It seems that CoalSack is in the pretreatment of coal business, until now a non-existing business, but should all the work of Mr. Bennett work at commercial scale, coal would be a much less environmentally aggravating fossil fuel. Not that would make any difference to the anti fossil fuel crowd, but it would be significant to everyone with some reason and balance in mind for the consumers, the environment and the economy as a whole.

The technology is claimed to make it possible to convert any type or grade of coal, including scrap coal, oil shale, tar sands, etc., into three basic by-products char, synthetic oil and gas – through one integrated process.

Greg Boyd, 47, is the more youthful leader of CoalSack Energy. Asked by Bob McCarty for a 60-second spiel to a prospect Boyd answers with some interesting numbers. “I’d say we have a patent on low-temperature carbonization which takes out 99.2 percent of the sulfur from a ton of coal,” Boyd explained. “The mercury is not even measurable. We’re raising the BTUs by upwards of 40 percent, averaging between 28 and 40 percent. With the same ton of coal, we’re producing the highest grade of light sweet crude oil which can be turned into Jet A fuel and that we’re getting about 7,000 cubic feet of gas.”

Boyd explained that Clear Coal™ technology is good for an environment in which pollutants like sulfur and mercury are becoming big problems and expensive to combat. “(Sulfur and mercury) Scrubbers cost $100 to $200 million dollars a copy,” he explained.  “At the same time, when coal goes through the scrubber, all of the sulfur ash drops out the bottom and all the mercury goes down there. So what are you gonna do with that?  If you can’t separate it, it has to go to some hazardous waste landfill.”

“Conversely,” he said, “You can’t even measure the mercury after we process the coal.”

This should be getting attention now. That’s big money. And scrubbers need maintained.

Clean-Tech Energy Concepts has patents and a functioning prototype in operation. Most importantly, the infrastructure needed to refine, distribute, and use the technology on a mass global scale is currently in place. This includes production, supply-chain distribution, utilization infrastructure, markets, financial infrastructures, and the boiler and engine technology needed to burn the char and liquid fuels created from the synthetic oil after it is refined.

“Clear Coal™” technology is the only integrated process in existence that was developed specifically to create oil from coal, and still deliver a smokeless boiler fuel, liquid petroleum gas, and producer gas without cross contaminating the end products. The ‘Bennett Process™’, takes any type or grade of coal, including scrap coal, oil shale, tar sands, etc, and creates three basic products: char, synthetic oil, and the gasses. For every ton of coal, our process yields roughly 3/4 ton of char, 3/4 barrel of synthetic oil, 1/2 barrel mixed piqued petroleum gas, and 3,000 standard cubic feet of fuel gas in the form of methane and hydrogen.

Clear Coal Process Graph. Click image for the largest view.

Using a low temperature carbonization process, we are able to carefully control internal temperature ranges inside a roasting unit called a Coal Carbonization Module or CCM™ to vaporize the contaminate elements contained within coal. These vaporized elements are then transported to tanks using steam, whereupon they are condensed into their natural, uncontaminated forms. We are able to produce the nearly contaminate-free char, synthetic oil, and synthetic gasses that are sold to industrial markets, such as refined into Coke for steel production, used for electricity production, or refined into liquid fuels like gasoline, diesel, and Jet A. The carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide production is also converted into liquid fuel, and injected into the product stream where it is sold as a value-added product.

Those four products are interesting. The char is a clean burning smokeless boiler fuel, which can be used for electricity and heat production. The char may also be used in the production of steel and activated charcoal products including filters and carbon fiber. Char has a higher BTU range than coal, 12MBTU/lb – 14MBTU/lb, making it more valuable per ton. Utilities using char as a fuel source become carbon creditors, and could eliminate expensive flue gas scrubbing units.

The synthetic oil is contaminate-free, low temperature oil extracted from the coal that can be converted into jet fuel, gasoline, diesel, and other high value fuels. At a BTU value of 17,370BTU/lb it can also be used as a sweetener of conventional crude supplies. CoalSack’s synthetic oil has been tested by International Lubrication & Fuel Consultants Inc. and other independent labs, and is verified to contain a “much higher amount of gasoline range materials” than conventional crude oil, making it easier and less expensive to convert into fuel. The synthetic oil is easily refined into gasoline, diesel, and Jet-A.

