SLURRY PIPELINES

The USSR is faced with some very large coal transport needs that cannot be met by the existing railroad network. In particular, as oil becomes scarcer and gas more expensive, current thought on fuel policy favors a larger role for the major coal basins of the East—Ekibastuz, Kuzbass, and Kansk-Achinsk. Most of this coal would have to be used in the West, so that if coal is to substitute for oil and gas, some way must be found to transport it over long distances; the existing rail links cannot possibly take it on. In the USSR, as in the United States, the relative advantage of rail transport and coal slurry pipelines for long-distance coal transport is a controversial issue, but it is thought that coal slurry lines may well play an important role in transporting Siberian coal. As one author says “in the conditions of the Soviet Union, hydraulic transport of coal will be developed above all in the Kansk-Achinsk deposit. Hydrotransport may also be used for shipment of coal to power stations located in Siberia and other regions of the country, as for example the Ural region” (Ushakov, 1972, p. 172).

There are two related questions—how successful the USSR will be in developing slurry pipeline technology and how competitive slurry pipelines, once mastered, will be compared to railroads. In the United States, the technology of slurry lines seems to be thoroughly in hand, and the major determinants of their application involve economic and institutional considerations. At issue are whether they should be organized as common carriers, whether they should have the right of eminent domain, whether the government should protect railroads against competition from them, and whether in any given situation their somewhat distinctive requirements, such as an adequate water supply, make them noncompetitive. The general conclusion in the United States regarding their competitiveness seems to be as follows:

The two low-cost methods [for transporting coal overland] are slurry pipeline and rail. The overlap of .3 to .7 cents per ton-mile for slurry and .4 to .9 cents for rail is realistic. Neither is superior to the other in any broad spectrum. Yet, for specific cases one will undoubtedly be preferable to the other, though likely by narrow margins. [U.S. Bureau of Mines, 1975, pp. 23–24]

The first large-scale slurry line in the United States, the Cadiz-Eastlake line in Ohio, which was considered a decided technical success, ceased operation because a cut in railroad tariffs permitted the railroads to win back the traffic. In the USSR, it seems, most of the institutional issues important in U.S. debates are absent, but there are still important technological questions to be settled.

Several hydraulic coal transport systems have been in operation for some time in the USSR. Most involve very short hauls and only move coal from a mine to its cleaning plant. One which began operation in 1967 sends coal from the Inskoe mine in the Kuzbass to the Belovo power station in West Siberia, and another (operating since 1966) sends coal from the Iubileinaia mine to the West Siberian metallurgical plant. Each is 10.5 km long; the first has a capacity of 1.2 MT per year, the second 3.9 MT per year (TsNIEIUgol’, 1976, p. 4). In both these cases the coal is mined hydraulically, so that transport to the user is an extension of the transport approach used within the mine (Smoldyrev, 1970, p. 1 ). The Iubileinaia installation uses five 350 mm (approximately 12-in.) pipelines, of which three work and two are in reserve, implying that the line must be unreliable (Smoldyrev, 1967, p. 71). Other sources also speak of the rapid erosion of the pipe. These are not slurry lines, properly speaking, since they operate with very coarse coal (sizes up to 50 mm) and a low concentration (15 percent or less) of coal in the mixture (TsNIEIUgol’, 1976, p. 4).

Some more ambitious applications have also been proposed. A project for supplying the Belovo station in West Siberia with an additional 360 thousand tons of coal from a mine 25 km away has been under consideration since at least the mid-sixties. A still more ambitious project envisages a 420 km pipeline from the Lugansk mines to the PriDnepr regional power station in the Ukraine. That project would use 400–500 mm pipe and have a capacity of 4—5 million tons per year (Energetika i transport, 1976:6, p. 7; and Smoldyrev, 1967, pp. 82–83). It would thus be a fairly close analogue to the Black Mesa line in the United States, which transports 5 million tons of coal a year in a 287 mile line using 18-inch pipe. Other projects mentioned in the literature are lines to the power stations at Dobrotvorskaia (61 km), Mironovskaia (88 km), Staro-Beshevskaia (64 km), and Kura-kovskaia (80 km) (Smoldyrev, 1967, p. 83; and TsNIEIUgol’, 1976, p. 5). These projects all envisage moving coal in slurry form—i.e., the particle size for various projects is in the 0–2 mm, 0–3 mm, 0–6 mm classes, and the coal concentrations would be 40–50 percent. Whether any of these projects have actually been completed is unclear, though my guess would be that they have not. A 1973 statement says that 300 kilometers of coal transport pipeline are actually being operated (Ugol’, 1973:3, pp. 37–38), and a 1978 source says that 10 coal pipelines are in operation (Truboprovodnyi transport, vol. 7, 1978, p. 89). But what would seem to be an authoritative recent statement by a Gosplan author says explicitly that no high-concentration lines have yet been created and mentions only the two Kuzbass lines mentioned earlier as actually being in operation (Iu. Bokserman in Planovoe khoziaistvo, 1977:10, p. 100).

The use of high-volume, long-distance slurry lines for moving eastern coal to the Ural or to the European USSR would thus be a large step upward from any previous experience. Economic studies by the research organizations comparing various transport modes for moving eastern energy westward make slurry pipelines look very attractive. Numerous proposals have been considered—based on Kuzbass, Ekibastuz, and Kansk-Achinsk coal, using pipe diameters of 1220, 1420, and 1620 mm, with capacities from 50 MT to 100 MT per year. Slurry pipelines are appealing in terms of labor inputs, metal requirements, energy efficiency, and overall transport cost. Most of the evaluations conclude that pipeline transport is likely to have a small cost advantage over rail or electric power transport (Planovoe khoziaistvo, 1977: 10, p. 101; TsNIEIUgol’, 1976, pp. 13–19; Ushakov, 1972, p. 174), and some studies show large cost savings.

But all available evidence suggests that the USSR is not very far along in creating slurry pipeline technology. As indicated there were no large, high-concentration slurry lines in operation as of the mid-seventies. The main reason for this seems to be that Soviet industry has not yet produced the proper pumping equipment. One of the early projects apparently envisaged the purchase and use of the same pumps that were used on the Cadiz-Eastlake line (Smoldyrev, 1967, p. 82); a later commentator says explicitly that Soviet-produced pumps capable of moving slurries “operate at low pressure and have design defects that do not permit using them in long-distance systems with high concentrations of solids” (Planovoe khoziaistvo, 1977:10, p. 101).

In this situation it seems indispensable to get on with a demonstration project to test equipment and design ideas, but the Soviet planners seem to have been very cautious in moving to any demonstration effort. One author suggested in a 1972 book that the appropriate step would be to design a large-diameter experimental line (1420 mm) from some Kansk-Achinsk mine to a nearby large power station as a first step in developing the data needed for projecting a line from Kansk-Achinsk to the Ural (Ushakov, 1972, p. 175)· But that idea has not been followed up, and the proposals now actively being considered involve lines of smaller diameter but greater length. One article mentions two such projects—one from Leninsk-Kuznetskii in the Kuzbass to Barnaul would move 5–6 MT of coal per year, and one from Borodino to Krasnoiarsk (150 km) would move 3–5 MT of Kansk-Achinsk coal per year (Planovoe khoziaistvo, 1977:10, pp. 101–102). Another project mentioned more recently calls for a line from the Kuzbass to Novosibirsk 250 km long, using pipe 429 mm in diameter to handle 4.3 MT per year (Planovoe khoziaistvo, 1978:11, pp. 21–23). It is said that the design for this line has been completed and that experiments with equipment are being carried on at the Ramenskoe test facility of VNIIPITransprogress (Stroitel’stvo truboprovodov, 1978:11, p. 37). Fuel policymakers are apparently serious about this kind of line, and a group of experts headed by A. Lalaiants, the deputy chairman of Gosplan in charge of energy policy, has recently been in the United States, especially to learn more about experience with the Black Mesa line.

Lines with those capacities and using relatively small diameter pipe will do little to settle the issues involved in designing a line with the 50–100 MT capacity needed to send eastern coal to the Ural region or to the Center. For dealing with that problem, all that was envisaged for the 1977–1980 period was research and experimental work leading to the establishment of specifications for pumping equipment and fittings and designing the technical schemes for such a line. A technical-economic analysis for a 25 MT/year line 2800 km long is said to have been completed, as well as preliminary estimates for an 85 MT line from the Kuzbass to the European USSR (Planovoe khoziaistvo, 1978: 11, pp. 21–23).

