The diversification of energy sources in agriculture of Siberia

The aim of this work was to demonstrate possible use of energy sources of local available and inexpensive resources. One of the developed and applied technologies is coal-water slurry fuels (CWF) production. This technology allows creating efficient and reliable production of high quality thermal energy near local consumers with their specific demands. Investment attraction is defined by the compactness and high environmental safety. The WCF using allows solving a number of issues related to the transportation of coal; in some cases it is more economical to do it by pipeline. This excludes losses connected with the fuel quality deterioration: the processes of oxidation, weathering, dusting, freezing, etc., and it is also an important element of energy saving resource during the energy source transportation, creating or developing energy-related systems and complexes. The WCF properties depend on the origins of coal, which varies according to the metamorphism degree. Another way of using local raw materials is the effective employment of low-grade metamorphism coals, i. e. brown coals. The research showed that the technology of production and use of coal-water slurry fuels may be successfully applied in agriculture of Siberia because of the coalfields and enterprises for coal processing being distributed evenly throughout the whole territory of Siberia. The results of experimental-industrial tests of developed heat generators have shown that at low values of the lowest CWF combustion heat (2500 kcal/kg) from different Krasnoyarsk region’s coals it is possible to obtain efficiency values over 80 %, reducing the cost price of 1 Gcal min from 30 to 300 % in comparison with coal or liquid petroleum fuels burning. During testing process of selected calculated steady-state modes it was determined that the boiler is stable working on estimated fuel, the average level temperature is 1000-1100 °C; stable combustion is possible in the combustion chamber on the modes from 100 to 25 % load and manual regulation; the emission from the combustion chamber is small, insignificant and there is no visible smoke from the chimney.