China Tests a Supercritical CO2 Generator in Commercial Operation (cleantechnica.com) 44
"China recently placed a supercritical carbon dioxide power generator into commercial operation," writes CleanTechnica, "and the announcement was widely framed as a technological breakthrough."
The system, referred to as Chaotan One, is installed at a steel plant in Guizhou province in mountainous southwest China and is designed to recover industrial waste heat and convert it into electricity. Each unit is reported to be rated at roughly 15 MW, with public statements describing configurations totaling around 30 MW. Claimed efficiency improvements range from 20% to more than 30% higher heat to power conversion compared with conventional steam based waste heat recovery systems. These are big numbers, typical of claims for this type of generator, and they deserve serious attention.
China doing something first, however, has never been a reliable indicator that the thing will prove durable, economic, or widely replicable. China is large enough to try almost everything. It routinely builds first of a kind systems precisely because it can afford to learn by doing, discarding what does not work and scaling what does. This approach is often described inside China as crossing the river by feeling for stones. It produces valuable learning, but it also produces many dead ends. The question raised by the supercritical CO2 deployment is not whether China is capable of building it, but whether the technology is likely to hold up under real operating conditions for long enough to justify broad adoption.
A more skeptical reading is warranted because Western advocates of specific technologies routinely point to China's limited deployments as evidence that their preferred technologies are viable, when the scale of those deployments actually argues the opposite. China has built a single small modular reactor and a single experimental molten salt reactor, not fleets of them, despite having the capital, supply chains, and regulatory capacity to do so if they made economic sense... If small modular reactors or hydrogen transportation actually worked at scale and cost, China would already be building many more of them, and the fact that it is not should be taken seriously rather than pointing to very small numbers of trials compared to China's very large denominators...
What is notably absent from publicly available information is detailed disclosure of materials, operating margins, impurity controls, and maintenance assumptions. This is not unusual for early commercial deployments in China. It does mean that external observers cannot independently assess long term durability claims.
The article notes America's Energy Department funded a carbon dioxide turbine in Texas rated at roughly 10 MW electric that "reached initial power generation in 2024 after several years of construction and commissioning." But for both these efforts, the article warns that "early efficiency claims should be treated as provisional. A system that starts at 15 MW and delivers 13 MW after several years with rising maintenance costs is not a breakthrough. It is an expensive way to recover waste heat compared with mature steam based alternatives that already operate for decades with predictable degradation..."
"If both the Chinese and U.S. installations run for five years without significant reductions in performance and without high maintenance costs, I will be surprised. In that case, it would be worth revisiting this assessment and potentially changing my mind."
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader cusco for sharing the article.
China doing something first, however, has never been a reliable indicator that the thing will prove durable, economic, or widely replicable. China is large enough to try almost everything. It routinely builds first of a kind systems precisely because it can afford to learn by doing, discarding what does not work and scaling what does. This approach is often described inside China as crossing the river by feeling for stones. It produces valuable learning, but it also produces many dead ends. The question raised by the supercritical CO2 deployment is not whether China is capable of building it, but whether the technology is likely to hold up under real operating conditions for long enough to justify broad adoption.
A more skeptical reading is warranted because Western advocates of specific technologies routinely point to China's limited deployments as evidence that their preferred technologies are viable, when the scale of those deployments actually argues the opposite. China has built a single small modular reactor and a single experimental molten salt reactor, not fleets of them, despite having the capital, supply chains, and regulatory capacity to do so if they made economic sense... If small modular reactors or hydrogen transportation actually worked at scale and cost, China would already be building many more of them, and the fact that it is not should be taken seriously rather than pointing to very small numbers of trials compared to China's very large denominators...
What is notably absent from publicly available information is detailed disclosure of materials, operating margins, impurity controls, and maintenance assumptions. This is not unusual for early commercial deployments in China. It does mean that external observers cannot independently assess long term durability claims.
The article notes America's Energy Department funded a carbon dioxide turbine in Texas rated at roughly 10 MW electric that "reached initial power generation in 2024 after several years of construction and commissioning." But for both these efforts, the article warns that "early efficiency claims should be treated as provisional. A system that starts at 15 MW and delivers 13 MW after several years with rising maintenance costs is not a breakthrough. It is an expensive way to recover waste heat compared with mature steam based alternatives that already operate for decades with predictable degradation..."