The idea of an experimental slurry line for the short haul from the mine to the Berezovo power plant (the first of the big power stations to use Kansk-Achinsk coal) has apparently been rejected in favor of a container pipeline. Some experiments in the early seventies convinced Soviet transportation planners that container pipelines have a big future, and a 1974 decree of the Council of Ministers called for 28 experimental (opytno-promyshlennyi) container-line installations to be built, including some in the coal industry (Current Digest of the Soviet Press, vol. XXVI, No. 32, pp. 12–13). Container pipelines do not really seem suitable for coal transport since even a 1400 mm container pipeline would move only 5–10 million tons a year (ibid.). This seems very small in relation to the annual fuel consumption of one of the 6.4 GW stations intended for the Kansk-Achinsk basin (something more like 25 MT) and very extravagant of metal compared to a much smaller diameter slurry line of equal capacity. But for some reason or other the proponents of container pipelines have been extremely successful in convincing the top leadership of their potential and have succeeded in getting a high priority for development and demonstration of this technology.

As a case of R and D, slurry pipelines reveal a slow and cautious attitude and relatively little sense of direction on the part of the program managers. One of the most interesting features of the literature is the many contradictions and gaps in the accounts given by different authors. One source claims that actual design (proektirovanie) was completed for a large-capacity line from Kansk-Achinsk to the European USSR (Truboprovodnyi transport, vol. 6, 1976, p. 45), but later discussions seem completely oblivious to this. It is possible that the slowness and uncertainty in moving ahead reflect not dilatoriness but uncertainty as to just when and in what quantities Kansk-Achinsk coal will be used in the West, since the questions of how it will be burned and whether it can be converted into a transportable form have not yet been settled. I have found no comment as to whether Kansk-Achinsk coal would be sent via pipeline without prior conversion. It seems that pipeline transport would permit the sidestepping of prior conversion and that the high water ballast that makes it uneconomic to ship by rail would be less of an obstacle in a slurry pipeline.

The strongest impression one has from all this discussion is of how little R and D work has been done and how vague and irresolute policy seems to be in setting any kind of directions and goals for moving ahead with some kind of demonstration work on slurry pipelines, given the urgency of finding a solution to the problem of transporting Eastern coal.

CONVERSION OF SOLID FUEL

Conversion of solid fuel constitutes a very broad area of technology that includes such processes as coking, gasification, liquification, solvent refining, and many others. It is not a frontier technology in the same sense as some of the others discussed in this chapter, since various versions of many of these processes have been in commercial use for a long time—e.g., gasification and hydrogenation. On the other hand it is far from being an established technology, because the current situation creates new demands with respect to scale of operation and type of product and raw material, which cannot be satisfied by the established technological base. This is the case in the USSR as well as in the Western countries. The USSR has had a long history of experimentation and research in solid fuel conversion, sometimes with commercial application—it has carried on commercial processing of shale and has produced synthetic fuel and gas from coal on a significant scale. Today, however, Soviet energy policy faces quite a new problem: the transformation of the cheap strip-mined lignites of the East, notably those of the Kansk-Achinsk basin, into fuel forms that can be transported. Kansk-Achinsk coal is not transportable in its present form at all, and simple forms of treatment (such as an emulsion-coating to prevent drying and spontaneous combustion) do not solve the problem of the low heating value per unit weight, which makes it very costly to ship over long distances. For this coal to assume its anticipated place in the fuel balance, it needs to be converted to some form of transportable fuel with a higher heat content—liquid, gaseous, or solid. Given the relative abundance of natural gas resources in the USSR, the most useful products of solid-fuel conversion in the Soviet economy will be solid and liquid fuel (in contrast to the United States, where one of the main goals for R and D on synthetic fuels is to develop a source of gas). A review of the Soviet experience on solid-fuel conversion is illuminating, both for historical perspective on the R and D process and as an illustration of current R and D performance and its interaction with energy policy.

The USSR has a fairly long experience with coal conversion along two main lines—gasification and what the Russians call “energy-technological processing.’’

Gasification

The original Soviet rationale for gasification of coal was to create a gas supply at a time when Soviet planners were still unaware of the large resources of natural gas they could tap.* The main objectives were underground gasification as an alternative to mining coal, synthetic production of gas for household use, and gasification of high-sulfur coal to provide a fuel for gas turbines. (There has also been a long-standing interest in gasification of shale, but that will not be discussed here.) By authoritative Soviet accounts, the underground gasification efforts have proven a failure. According to Grafov, Deputy Minister of the Coal Industry, “for decades we worked on this—institutes, groups of specialists, engineers. . . . Unfortunately, during all those years we obtained no positive results. The gasification process turns out not to be controllable, and the heat value of the gas obtained is low” (Kirillin, 1974b, p. 46). An informative description and evaluation of Soviet underground gasification efforts—somewhat more positive than given here—is available in Gregg (1976). The major effort to produce synthetic gas from coal for household use was a high-pressure gasifier plant at Shchekino, which generated gas with a heat content of about 4,500 KKal/cubic meter for pipeline shipment to Moscow. That project used Moscow basin lignite, but experimental work was also done with lignite from the Kansk-Achinsk basin.

None of that work has much relevance to the present problem of processing Kansk-Achinsk coal. None of the processes involved pipeline-quality gas, and the conversion of Kansk-Achinsk coal to low-BTU gas is uneconomic even for local use (except perhaps in a few isolated areas such as East Siberia) because of the competition of natural gas from West Siberia. Moreover, this coal has a low enough sulfur content that there is no obstacle to burning it directly. Gasification of coal to remove sulfur and provide a fuel for gas turbine use has lost its rationale, both because of the competition of natural gas and because (as shown in Chapter 3) the Soviet Union has not been very successful in developing gas turbines as prime movers for electric power generation. Thus, most Soviet R and D work on gasification performed through the mid-fifties was unsuccessful, or has been made irrelevant by changes in the energy policy environment. Since the big switch to oil and gas that began in the early sixties, R and D on solid-fuel conversion has been carried on mainly as a kind of defensive effort against future developments or to keep up with other countries. According to Z. F. Chukhanov, an eminent researcher in this field, work on processing solid fuel has had an extremely low priority for the last 15 years (Vestnik ANSSSR, 1976:9, p. 15).

Complex processing

Much more relevant to the current problem of utilizing the Kansk-Achinsk coal is work on what the Russians call “energy-technological processing of coal,” producing both fuel and chemical raw materials. Soviet experience in this area grows basically out of earlier efforts to produce synthetic liquid fuels. A large effort was made during the Second World War to produce synthetic motor fuel by destructive distillation of lignites, and several plants were built for this purpose (Krapchin, 1976, p. 133). The motor fuel produced was both low in quality and very expensive, however, and when the discovery of large oil resources eased the problem of liquid fuel supply in the fifties, these plants were modified to use their output of tar products for chemical purposes. There are now great hopes for applying this experience to the processing of Kansk-Achinsk coal.

An experimental program of fairly long standing has been carried on by the Krzhizhanovskii Power Institute in Moscow (ENIN), the Institute for Research on Mineral Fuels (IGI), and a number of other research organizations. A pilot operation (described as an opytno-promyshlennaia ustanovka) using Moscow lignite was created at the Kalinin power station in 1957, and an analogous unit was to be put into operation working on peat in 1958 at the Sverdlovsk power station in the Ural region (Elektricheskie stantsii, 1958:2, p. 5). Both were based on ENIN designs. I have seen no explicit statement as to the size of either, but a later source says that the pilot plants for energy-technological coal processing have had capacities of 100–200 tons/ day or 26–55 thousand tons/year (Z. F. Chukhanov in Vestnik ANSSSR, 1976:9, p. 118).

