Oil Firing

Explosion risk I suppose. Can you imagine a firebox full of gas exploding? Propane and butane are also fossil fuels. The NYMR method with rapeseed oil would be a better route for the Bluebell.

 

Well it's one thing to call something BS, especially if you don't understand it, but you can't prove it, can you?

 

The issue is that its expensive

BUT based on what I know about balloons no pumping involved - you may need to nitrogen pressurise in winter* so it sounds promising

Balloon burners use liquid propane the pressure to force the fuel into the burners comes from the vapour in the tanks. In cold weather less gas evaporates hence lower pressure so instead you can pressurise the tank with nitrogen.

 

I have never heard of one exploding, either, not even in a crashed LPG-fuelled car, so the concern expressed in an earlier seems a bit alarmist.

 

When using gas on a live steam model it is possible to get an impressive "Whoomph!" explosion if not handled correctly. I would not like to be around if scaled up to full-size!

 

It is. But on a quick skim through the article, the form of analysis looked designed to produce an answer, and to be pitched to a target audience to be able to wield as a proof text. It struck me as alarmist absolutism, and to be making some significant assumptions about how the costs and benefits would fall that are collapsed into a simplistic headline. In particular, I didn't see any suggestion that income earned now might have a positive value to offset against longer run costs - but I recognise that this may be a level of detail too much for a newspaper report; nor did I see any discussion of where the different sources of money might come from.

More generally, it suffers from the "in the long run we're all going to be dead issue", and isn't terribly helpful about policy choices now to deal with short term energy supply and cost challenges.

 

I'd imagine it would

Manoeuvring the scaled-up propane can over the cab and pushing down the valve into the tank would be quite something too... not to mention the 14' long match over the chimney...

I think pilot light system and adequate venting would minimise that particular risk.
The usual concern is pooling around an unknown leak in a storage facility where it can build up. That may actually be the killer - who's going to want to carve up the tender so the gas tank is exposed?

 

The containers are pressurised and the internal pressure is contained by the thick wall of the container, which is generally circular. If you scale up to sufficient fuel to maintain a supply over a period of several hours sufficient to maintain enough steam pressure to move maybe 400 tons throughout that period then you need either multiple cylinders about the same size as currently available; or a very large and difficult to accommodate cylinder to contain all the fuel needed. The large cylinder is difficult to accommodate as it must be circular, but the hoop strength reduces with the increase in diameter so the metal would need to be much thicker. The standard size cylinders are already heavy for the gas they carry; how heavy would a much larger one be? Bear in mind how much gas would be provided by a burner large enough to maintain steam pressure at 200 p.s.i. in, say, an Ivatt Class 2 boiler, hardly the biggest in use. Or do you just carry a supply of standard cylinders and change them regularly and often throughout the day?

 

They are used on fork lift trucks too, if warehousemen can't break them, they've got to be robust...

 

I would have a feeling energy density might be an issue.
Storage of the propane/butane as well. You don't need pressurised tanks for coal or oil firing.

 

Slight difference. In a car or fork lift there is no large volume that's potentially full of unburnt gas.

 

Never mind the financial aspects, the physical effects are far more important. Nepal is a case in point.

 

Anyone who claims that any specific event has been caused by global warming is lying; the proof is insufficient for causality. At most, it would be possible to suggest that global warming has probably caused the glacial retreat that is believed to have caused yesterday's tragedy.

That then leads to a subsequent question - which is what does that mean now? That glacier has retreated, global warming has established. Drilling Rosebank and Jackdaw will, at most, further contribute to an existing trend. The policy choices remain necessary whether expressed in physical or financial form - and history shows that populations do not voluntarily clothe themselves in hair shirts

 

https://www.theguardian.com/environ...omy-north-sea-oil-gas-fields-rosebank-jackdaw

The only reason that it is "economic" for the oil companies is because they take the profits and leave Joe Public to pay for the consequences of their product's pollution.

 

Can we just get back to oil firing in relation to railway locomotives please?
There is a separate thread for Global Warming and Climate Change.