"If both the Chinese and U.S. installations run for five years without significant reductions in performance and without high maintenance costs, I will be surprised. In that case, it would be worth revisiting this assessment and potentially changing my mind."
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader cusco for sharing the article.
Efficiency of heat engines (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Efficiency of heat engines (Score:5, Informative)
Some amazing walls of text for something so conceptually simple: use CO2 to spin turbines instead of water. It is claimed CO2 does this with substantially higher efficiency. For certain, the turbines are much smaller for the same power, and CO2 doesn't corrode everything it comes in contact with.
Re:Efficiency of heat engines (Score:5, Interesting)
It's supercritical CO2, meaning at high enough pressure that it acts sort of like a liquid. There's nothing revolutionary about the idea, it's well known that it has a higher theoretical efficiency than steam.
The problems are with implementation, and one of the big ones is in fact that it corrodes everything it comes in contact with. The CO2 isn't corrosive if it's pure, but if any water is present it turns into high pressure, hot carbonic acid.
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Indeed, and the purity of the CO2 used in this prototype system is exceptional. I've read elsewhere that the process for purification they developed is a novel technology which they will almost certainly use for this and other processes, and which will quickly spread throughout Chinese industry. That's apparently how Chinese industry works, one company develops something in a technology cluster, it spreads throughout that cluster, and then throughout the entire country. This author calls it an "open sour
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If you want a dynamic economy, ignoring IP laws internally works pretty good.
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The thing is the phase diagram gets strange at the high temperatures and high pressures - the line dividing gas from liquid regions actually ... stops. That is, in the supercritical region there's no difference between liquid and gas - the meniscus just disappears. If you put something that floats on liquid CO2 but sinks in gaseous CO2 it falls to the bottom
Steve Mould has a few videos where he plays with supercritical CO2 - it's a very strange "phase" of matter.
Never-ending Criticism. (Score:1)
Working is hard enough. Now one has to bring the mother-in-law onboard.
Trying everything plausible is how you progress (Score:3)
This sounds dismissive, but I wouldn't read it as such.
"China doing something first, however, has never been a reliable indicator that the thing will prove durable, economic, or widely replicable. China is large enough to try almost everything."
This has always been true, you can for example read the history of improving iron / steel production during the Industrial Revolution. Either you had existing outfit and capital to try things. Or you raised capital and set-up an outfit to try things. If you had something viable, you made money, if not, the world (and hopefully you) moved on.
And in the end VCs work more-or-less on the same principle (which is why at some point someone was trying to do Uber for xyz).
Re: (Score:2)
It's not so much dismissive as recognizing the engineering limitations. Steam turbines are amazingly efficient and work very well, but they require pressurized steam.
That means specific minimums of heat, and heat exchange of exhaust > water/steam into turbine grade steam > steam turbine(s) > back into water/steam ready to be heated and pressurized again.
This cycle has multiple points of conversion related losses, but it's proven, reliable and works well with well understood and fairly minimal maint
Re: (Score:2)
Most of them are various systems that try to work directly with exhaust gasses of industrial processes instead of using them through heat exchangers to heat water into steam.
Some of the articles on supercritical CO2 generators describe them as being similar to combined cycle steam systems, but with the CO2 replacing the working "gas" of steam. So they have the same sort of heat exchangers. They are only exploiting the properties of sCO2 wherein it does not require the energy to produce a phase change that steam does.
sCO2 systems don't appear to be using CO2 from process exhaust or minimizing it in any way. Just increasing the cycle efficiency.
Re: (Score:2)
Interesting concept, but it will have severe problems with operating gas itself.
Steam we used in the circuit that runs steam turbine operations isn't just water. It has high level of purity, with specific additives developed over a very long time so give it specific features, often related to system longevity. This is typically matched to specific grades of steel used in piping and turbine itself.
This chemistry will have to be redeveloped for CO2. To make it work as well as steam turbines do today will like
Re: (Score:2)
take a lot of time and effort.
Of course, no one is pretending that it won't. There is one way to definitively figure out what works, that's to do it. While in the US that requires 10 years of committees, studies, VC soliciting, government subsidies and financial industry butt kissing in China they can say, "We've got this idea, and this is why we think we can make it work" and they're off to the races.
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It's actually more of a "we have an idea, we think we can make it work. Talk to our CCP contact, bribe him appropriately, so he tells us which regional officials need to be bribed and for how much to look the other way. Then go to the nearest hiring site and hire 5 process engineers with this and this specialty, and 10 with that and that specialty".