The next step in the commercialization of energy-technological processing of Kansk-Achinsk coal is to be a pilot plant adjoining one of the Krasnoiarsk heat and power combines (TETs-2) intended to process about one million tons of lignite a year. This plant is apparently to consist of a single unit of the ETKh-175 converter designed by Teploenergoproekt, one of the big design organizations in Minenergo. I believe the 175 means 175 tons/hour, so that annual capacity is about 1.5 MT/year. The concept of the plant is described in Elektricheskie stantsii (1974:4, pp. 12–16). Stack gases from the power station are used as a source of heat, and the plant is to produce semicoke (some of which is to be processed into briquets), tar, and gas. The gas and tar will be burned in the power station. The goal of the exercise would thus appear to be to test the process on a larger scale than used earlier at Kalinin and to produce a supply of semicoke and briquets that could be used experimentally in different ways. One of the long-range ideas is to use the semicoke as part of the mixture in production of metallurgical coke. Though construction of this pilot plant seems to be the crucial next step in the commercialization of the energy-technological process, work is apparently not proceeding very fast. One source claims it is already in operation (Krapchin, 1976, p. 134), but Chukhanov says in 1976 only that it is being built ( Vestnik ANSSSR, 1976:9, p. 120), and a story in Sotsialisticheskaia Industriia (May 1979) makes clear that it is not finished, and that in fact work on its construction almost completely stopped in 1979. Minenergo has responsibility for its construction, but has not given it a high enough priority to get it finished and into operation.

There seems to be another coal conversion process as well that could be used on Kansk-Achinsk coal, called thermal-contact processing. Actually there may be more than one variant of this process. One source speaks of thermo-coal produced in cyclone chambers using hot gas as the source of heat (Krapchin, in Ekonomika i upravlenie ugol’noi promyshlennosti, 1977:2, pp. 12–14), while another speaks of thermal-contact processing in an installation using a fluidized bed. The account here is based on a description of the cyclone version. The unit involved is described as the TKKU-300, which I believe means 300 tons/hour. This converter seems to have been developed under the auspices of Promenergoproekt, another of the Minenergo design organizations. Coal in small sizes (one source says 13 mm or less) is heated by contact with hot gas to 55o°C and held at that temperature for 4–5 minutes—yielding as products from a ton of coal 550 kg of “thermo-coal” with a heating value of about 6,200 kilocalories per kilogram and 35 cubic meters of gas. The thermo-coal still contains volatile elements— about 40 percent. The cyclone process was developed by IGI in experimental stations at the Moscow coke-gas plant and the Khar’kov coke-chemical plant (Krapchin, 1977, p. 13). The fluidized bed process was developed by ENIN and the Eastern Coke-chemical Institute in Sverdlovsk and is embodied in a small pilot plant apparently located in Sverdlovsk (Pravda, 21 March 1977).

At one point it was being suggested that the next step in the coal conversion program should be the construction of a plant of 24 million tons capacity on the way to the construction of two 50-million-ton plants at a later date. The timetable is vague, but it seems even the 24-million-ton plant would not be built until after 1990 (Elektricheskie stantsii, 1974:4, p. 16; and Energetik, 1974:8, p. 37). The 24-million-ton project would use both the ETKh and the TKKU units. Other sources seem to favor going directly to a 50–60-MT/year plant using the TKKU equipment (Pravda, 21 March 1977; and Krapchin, 1977).

Finally, there is also a proposal for synthetic liquid fuel from coal, via complex processing with oil. It is apparently different from solvent-refined coal, and the main goal is to hydrogenate coal, using oil as the source of hydrogen (Planovoe khoziaislvo, 1977:8, p. 98). But this is still only at the theoretical and experimental stage; there does not appear to be any pilot plant proposal yet.

Some aspects of the research, development, and demonstration program for coal processing are difficult to understand. First, it seems poorly oriented toward solving the major problem of putting Kansk-Achinsk coal into a form that will permit it to be used like any other coal for energy purposes. In the original one-million-ton pilot plant, it is intended to use much of the output (the gas, the tar, and perhaps some of the semicoke) as power plant fuel at the Krasnoiarsk station, and this doesn’t help with the crucial need to produce power plant fuel for the Ural and Volga regions. The economics of combining the process with local power generation (to use the gas) creates puzzles. The projected 24-million-ton plant would produce only 1.71 million tons of standard fuel in the form of gas, and this would cover only a relatively small power station—i.e., less than 1,000 MW. (A 1,000 MW station requires 2–2.5 million tons of standard fuel per year, for example.) The capital savings expected in the very large (4–8 GW) stations, in which direct burning of Kansk-Achinsk coal is planned, would probably offer strong economic arguments against this “energy-technological” line. One is left with the feeling that the effort is focussed on a technology not well suited to solving the main problem. And in fact some experimentation is being done with other methods of processing the coal that seem more relevant to the problem of making it possible to transport. One method in particular, the “autoclave method” (described in Krapchin, 1970), would use steam to dry and raise lump strength of Kansk-Achinsk coal to make it transportable. But tests on samples of coal from the Irsha-Borodinskoe field that an Austrian firm performed for the Russians concluded that this treatment would not suffice to solve the problems of decomposition and self-ignition. “Measures recommended by the firm for this purpose are expensive and have not been tested industrially” (Ugol’, 1974:9, p. 73).

V. A. Kirillin states that many methods of utilizing the coal will probably be used, and it is interesting that the Scientific-technical Council of Minenergo says that “until we can obtain an upgraded fuel from Kansk-Achinsk coal, we acknowledge that it will be possible to use untreated coal in the European part of the USSR, first of all in the Ural” (Energetik, 1974:8, p. 37). Some Kansk-Achinsk coal is, in fact, shipped considerable distances for energy use. The output from the mines at Nazarovo and Irsha-Borodinskoe exceeds local power station use, and, according to la. A. Mazover (Planovoe khoziaistvo, 1975:6, p. 79), they have been successful in shipping it 400–500 km. But the idea of shipping much untreated coal seems to me quite an overstatement of what is possible and an indication of pessimism about any early answer to the question of how to process the coal into more transportable forms. Mazover also says that it may be necessary to ship run-of-mine coal, using films and emulsions to protect it—i.e., to prevent its drying out and crumbling and undergoing spontaneous combustion (Planovoe khoziaistvo, 1975:1).

POWER TRANSMISSION

One method for connecting Eastern coal to the energy needs of the West is to build mine-mouth power stations at the major Eastern sources of energy coal (Ekibastuz and Kansk-Achinsk) and send the power west via ultra-high-voltage bulk transmission lines. Despite an established record of progress in this technology, the USSR will have to traverse a considerable R and D gap to create transmission lines suitable for this need; the distances involved require moving to higher voltages than those yet mastered. Because of the great distances the Soviet power industry must cope with, the USSR has had at various times longer transmission lines and higher voltages than other countries. At present the Siberian situation directs great attention to this technology and forces the USSR out to the frontier.

A rather detailed study of Soviet technological progress in high-voltage transmission concluded that

the USSR moved by 1960 from a position in which it was a follower of technological trends in the high-voltage field to one in which it ranks among the leaders, both in AC and DC. This is not surprising to the extent that high-voltage technology is one area in which a country’s performance as an innovator is to a large degree a function of its geographical and economic problems. . . . In the 1960s, however, the Soviet Union has in several respects lost its leading position in the development and diffusion of voltage technology. [Amann et al., 1977, p. 224]

The present goal in DC transmission is to step up from 800 KV lines to 1,500 KV. Beyond that, plans call for an eventual further increase to 2,200 KV. In AC transmission the goal is to move up from 750 KV to 1,150 KV.

The first step in getting Eastern mine-mouth power to market in the West is a plan to send power from the Ekibastuz region to the Ural region over an 800 KV DC line. There is already a line being operated at this voltage (Volga-Donbas), so this new line should present no great technological problem. To deliver power from mine-mouth plants in Ekibastuz to the power system of the Center Region at Tambov, a distance of about 2,400–2,500 km, however, it will be necessary to use a 1,500 KV DC line. The Ekibastuz-Center line in its present conception would have a capacity of 6 GW, and so could handle only part of the total output of the planned Ekibastuz generating complex of 16 GW. Much of the Ekibastuz power output will be used closer to home, especially in the Ural region.

From the Kansk-Achinsk power station complex it is planned to distribute power within Siberia using an 1,150 KV AC line, of which the first step will be a 500 km segment between Itat and Novokuznetsk. This will be a significant step beyond the 750 KV AC lines already mastered. But to get power to the Ural region from the planned mine-mouth plants in the Kansk-Achinsk fields, which at 4,000–4,500 km are much farther away than Ekibastuz, it will be necessary to employ something like a 2,200 KV DC line. This is a big increase even over the 1,500 KV voltage planned for the Ekibastuz-Center line still to be built. The Soviet power industry planners are understandably much more tentative about the prospects for the 2,200 KV line. The capacity of a 2,200 KV DC line is said to be 12–13 GW. It is further said that it would be necessary eventually to introduce a second line at 2,500 KV DC, which would have a capacity of 40 GW. Together, these two lines could handle a large fraction of the total power output from the Kansk-Achinsk complex of stations. The current development task is to create the 1,500 KV DC line and the 1,500 KV AC line—let us begin with a brief description of where development now stands on these two projects.

