemens' SGT 500 series or Ansaldo’s AE94.2 &
AE64.3A+ models can easily burn residual fuels. Some of them actually
use steam injection to reduce NOx and for flame augmentation, others use
water injection to cool and condense the charge.
Adapting Gas turbines to fire Emulsified HFO would of course entail
its own share of challenges, but nothing extremely difficult or
prohibitively expensive as the technology exists, is mature and has
proved itself several times over.
On the benefit front, the Power
Stations would be running on the cheapest liquid fuel available,
cheaper than Naptha, cheaper than Natural Gas and being Emulsified it
would negate most of the problems of Sooting and Fouling associated with
using HFO in Gas Turbines. And unlike the elusive Natural Gas, Indian
refineries produce over 15 million MT of HFO per year and the cournty
consumes only a 3rd of it, the rest is sold overseas at a discount.
Ravi Deka is an energy management consultant and one of the pioneers in introducing Fuel Emulsification concepts in the country.
www.rade.co.in
www.creatnettechnology.com