In US, it takes much longer because you can't just bribe the correct officials that fast, nor can you hire this fast (if at all, as best minds have now been funn
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You're overestimating the amount of bribery going on. You don't need to bribe anyone to start something. They only come to you when you actually start making money. Quite refreshing actually, and it works very well for startups.
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You misunderstand. There's the permitting issue. We're not talking some "in the cloud IT" thing, we're talking building a power generating unit that needs both inputs and outputs provided by the regional government.
This will require a LOT of bribes. Or your project will take several decades (and several times the budget) to build out, as red tape just keeps magically materializing, things don't get connected, and so on.
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And another thing: if you have the right business partner you never get that issue in the first place. I was once asked if I wanted to go into business with someone. I had a good idea and he liked it. Turned out he was pretty high up in Chinese intelligence. No problem inside China, but would have created lots of trouble outside of it since I work for my own government as well. So I declined. But I'm pretty sure we'd never have had any issues with bribes.
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Guanxi makes things happen, obviously.
But high level guanxi is very expensive in most cases. Prohibitively so. And if your guanxi is with national level party, rather than regional, you risk the ire of Xi's ongoing "anti-corruption purge" if your partner happens to be on the wrong end of it.
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Best human material developed to be anti-human and anti-progress instead of pro-human and pro-progress
That is a tragedy. These people are crippled for life, and their society is much worse for their talent being used to diminish it.
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Ignoring the "you just said that "something you obviously didn't say" propaganda retardation, in real world, nothing is wasted more than talent.
Best you can hope for most of your elites is to be harmless. Wokeness is a problem because it makes them actively damaging to society. Like a tree forced to grow back into the ground by the mold, we'll never know if any of such trees had a potential to be the outlier for the tallest tree by far.
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Still haven't fixed those LLM hallucinations I see.
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This is also what the USA did more of in the post-WWII period, after the Manhattan Project and we built all these national laboratories it was pretty clear that if the US wanted to actually put effort and money into something we could really accomplish anything. Proved it again a couple decades later with Apollo. Then you have an oil crisis and instead of doubling down on innovation and investment we chose low taxes and divestment.
Re: (Score:2)
lol
Stay. Mad.
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Oh and my taxes are way lower than my parents.
That's my point?
"don't put in the newspaper that i got mad"
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Not coincidentally this was when much of Congress was replaced with lawyers employed by the financial industry. It's been downhill since then.
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And in the end VCs work more-or-less on the same principle (which is why at some point someone was trying to do Uber for xyz).
The VC system actually appears to be worse. China's trying supercritical CO2 as a working fluid and flying wind turbines while the West is in its second round within a decade of "make a small handful of people stupendously rich chasing a plainly stupid idea that makes most people's lives worse" (Currently AI, previously blockchain nonsense). And that's aside from the undercurrents of SaaS and uber-ization among other aspects of enshittification. We can only look on at China's gambles with envy.
Re: (Score:2)
China has engineers. We have MBA's.
I know which one I'd rather have.
Is this like those giant salt batteries? (Score:2)
It's kind of frustrating to think that we could probably get off fossil fuels in a couple of decades if we did a moon landing style project for it. But the Middle East countries and American oil companies sure as hell aren't going to allow that...
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Ask yourself what's more likely: Is the entire world ignoring a perfectly good solution that would save money and improve everyone's lives or are you mistaken in some of your beliefs? Existing i
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The groups "countries without any oil" and "countries with resources to work on new energy solutions" have four overlaps: Taiwan, Japan, South Korea (all in thrall to the US and Wall Street/banksters) and China. Of course the latter is where this (and most of the rest) research is being done.
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If you do really think that you're correct in your own thinking then you should probably invest your money in the companies trying to provide these services because they must obviously be undervalued and in a prime position to disrupt the market and make a killing.
I'm not a magic bullet believer but your logic doesn't hold here, because there's lots of other reasons why an investment might fail. They could fail to execute for non-technical reasons, they could be not good enough at raising capital, an entrenched player could shut them down with regulatory capture...
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The Netherlands were leading in the field of windmills for a long time, and in the 90's we had the best wind turbines in the world. But they still needed a small amount of govt subsidies at the time.
And then we got a free market government that decided that the environment was a stupid leftwing hobby (they were also firmly in the pocket of Shell, who later betrayed them - which is what they deserved), and shut everything down. So when windmills finally took off it was Denmark that created the biggest compan