The Ekibastuz-Center Line

The plan for the 1,500 KV line from Ekibastuz to the Center has been on the agenda for quite a few years. It was said at one time that the line was to be constructed in the 9th Five Year Plan period (1971–1975)—Investila VNIIPT, No. 16, 1970, p. 17). But when the 9th Five Year plan was promulgated it did not actually specify a target regarding construction of the 1,500 KV line or even production of equipment for it. Apparently only experimental and design work for such a line was carried out in 1971–1975. The concept for the project is laid out in Energetik (1971:3, pp. 8–10), and the article in Izvestiia VNIIPT cited above said that an experimental line at 1,500 KV was put into operation “several years ago” (Izvestiia, 2 February 1974). I suspect that this was only an experimental section at VNIIPT—the article in Izvestiia cited above shows a picture of a test section on which they are testing for corona and radio interference. Kirillin reported in 1974 to the annual meeting of the Academy of Sciences that work on the Ekibastuz-Center line was underway. Popkov says in an article in Pravda (9 October 1974, p. 3) that the design for the line, completed over a year earlier, was still sitting in the files of the expert commission. Popkov also said that 60 items of new equipment had been designed for it. When we get to the guidelines for the 10th Five Year Plan (1976–1980), no mention is made of constructing the 1,500 KV line, but the guidelines say that it is necessary to master the production of equipment for it (Osnovnye napravleniia, 1975, p. 36). The target date for its completion has therefore shifted from sometime in the first half of the seventies, to sometime beyond 1980—i.e., by at least 10 years. There may have been problems in producing the equipment, or perhaps the R and D work done so far has failed to convince people that the proposed design will work. A report in 1977 says that testing of the equipment is proceeding (Sotsialisticheskaia Industriia, 2 October 1977), and it is claimed in a story in Soviet News (12 June 1979) that work has started on the line.

There is still some time for getting 1,500 KV technology perfected. The 10th Five Year Plan envisages the completion and commissioning of the first 500 MW unit in the first power station of the Ekibastuz complex before the end of the period. A story in Pravda (16 March 1975) mentions the end of 1978 as the target date. A start on the construction of the second of the projected four power stations in the complex is also intended in the 10th Five Year Plan. In the Kansk-Achinsk complex, the language of the guidelines does not suggest completion of even the first station (the Berezovo station) during 1976–1980, but only progress on its construction. Thus the only power available for interregional transmission by 1980 will be from the Ekibastuz station, if it is in fact commissioned and begins to operate successfully.

The Siberian Line at 1,150 KV

Progress on the 1,150 KV AC line appears somewhat better. The 9th Five Year Plan said that a section of this line connecting the Krasnoiarsk and Kemerovo systems should be constructed by 1975, so that this section could be used for settling design decisions and for accumulating experience (Baibakov, 1972, p. 102). The guidelines for the 10th Five Year Plan (1976–1980) say that the production of equipment for this line is to be “mastered” (Osnovnye napravleniia, 1975, p. 36) and that the line is to be constructed (ibid., p. 25).

As yet, however, there is no reasonably confident and convincing answer as to how power from Kansk-Achinsk stations will be transported to the European USSR. I have seen no indications of significant development work on 2,200 or 2,400 KV DC equipment or line design. There is no mention of any of the series of preliminary design studies that would be performed for such a project (avanproekt or eskiznyi proekt for example) nor any statement of intermediate R and D targets such as experimental work with prototype equipment. Some authors even question the technical and economic feasibility of moving up to that voltage level. There is a great deal of discussion and experimentation on longer-range answers to the problem of long-distance bulk transmission, such as cryogenic lines, waveguides, and gas-filled conductors. Research work is being done on these. None of the commentators seems to think seriously that these approaches will be developed soon enough to get the power intended to be produced at the Kansk-Achinsk complex to the European USSR, but they may not be really any more unfeasible or distant than 2,400 KV DC technology. One important feature of the Soviet situation is that there are very large flows of power to be transmitted, and there may be economies of scale with superconductive or cryogenic approaches that would give them a competitive edge over traditional overhead lines when the size of the flow is so large.

To conclude, the Soviet literature on progress toward the higher voltages in power transmission is not very informative. A priori, these would seem to be interesting cases for illuminating how the Soviet R and D system operates on the frontier of some technology. Unfortunately, the strongest impression one gets from the rather slim accounts of what is being done, is one of hesitation and vacillation, without much idea of how they evaluate alternatives and make decisions about how to move forward. This uncertainty may derive in large part from the uncertain state of the Kansk-Achinsk plans themselves. As indicated in Chapter 3 and in the sections in this chapter on coal processing and slurry pipelines, it is still not clear that it will be feasible to burn this coal in mine-mouth power stations or that there may not be some equally attractive alternative way to move the energy in it to the West. In that situation it is not surprising that there should be some hesitation about making large commitments to move on to actual development of the technology for transmitting this energy by wire.

MAGNETOHYDRODYNAMIC
GENERATION

The Soviet interest in magnetohydrodynamic generation of power (MHD) began rather early. According to a careful and detailed Western review of Soviet MHD work, “successful feasibility demonstrations in the United States in 1959 provided V. A. Kirillin . . . and A. E. Sheindlin with the rationale to initiate an MHD-research development program in 1961” (Rudins, 1974, p. 3). Research was first pursued intensively at the Institute for High Temperatures at the Moscow Power Institute (Moskovskii Energeticheskii Institut or MEI). From the very beginning MHD apparently had the personal support of V. A. Kirillin, who was at one time the Director of the high temperature laboratory from which the Institute was formed, although the major figure directly in charge of the program has been A. E. Sheindlin, Director of the Institute. The Institute was transferred to the Academy of Sciences in April 1967, and the work expanded to a more ambitious scale. Other institutes have been involved as well. There is a reactor at the Krzhizhanovskii Power Institute (ENIN), and the Kurchatov Institute has also been involved. In 1964–1965 the first pilot unit designed to demonstrate the actual working of the process was completed in Moscow; it is said to have been in continuous use since. It had a theoretical capacity of 200 KW. The results obtained with this experimental installation were sufficiently promising that a decision was made to create a full scale integrated pilot facility, the U-25, started in 1966 and completed in the spring of 1971 (Electrical World, 15 August 1973, p. 25). There is also a small pilot plant in the Ukraine (the Kiev-1) but little discussion of its purpose or status can be found. An article in 1974 speaks of the need to master and put into operation the MHD installation at the Kiev GES-2 station, and this may be an indication that the Kiev MHD unit was technically a mistake or was based on an idea later discarded. At any rate, there is a hint here that not everything in this program has gone smoothly (Energetika i elektrifikatsiia, 1975:1, p. 54).

The Soviet interest in MHD has usually been understood in terms of its being the most promising method for significantly increasing the efficiency of electric power generation. As explained in Chapter 1, electric power is a disproportionately large consumer of fuel in the USSR, which has led to a great concern with technologies for reducing the heat rate, such as cogeneration and the combined cycles discussed in Chapter 3. But the arguments for MHD seem to have varied over time. The development program started and is being carried forward using natural gas as a fuel, with residual fuel oil considered as an alternative for the first industrial plant. though these are now precisely the fuels that must be replaced with others in the European areas where use of MHD generators is intended. For some time the Soviet sponsors of MHD research have known that this will become a viable technology only when it is converted to using coal, but a tremendous inertia carries the program forward in its gas-based form. Also in the beginning, it was thought that MHD would be a technology employed primarily in base-load generation. The reasoning behind this expectation was that, as a fuel saving technology with high unit capital costs, it should be used a large number of hours per year—5,000–6,000 (Kirillin, 1974a; available as JPRS 62–139). But the thinking has now shifted to a conclusion that MHD should be used in TETsy and as a cycling technology. Used in TETsy, it would permit the burning of sulfurous oil (sulfur will be removed by an interaction with the seed and recovered in the regeneration of the seed material) in a way compatible with urban pollution standards and would also help to satisfy the need for generating technologies with rapid start-up capability. These are important points in the justification of the design for the first industrial plant presented at the joint U.S.-USSR 1976 colloquium on MHD in Moscow (Kirillin, 1976, pp. 27–32). As explained in Chapter 3, the need for equipment that can be started up on very short notice is acute (especially in view of the increasing emphasis on nuclear power plants, which are essentially base-load plants), and so this is a good selling point.