The synthetic gasses are contaminate-free producer gases of petrochemical feedstock including H2, propane, butane, ethane and methane. Each CCM unit creates enough producer gas byproducts to fuel itself, eliminating the need for external fuel sources during operation. In addition, the gasses may also be sold to spot market.

Carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide instead of being captured, contained, and stored underground, are channeled, condensed, converted into liquid fuel, and inserted into our product stream. This portion the patented technology may also be licensed to the ethanol industry to convert their CO2 into liquid fuel, so creating a separate business.

The outstanding feature is the mercury, sulfur, arsenic and the trace elements can be sold for use instead of launched into the air or buried in hazardous waste sites. This alone is cause for great hope.

I wish these guys well. It should easily be worth many interest’s time and expense to investigate the claims and examine the demonstration unit. A quick overview of their PDF gives one a sense that they’re deep into investor marketing and could use a little coaching as the customers are either coal producers or huge coal burning utilities with an entrenched conservative and leading edge technology adverse nature. But a little time, a few interviews and some investor support would go far.

On the other hand, they could just buy coal and sell their products. The value added looks to be very substantial with minimal running costs. Good luck guys.

But the environmentalists, climate change and other pressure groups in the special interest and cultish business of recruiting believers might want to consider the harsh facts should prognosticators be only partially right about the dramatic damages that would occur to the whole of the economy, people’s ability to support themselves and the consequences to the remaining productive working people, investor class including pensioners and government planners and policy wonks. Climate managed through CO2 is a prescription for the developed world to sink into despair. You think the financial/credit crisis is a disaster? Try to reduce carbon out of the life of the planet.

Ideology is a great way to recruit people to your goal. It’s the road that recruited the whole of post WWI Germany to follow Hitler into WWII. It’s been used and used over and over again throughout history to get a few power over the many. Purity is a good sign it’s a fraud, no wiggle room, negotiating space, or other signs of compromise wrap an ideology into dangerous pathology. The near mob psychology like suggestions from Al Gore that civil disobedience is valid just makes the point that they know that war it is – against everyone else.

When I saw the Science Daily report on MIT graduate student in chemical engineering and the Technology and Policy Program Ashleigh Hildebrand’s study on “Partial Capture” with co-author Howard J. Herzog, principal research engineer at the MIT Energy Initiative, I have to wonder what kind of reception these honorable people will receive in an attempt to show what a compromise might mean.

Ashleigh Hildebrand and Howard Herzog

Construction of new coal powered generation is about stopped in the U.S. with the expectation that essentially total emission capture is or will be a requirement. The team’s study suggests that a “significant fraction” in an intermediate step of partial capture would keep the power on, jobs on the payrolls and life moving forward. Coal is simply the U.S.’s largest store of energy and to cancel it out is a marvel in self-destructive choices.

Herzog’s view, the call for full carbon capture is “a policy of inaction, a policy that won’t move forward either new coal plants or the CCS (clean coal and storage) technology.” Partial capture could be a viable intermediate step. The push for full capture (defined as 90 percent of the total) is in part economic: everyone assumed (emphasis added) that 90 percent capture would — due to economies of scale — yield the lowest cost per ton of CO2 removed. Anything less than 90 percent would mean a higher per-ton cost.

So Hildebrand and Herzog modeled the technology changes and the costs in capturing from zero to 90%. The model accounts for technological breakpoints such as carbon capture with a series of devices that absorb CO2, release it and compress it. Full capture may require two or more systems running in series.

What the model shows is that the cost per ton of CO2 removal drops as the number of tons increases. And to no surprise, when the addition of a second unit in a series is added the cost per ton goes up and then levels off when the ton throughput gets to the cost per unit equilibrium. Hildebrand and Herzog can say that per ton cost is about the same at 60 percent capture as 90 percent capture. The assertion is, if the press release writer got the meaning correct, that there are no economies of scale in going from 60 to 90%, but that the initial capital investment is significantly reduced. Or more on point – I suspect that the team is illustrating that there is a big capital cost in getting from 60 to 90%. Compared to zero percent as across most of the world, 60% is a great goal if you’re into limiting CO2 while 90% “clean coal” may be unaffordable as the rates customers pay would include the increased capital costs.