The current status of the program is that enough has been learned from the operation of the U-25 testbed facility to make the construction of an industrial plant appropriate, and such a plant is now being designed. Several years ago it was predicted that this first industrial unit would be an 800–1,000 MW block, presumably in line with the idea that it would be a base-load plant (Kirillin, in Vestnik ANSSSR, 1975:2, p. 12). But the most recent statement indicates that the first plant will be built as a heat and power combine, probably in connection with an already existing heat and power combine near Moscow, and will use natural gas or oil (Kirillin, 1976, p. 29). There are several statements that reflect hopes that such a unit can be built before 1985: a representative of Teploenergoproekt said at one point that this plant must be ready sometime in the 1981–1985 period, and as recently as 1977, the Minenergo journal says that it is possible for it to be commissioned midway through the 11th Five Year Plan (1981–1985—Elektricheskie stantsii, 1974:4, p. 8; and 1977:7, pp. 13–14). The change of plan to employ the first MHD unit in a heat and power installation probably reflects in part the availability of a suitable turbine (i.e., the 250 MW supercritical extraction turbine), and the size of the project is determined starting from the technical characteristics of that turbine.

One of the most interesting features of the MHD program is that it is being carried out with a considerable amount of cooperation with the United States. According to Rudins, MHD is an area with a long history of international cooperation, and the Soviet Union has been associated with the formal and informal international groups working in this area for a long time (Rudins, 1974, p. 1). The United States was an early pioneer in MHD research, but development languished in the sixties, when many were skeptical that this could be a competitive technology. Rising energy prices, a desire to increase coal as a power station fuel, and the need to deal with the pollution problem posed by coal later gave MHD a renewed high priority in the United States. At this point, the Soviet and U.S. efforts were quite complementary, and it was easy to argue that a joint effort would bring big benefits. The United States had done a great deal of design work on testing of concepts, components, and materials and had the superconducting magnet technology. The USSR had followed a different R and D philosophy (about which more below) in setting up an expensive pilot plant intended to provide a testbed for testing individual elements and the system as a whole in a functioning plant. MHD was specified as a field for cooperative research in the U.S.-Soviet agreement on scientific and technical cooperation signed in 1972, and this effort has since expanded to extensive and real cooperation. The United States has supplied a superconducting magnet for use in the U-25 facility, which by the end of 1977 had been installed and cooled and was ready to start operation (Department of Energy Information, 21 October 1977)· We have also designed several channels for testing in the facility. The Russian contribution is to provide access to the U-25 testbed as a facility for testing different design ideas. The USSR side actually conducts the jointly planned tests and is to share with the U.S. side all the experimental results. One of the by-products of this cooperation is that the U.S. side has experienced a much more intimate involvement and insight in a Soviet R and D program than is customarily possible, and the American participants have provided an interesting commentary on some distinctive features of Soviet R and D.

The first of these is a striking difference in R and D philosophy. The American approach to MHD has been to do extensive work on components and concepts and to accumulate enough data so that the planners can feel they understand the process well enough to assure that a commitment made to an experimental facility will work as designed. This is a philosophy, moreover, which seems to be true of U.S. R and D in general. The Russians have gone much more directly into the creation of an expensive plant, in which various elements of the whole system can be experimented with, redesigned, and upgraded within the context of the system as a whole. This approach has its costs. The Americans are much impressed with how expensive these facilities have been. One of the points in selling the cooperative program to U.S. authorities has been that the U-25 facility would cost about 100 million dollars for us to build and that the outlay for such a facility is not something the U.S. program could justify on its own. They also comment on the disadvantages that come from fixing designs in concrete and hardware at too early a stage in the game. In reporting on what has been gained from the cooperation, the U.S. side has said that “we have learned of Soviet difficulties experienced in trying to develop MHD with a rigidly designed pilot plant” (U.S. Congress. House, 1975, p. 550). Rudins has an interesting suggestion (1974, p. 24) that one motivation for the Soviet decision to build the U-25 plant was the need to ensure visibility for the program and a desire to get enough momentum and investment to make it difficult for the authorities to terminate the program. He also suggests that one consequence of this approach is that, in its components, the design of the plant could not be technologically venturesome and had to stick very close to established technology (ibid., p. 39).

Another conclusion from the MHD experience is that the Soviet R and D establishment can be quite bold in a commitment to far-out ideas. Apparently support for the MHD effort has continued without a setback over what is now almost two decades. It has been very expensive. Rudins attempts an estimate of the total costs of the MHD program up to 1974 as 250 million dollars (ibid., p. 73), though he does not explain how he obtained this figure. There have also been great delays. Nevertheless, the support has continued undiscouraged even in the years when the United States was weakening its support for MHD. Sheindlin is quoted as saying that “it was not easy for us to stay in the field in isolation, but we were sure of the correctness of our approach and continued it” (as reported by Robert Toth in the Louisville Courier-Journal, 6 April 1975, p. E9). This is a different conclusion from what we have found in some other cases, where what is being done in the rest of the world technologically operates as a powerful argument in determining the directions of Soviet R and D. There are probably several factors explaining this commitment. One is that Kirillin became head of the State Committee for Science and Technology (GKNT) and a Deputy Prime Minister, and so was in a uniquely favorable position to turn his personal belief in the project into an institutional commitment. Rudins says that Kirillin deliberately chose MHD as an example of how Soviet scientific development could be taken to the applications stage (1974, p. 73). Furthermore, MHD seems to have consistently had the support of Minenergo. The degree of involvement is indicated by Sheindlin in his formulation that the test facilities were “created by Minenergo, under the scientific supervision of the High Temperature Institute” (Vestnik ANSSSR, 1968: 11, p. 20). Elsewhere he says the U-02 and the U-25 were “developed jointly by Minenergo and the Academy of Sciences” (Izvestiia, 27 September 1976, p. 5). Rudins reports that Soviet officials involved with the program say that one of the distinctive features of the system, its embodiment in a plant that actually delivers power to the Moscow network, is a design decision made in part to keep Minenergo convinced that this is a commercial technology (1974, p. 34).

The MHD history reinforces our general conclusion about Soviet R and D: that initial plans are always overambitious. Kirillin was saying in 1974, at the annual meeting of the Academy of Sciences, that the first demonstration plant would have a capacity of 1,000 MW and could be developed by 1981 (Soviet News, 10 December 1974). Some of the earlier accounts indicated that the next step to follow the U-25 would be a 500 MW demonstration plant (Elektrichestvo, 1970:4, p. 5), and it is interesting that the actual proposal has now moved back to that size plant. Perhaps this reflects the influence of the interaction with the Americans, though it seems more likely that a plant on this scale will be simply more feasible to construct. The proposal for a 1,000 MW plant was based on a presumption that there would be a 500 MW turbogenerator unit available by the mid-seventies (Kirillin, 1974a, p. 11), and the delay in getting such units mastered may have changed their minds.

The whole history also illustrates the kind of twists and turns an R and D project undergoes as it advances. As explained, the conception of the role this technology should play has been substantially redefined—it is not clear how best to interpret this. I am prepared to believe that the original decision to base the early development stage on gas as fuel was sensible enough at the time and that the preferability of using MHD as a coal technology only emerged when the fuel balance environment changed. Indeed, it may still turn out that gas is the best fuel for the applications they now intend for MHD-i.e., in the European SSSR, where gas may well be no more scarce or expensive than either coal or oil. In fact, what should be questioned perhaps is the current assessment that it must ultimately be adapted to coal. Given the transport considerations, the biggest expansion of coal-fired plants will be based on cheap, low-quality coal, mostly in the East, and one wonders if the fuel savings in such a situation will be worth the capital cost. The real dilemma for this technology is that, for the regions with high-cost fuels, nuclear power seems to have the competitive edge for base-load uses. In these regions, oil and gas will be reserved as fuel for peaking and intermediate uses; the competitive position of MHD in this area is hurt by the low number of hours during which its big advantage—lower fuel expenditure rates—is being exploited (all this is detailed in Kirillin, 1974a). The Soviets argue that it is possible to develop MHD to a commercial stage by continuing the gas direction and then modify the technology for coal. But, says Rudins, “some noted U.S. MHD specialists believe just the opposite: that coal plants are totally different from natural gas plants” (1974, p. 75). The shift from justification in terms of fuel economy to justification in terms of environmental advantages and suitability for intermediate load generation is reasonable enough, though the rearrangements seem just opportunistic enough to make one wonder how firmly grounded they are in cost benefit calculations.

Finally, the USSR seems to carry its preference for early commitment, loosened by flexibility and insurance in design, right on through succeeding levels of demonstration facilities. The Soviet paper on the considerations guiding the design of the first industrial MHD plant, given at the joint symposium in Moscow in 1976, shows a great concern with providing expensive supplementary facilities that will permit the facility to work under unexpected adverse circumstances that may flow from the early commitment to a design that has not been oriented to a well-specified environment on the basis of refined knowledge. This paper states that

in order to accelerate the adoption of the new equipment, the plan provides certain measures designed to facilitate the attainment of rated indices. These will make the facility somewhat more expensive and subsequently it will be possible to discard them. The essence of these measures consists in their ability to compensate for possible miscalculations that may have occurred in the designing of individual pilot units of the facility and to preserve the capability of the unit to operate while the mistakes in designing are being corrected. [Kirillin, 1976, p. 31]

The paper proceeds to list a considerable number of such provisions. A desire for flexibility to cope with technological surprise is a perfectly rational decision, of course, but against the background of the many other examples in which plants are built ahead of the technology, it is easy to imagine that the managers of this program are taking considerable risks.

GEOTHERMAL ENERGY

There is a long-standing Soviet interest in geothermal power. Exploration drilling for a power station at Pauzhetsk on the Kamchatka Peninsula in the Far East began as early as 1957 (Dvorov, 1976, p. 71). (Other sources say 1958—Kruger and Otte, 1973, p. 42.) The objective of that exploration was apparently to decide whether a sufficient flow of fluid could be developed to supply a power station. It was thought that a start could be made with a small station, which could later be expanded if more resources were discovered in the process of exploration. The work was conducted by the ANSSSR and by Mingeo, so I suspect that the project was motivated more by basic research concerns than by a desire on the part of Minenergo to find a way to utilize new primary sources for electric power.

In September 1961, the Presidium of the ANSSSR established a Commission on Hydrogeology and Geothermics (Dvorov, 1976, p. 24), which was assigned the mission of coordinating and leading basic research in this area.

The most significant milestone in attention to geothermal sources was a 1963 decree of the Council of Ministers on the development of geothermal resources. The tone of the decree is impatient—as if plans had been around for some time but that action had been delayed. It is an action document, establishing timetables and allocating responsibilities, and contains both a development program and an outline of further basic research directions. The Academy of Sciences of the USSR was given responsibility for organizing basic research, and in January 1964, it transformed the Commission mentioned earlier into a Scientific Council on Geothermal Research. (Dvorov is uchenyi sekretar’ of this Council.)

Things then began to happen, but slowly. On the basic research side, it seems that the most intensive activity was the exploration of resources. The oil and gas exploratory organs were instructed to include geothermal data in their studies, and there are numerous reflections of their studies and concern with geothermal resources in the literature of the following years.

On the side of experimental and development work for utilizing these sources, work went ahead on building the experimental power station at Pauzhetsk using direct steam. Construction is said to have begun in 1964, according to a design developed by Teploenergoproekt (Kruger and Otte, 1973, p. 42), and the station was “commissioned” in 1967 (Dvorov, 1976, p. 26). It was originally intended that this station would be a 12 MW unit (Zolotar’ev and Shteingauz, 1960, p. 177), but in the end it was given a capacity of only 5 MW in two separate 2.5 MW units. These were probably standard turbines—Dvorov says they were MK-2.5 models produced by the Kaluga plant (1976, P. 73).

The Pauzhetsk station was to be followed by a second one at Makhachkala on the western shore of the Caspian Sea—also with a planned capacity of 12 MW (Elektricheskie stantsii, 1962:1, pp. 3–4; and the 1963 decree). But this part of the program was apparently never carried out.

The Pauzhetsk facility was a fairly simple one. The resource was superheated water, and on extraction, steam was separated from the fluid and was sent directly to the turbine. Some impurities were carried over with the steam, but it is asserted that they did not damage the turbine.

The Pauzhetsk station was reasonably successful and operated more or less continuously after it was built (Dvorov, 1976, p. 73). But Dvorov’s book contains a table indicating that, although its nominal capacity was 5.4 MW, its “disposable” capacity was only 3.2 MW. Another source explains that the parameters of the steam at the site turned out to be lower than estimated, so that the station could not develop the planned capacity (Zhimerin, 1978, p. 186). On the other hand, it is claimed that the capacity of the station is now being expanded to 10–15 KW (Dvorov, 1976, p. 74), which may be a matter of developing a larger supply of steam. Dvorov also gives investment figures that work out to 906 rubles per KW, which is 8–9 times the cost per KW usually cited for most power stations.

More or less contemporaneously with the Pauzhetsk station, an experimental secondary-fluid station based on Freon-12 was created to use the lower-temperature waters of the Paratunka geothermal field, also on the Kamchatka Peninsula. This plant is said to have begun operation in 1968, about a year after the Pauzhetsk station. I suspect that Minenergo had even less interest in that station—the design work for it was done by an Institute of the Siberian Branch of the Academy of Sciences and the Institute of Refrigeration Machinery, and the construction of the station was carried out by an organization in Minneftekhimmash.

The Paratunka station apparently worked so badly that it was soon abandoned. It is usually not even mentioned today; Dvorov rationalizes that it was really only a station-laboratory rather than a power station and says that although it functioned for a while, it has now been dismantled so that the freon equipment can be redesigned to raise its efficiency. P. S. Neporozhnyi described in 1972 what seems to be this same equipment but spoke of it as being installed in the Shatura power station near Moscow, and I imagine that it was moved there for further experiments after being dismantled at Paratunka.

It appears that further development of geothermal power stations will now take a different direction from the original steam concept. Several additional projects more or less like the Pauzhetsk plant were proposed (for Petropavlovsk-Kamchatskii and the Bannaya Valley on Kamchatka and for Kunashir Island in the Kurile Chain), and the 1963 decree directed that series production of equipment for such stations be started. But these were never built, and nothing is heard of such projects now. Most discussions now suggest that the supply of heat in the form of natural steam is so small that it will not be feasible to develop more stations of the Pauzhetsk type.* And the absence of any follow-up discussion on the secondary-fluid approach, which could utilize water at lower temperatures, makes me think that experiments involving the freon equipment were abandoned or were too disappointing to justify use of that approach. Specialists engaged in basic research in the field have always said that if extensive use is to be made of geothermal power the crucial step is to solve the problem of massive heat transfer from hot rock at great depths to generate steam. Some of the research that has been done follows these lines, one of the proposals being to create a cavity at great depth in hot rock with a nuclear explosion and circulate water through it. Recent discussions mention a project for a larger power station “of the circulation type” to be located in the Makhachkala area, and an article in 1978 says that construction of such a station in the USSR is “contemplated” (Elektricheskie stantsii, 1978:5, p. 8). Nonpower uses of geothermal heat are a way in which substantial fuel savings could be obtained by using water at temperatures well below boiling. This kind of use is growing moderately in the USSR but faces many obstacles, including institutionalized skepticism.

Because development of geothermal sources has not worked out well, the history of development is not very fully described in the literature, but all the evidence available suggests that little has been accomplished to develop the technology required to bring this source into the fuel balance. The Ministry of the Gas Industry gives some output figures which suggest that the output of water and steam has fallen since the early years of the program (Gazovaia promyshlennost’, 1977:6, PP· 19–21).

The explanation for slow progress in doing the research and developing the technology to use geothermal power is that the task has never had anything more than halfhearted leadership. As one exasperated advocate says, “there is today no clear line defining a program for geothermal resources” (Ekonomicheskaia gazeta, 1973:48), and most Soviet sources would add that there is no organization with adequate interest and responsibility for pushing it. The division of responsibilities is: basic research to ANSSSR; development of resources to Mingaz; utilization to customer ministries such as those for agriculture, for the chemical industry, and Minenergo. The Ministry of the Gas Industry has charge of drilling the wells and producing the water and steam, which it does today through four field administrations. But it has never really had at the top level any serious interest or commitment to geothermal resources, which are after all a minor sideline to its main mission of finding, producing, and transporting natural gas. At one point the Ministry simply liquidated its department in charge of geothermal work, according to a critical analysis published in Pravda (15 January 1974). The article says that drilling for geothermal resources was not protected by having a separate allocation in the Ministry’s budget or a separate target in the plan. One can easily imagine that the Ministry preferred to use all its drilling capacity, probably the greatest bottleneck it faces, for its main task of finding and producing gas.

Nor have any of the potential users of geothermal resources done much to promote geothermal development. Minenergo officials are consistently on record as saying that geothermal energy is irrelevant to the problems of large-scale power generation. One of Minenergo’s project-making institutes designed the Pauzhetsk plant, but the equipment was developed outside the ministry, the plant was built by another ministry, and I have not been able to find any evidence that it is even under the jurisdiction of Minenergo, whose relationship to the Paratunka plant is about the same.

A review in the Minenergo journal Elektricheskie stantsii (1978:5) reports on what is apparently a serious effort within the Ministry to evaluate the potential of geothermal resources for power generation. The author explains that use of water at 150°C and below is uneconomic anywhere in the USSR, and even when water at 25o°C and above is available it cannot compete against other sources unless it is at relatively shallow depths to keep drilling costs within reason. Overall, the author confirms the generally pessimistic views about geothermal power said to be held in Minenergo. As for other potential users, it is reported that the Ministry of the Chemical Industry has no interest in the brines as raw material sources, and that the Ministry of Agriculture drags its feet on using geothermal resources for heating greenhouses and other agricultural applications.

Beginning in the mid-seventies there has been renewed pressure from the center to give R and D for renewable sources a higher priority. (See, for instance, a plea for this change in Kommunist, 1976:2, pp. 62–65.) The gas industry has been repeatedly criticized for its failure to carry out its responsibilities for geothermal energy and now seems to be treating this area with a higher priority. An article in the Mingaz journal laid out an extensive program of expanded R and D work on geothermal problems. Mingaz is drilling a few more wells than in the past, planning for some growth in output of geothermal waters, and doing much more research on such problems as corrosion and the problems of drilling in these difficult environments (Gazovaia promyshlennost’, 1977:6, pp. 19–21). This may be more an effort to simulate some activity than a genuine commitment to a higher priority, however, and the complaints go on. A recent article expresses great skepticism:

The country has an organization responsible for the utilization of deep-earth heat. Fifteen years ago this responsibility was assigned to Mingaz. It created field administrators for this purpose, relatively small and poorly equipped agencies one must admit. This essentially ended the ministry’s concern with the accomplishment of a task of great national economic importance. Not much exploration and prospecting is being done for hot water and steam. The ministry shows no concern for the designing and manufacture of specialized equipment capable of operating dependably at high pressures and temperatures. In short the ministry, engrossed in its principal business, treats geothermal engineering like a stepchild for whom it lacks sufficient love, time, and money. [Pravda, 15 December 1978]

TIDAL POWER

The Soviet Union has large tidal power resources, most notably on the Arctic coast, but also in the Sea of Okhotsk in the Far East. The capacity of some of these sites is said to be very high. The figures one finds quoted are quite variable, no doubt depending on how large an area is assumed to be feasible or economic to block off. One source says that the capacity in the Mezen location on the Arctic coast, for example, could be 14 million KW (Elektricheskie stantsii, 1962:1, pp. 3–4). That is equivalent to three Bratsk projects or seven nuclear power stations like the one that has been built near Leningrad.

There appear to be two major issues in tidal power that govern the direction of R and D efforts. The first is the problem of building the elaborate structures required, in the inhospitable conditions of their locations in the USSR, at a cost that is acceptable. The second is the exploitation of its potential within a power system, since tidal power has a peculiar time profile, with some possibilities of modification via pumped storage. Extensive studies are required that evaluate the economic feasibility of tidal power projects in connection with the optimization of their design and the nature of the system into which they would fit.

The Soviet development program has thus far been oriented mostly to the engineering problems, via the building of a small prototype station at Kislaia Bay on the Kola peninsula, near Murmansk. The approach adopted to cheapen the cost of construction was to prefabricate the major structure elsewhere (in a dry basin later opened to a river), float it to the site, sink it onto a specially prepared bed, and then complete the barrage across the mouth of the inlet with an earth-filled dam. Work on the project began somewhere around 1964 (Energeticheskaia, atomnaia, transportnaia i aviatsionnaia tekhnika. Kosmonavtika, 1969), and construction took several years. According to one account the power house was in place by 1968 (Shabad, p. 34), an other suggests 1969 (L. Bernstein, in Civil Engineering, April 1974, p. 47). Bernstein, chief engineer of the project, adds that this station first generated power in 1970. The unit uses a very small (400 KW) bulb-type, reversible, generating-pumping unit, supplied by Neyrpic, the French company that produced the units used in the French tidal power station.

Here, we are interested primarily in the R and D process, and although not a lot is said about the evolution of this project, it has been possible to gather a few interesting facts. The project was developed by Gidroproekt (which is under Minenergo), so that I believe this experiment has had its major support and direction from that source. Perhaps it is not irrelevant that the Minister of the electric power industry, P. S. Neporozhnyi, is a construction man. It is also interesting to find that the concept has changed considerably in the process of development. An early account said that the station would have a capacity of 1200 KW—i.e., presumably using three generating units (Energeticheskaia, atomnaia, transportnaia i aviatsionnaia tekhnika. Kosmonavtika). A later description described it as having two 400 KW units (Energetik, 1967:3), and as indicated, the completed project had only one 400 KW unit. Comparison of the drawings of early mock-ups with what the structure looks like in place suggests that the whole structure was reduced in size, though Bernstein says that the prototype structure is that of a full-size station, and it might be that only some of the generating equipment was eliminated.

The explanation for this scaling down of the project could be some technical problem—they may have had to change their ideas of how big a structure it would be possible to manage in the towing and seating phase. It seems equally likely, however, that there was strong pressure to cut the costs of the project as it evolved, both in terms of total investment and in terms of foreign exchange cost. In other words, even if the Soviet R and D system shows an undeniable inclination to support speculative and long-range directions in technology, we might well conclude that such projects are not immune from budget pressures.

Virtually nothing more has been published about operating experience with this experimental station, except that it is said to have demonstrated the success of the idea and that design work is proceeding for the construction of a much larger station at the Mezen location which, it is asserted, will have a capacity of 6 GW (Soviet News, 10 November 1970; and Bernstein).

This once again shows the usual Soviet preference for very large upward steps in the development of a technology. If such a station is actually attempted that would be a scale-up factor of 15,00ο! A project of 6 GW capacity would have to use either larger generating units (the largest reversible units the USSR has attempted to produce so far are the 200 MW units for the Zagorsk pumped storage station—the French station uses 10 MW units) or an incredible number of small ones. There are other, smaller sites available they could work on. But “design work” in Soviet parlance can cover a wide spectrum of studies, and the statement cited should not be taken to mean that the construction of such a station has actually been decided on. The other aspect of the development problem—evaluation and design to see how such a station would be justified in the growth of the system—must be the next major step. It appears that Soviet interest in tidal power is based as much on its potential help in the peaking problem as on its possible contribution toward expanding primary energy sources. Tidal power, because of its peculiar time profile, is not in competition with baseload technologies such as nuclear power. The future of the project thus crucially depends on what happens to competing technologies for peaking purposes, such as the various thermal forms of peaking equipment and pumped storage. That must be one of the major issues at the present stage of R and D on tidal power.

SOLAR ENERGY

Solar energy has long had supporters in the USSR, and some serious work on this technology goes back several decades. It has never been a “big-science” effort; nor has the central machinery pushed it seriously. Solar energy R and D has been performed in the republican academies, in small units within larger institutes both of the Academy system and the ministerial system, and in institutions of higher education.

The Armenian Academy of Sciences and the Power Institute (ENIN) cooperated for a while on a proposal for a power plant and built a solar house, but that program broke up in the sixties and experiments ceased. ENIN had a helio-laboratory in Tashkent, and ANArmSSR had a commission on heliotechnology, which later was absorbed in the Power and Hydraulics Institute (Institut energetiki i gidravliki) of the ANArmSSR. There is still some research on solar energy at ENIN.

The scientific journal for this area of research—Geliotekhnika—is published by the Uzbek Academy of Sciences, which includes the S. V. Starodubtsev Physico-technical Institute in Tashkent, which seems to be a major locus of solar energy research. It has a geliotekhnicheskii poligon, though no description of its facilities is available. A survey of the institutions in which the articles in the journal originate suggests that many have solar research as a sideline to their main activity, such as institutes of electronics (converters) and institutes doing design work where remote power sources are important (Tashkent communications institute). The Physico-technical Institute (Fiziko-tekhnicheskii Institut) ANTurkSSR works on solar cells. An article reviewing 10 years of the journal’s activity says that “there has been a considerable expansion in solar-technology research in the Soviet Union in the last ten years,” and adds that in addition to institutions active in 1965 (Leningrad, Moscow, Erevan, Tashkent, Ashkhabad), new schools have been established in the Ukraine (concerned with the effect of high-intensity light and heat fluxes and high temperatures on matter), in Moldavia (development of semiconductor photocells and effect of light on seeds), and in Azerbaidzhan (development of autonomous sources of supply using solar energy). They mention a three-meter solar furnace at the Uzbek Academy and a 10-meter furnace being built at Erevan. Their summary is that in 1975, there were 30 doctors and 100 candidates doing research on solar energy. It is thus clear that this is a very small effort and is more concerned with basic research than with development.

If this line of research has had little support (as indicated in our survey of R and D spending) or little direction from above, the reason is easy to see. The makers of energy policy make no bones about their conviction that solar energy is of no interest for current energy strategy, because it cannot compete with other alternatives. All the major figures in the energy R and D “establishment”—Academicians Kirillin, Styrikovich, Aleksandrov, and lesser lights in the ministries—say that the exotic sources are not promising for making a contribution to serious energy problems. For the most part, they ignore such sources in discussions of the energy future, but when they do feel called on to evaluate them, the following statement by Kirillin about solar power is typical:

At the present time one can hear not a few statements that it is necessary to expand work aimed at utilizing the huge resources of solar energy and underground heat for the needs of large-scale power (bol’shaia energetika). However, thus far, no suggestions acceptable from an economical and technical point of view have been put forward as to how to do so. The difficulties in the use of solar energy on a large scale for obtaining electric power lie in the fact that the technical-economic indicators of both presently realizable methods—concentrating the sun’s rays for heating a steam boiler, or using solar cells—are very low. [Kommunist, 1975:1, p. 52]

A recent article in the Minenergo journal dismisses hope for use of solar cells as completely unreal. The author says that the cost of such cells at present is about 100,000 rubles per kilowatt, and although he is willing to concede that costs can be reduced by one order of magnitude, the prospect is that even after the considerable effort such a program would require the cost to remain two orders of magnitude above the 100 rubles per KW required to make solar cells competitive with conventional sources (Elektricheskie stantsii, 1977:7, p. 9).

Kirillin and other authorities who influence energy R and D directions are thus prompted to conclude that any effort on these exotic sources now should be directed toward long-range studies attacking fundamental issues, and that, until such efforts succeed in making some kind of breakthrough, solar and other such sources are not candidates for applied development effort.

The main exception granted is that a few special situations may make solar energy competitive with conventional sources even today. The major such uses involve small-scale autonomous power supply in desert regions for pumping and desalination of water; irrigating pastures and watering stock; supplying power for communications and cathodic protection of pipelines; water heating; and supplementary space heating and air conditioning for housing. A seminar held in Ashkhabad in 1975 called for this to be the main direction in the near future (Geliotekhnika, 1976:8, pp. 72–73).

It has been suggested that, in the United States, solar energy is likely to make its way into practical use, less as a result of the big ERDA-type programs such as the solar-tower power plant, than through the efforts of private initiative concentrating on small-scale differentiated local uses (“Solar Energy Research: Making Solar after the Nuclear Model,” Science, 15 July 1977, pp. 241–244). The direction being taken in the USSR seems to embody that approach, though it seems likely that in the USSR the forces substituting for attention from the center are rather weak. Several of these small-scale technologies are said to have passed the development stage, and some decisions have been made to move into the production phase. One of the “programs” in the R and D plan for the 10th Five Year Plan is for “bringing renewable resources into the fuel and energy balance” (Kommunist, 1976:2, p. 65). The Ministry of the Water Economy has set up an NPO* to design the equipment and establish production methods, and a plant is being constructed in Uzbekistan for routine production of equipment for solar power (Kommunist, 1976:2, pp. 63–64). But significant progress will require parallel initiatives in many other ministries as well, and the authors of the article just cited express the view that little will happen unless pressure is applied from the top to force planners in the Central Asian regions (where most applications are envisaged) to establish the enterprise to produce the equipment.

It is also possible that there will be some higher priority for solar R and D in reaction to the large spending under the U. S. program, including perhaps a solar power station. Such projects seem never to have obtained authorization in the past. In the early sixties, a proposal to build an experimental solar-tower power plant of 1,200 KW near Erevan was apparently seriously considered; some sources treat it as if it was actually scheduled to be built (see, for example, Zolotar’ev and Shteingauz, 1960, p. 178). But this proposal did not in fact get very far, and we can guess the reasons from an article in the Minenergo journal, which notes that it has very high capital cost per unit of capacity (Elektricheskie stantsii 1962:1, pp. 3–4). A similar project has now been suggested for the Turkmen SSR. An article in Soviet News (23 August 1977) says that such a station will be built, with a capacity of 100,000 KW, and that a new kind of design for the heliostats will cut the cost so much that cost per KW will be only half that of a conventional station. Such a claim suggests that this must be an early-stage proposal, and an interview with the President of the Turkmen Academy on the occasion of the creation of a new Solar Energy Institute in the Academy does not mention any plans for a solar tower (Current Digest of the Soviet Press, 28 March 1979, p. 24). It will not be surprising, however, to find the USSR eventually undertaking some analogue of the 10,000 KW installation that ERDA is now committed to building.

The implications of this brief survey of the solar energy program is that solar still seems very uncompetitive in the USSR, the planners see much cheaper alternatives, and in the absence of the kind of public enthusiasm and pressure felt in the United States, the Soviet effort has been kept far smaller than the American, much more oriented to basic research, and still rather decentralized and unfocused.

CONCLUSIONS

This set of disparate examples suggests a few obvious points worth recapitulating. It certainly seems that the Soviet controllers do not hesitate to sponsor work on the speculative frontiers of energy R and D and are willing to support moderately expensive efforts in novel areas, even when it is difficult to make a case that these are likely to have large scale payoffs soon. The tidal, geothermal, and solar programs all support this conclusion. There also seems to be quite a bit of inertia in the system—R and D programs like those in coal conversion can drift for a long time, even if they do not seem to be closely related to high-priority tasks. But the institutional decoupling of R and D work from the major concerns of the powerful R and D sponsors that permit it to continue also means that it proceeds gropingly, without much focus or direction, underfinanced, and in a poor position to make a case for moving ahead, on the basis of findings at any one stage, to more ambitious tests.

It is clear that the system is not unwilling to give strong support to expensive and risky projects such as MHD or container pipelines. It is essential that an idea be taken up by some powerful sponsoring structure, in which case it can then survive all adversities. Unfortunately these cases do not reveal much about the process by which sponsors screen the menu of possible development ideas to determine those to which they will give their loyalties. Rather than try to exhaust the lessons implicit in the bases reviewed in this chapter, however, let us leave the subject here, to return to it in the final chapter, when an attempt will be made to draw together some generalizations based on all the chapters.

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*The history of gasification efforts is sketched fairly extensively in Altshuler (1976), and this section draws heavily on that source.

*One current source does assert that the Petropavlovsk-Kamchatskii station is being built and that construction has begun on a 300 MW station (Alekseev, 1978, p. 169). I doubt that the author knows what he is talking about.

*The NPO is a new kind of firm combining research and development units with production facilities intended to hasten the commercialization of new technologies.