All this stands to reason if not fully obvious to interested technology and investment people. Academics being academic, drawing up a model and running assorted parameters could go a long way to making the intellectual case seem real. But the issue is something entirely different. What will the response be to the modeling of the obvious?

The players in the CO2 game are after something bigger than a minor to insignificant atmospheric gas. Something bigger is at stake. Reading the motives of those who manipulate emotions of the masses and seek to sway the popular opinion through endlessly reinforcing false facts with sensible seeming yet unfounded science is a puzzle wrapped in a media frenzy. “The sky is warming!” is too close to the sky is falling as discredited in a child’s fable starring a certain smallish chicken character to be serious, but it is taken as such by many.

So millions of people do take all of this seriously. The MIT team’s effort is of high drama, hysteria rules; civil disobedience is to be taken as a proper course of conduct. The bets by the promoters of CO2 global warming are becoming very high stakes indeed.

To me the raw courage of Ashleigh Hildebrand and Howard J. Herzog, who incidentally is chair of the conference organizing committee for the 9th International Conference on Greenhouse Gas Control Technologies in Washington where Hildebrand presented her findings, yesterday Nov. 18^th 2008, is of merit in recognizing that not all of academia is lost to the global warming cult. The stakes are high and may well get higher, for some the globe damn well better warm up or there will be a terrible price to pay. And some are beginning to realize it.

On the other hand, coal is a marvelous resource that begs a better end than just burning it up and losing the ingredients to the atmosphere. There is also the matter of burning which sends much of the other components of coal such as the metals, sulfur and other combustion products into the air, a not environmentally friendly thing to be doing as well as simply toxic and dangerous to the biosphere.

The MIT team has done a great service, a worthy first step. Perhaps it will open up an intellectual discussion, leading to making the best possible use of a superb resource instead of the absolutes of ideological drama and tunnel vision about powering a modern economy.

Three Cheers for Hildebrand and Herzog. Lets hope a few more intellectual and academic people find even more courage from their example.

A Supercritical Steam Heat Unit

Pressure in a steam boiler is said to be “supercritical” when the pressure exceeds 3208 psi. A conventional supercritical unit operates at a steam pressure of 3500 psi or higher and steam temperatures of 1000 –1050F. By contrast, a subcritical unit operates below the critical pressure, typically 2400 psi at similar temperatures.

Steam Generation Layout

The point of this is to save on coal to heat the water and reduce CO2 emissions. The gain in turbine efficiency is such that the added energy to reach higher temperatures can be recovered; at least in part so that the emissions can be reduced without hopefully, driving electricity rates out of sight.

The difference lies in using pressure. We are familiar with the conventional sub-critical steam generation unit, the system operating at pressures that convert water to steam through the process of boiling. Now at supercritical pressures, water is heated to produce steam through a gradual expansion without boiling. Due to improved thermodynamics of expanding higher pressure and temperature steam through the turbine, a supercritical steam-generating unit is more efficient than a sub-critical unit.

Supercritical Emissions Steps Diagram

Efficiencies get up to the 39 percent range. USC technology means that electricity can be produced using less fuel. Because less coal is consumed, emissions of sulfur dioxide (SO2), nitrogen oxide (NOx), mercury (Hg), carbon dioxide (CO2) and particulate and solid waste byproducts are reduced. And USC technology is compatible with all types of coal.

Early supercritical units initially operated at ultra supercritical levels. However, due to the unavailability of metals that could tolerate these high temperatures for extended periods of time, operation at these levels could not be sustained. Now power plants can be built using the recently developed chrome and nickel-based super alloys in components of the steam generator, turbine and piping systems that are exposed to the higher temperatures. The new metals can perform under these prolonged operating conditions, rendering USC no longer a goal, but practical design basis.

Southwestern Electric uses this example to pitch their new USC plant: a 600 megawatt USC unit burning a typical Powder River Basin coal would consume 2.0 million fewer tons of coal over its lifetime than a comparably sized supercritical unit at steam temperatures of 1000°F. Again comparing these same two units, a three percent improvement in the heat rate (a measure of the fuel consumed to produce a unit of electric energy) would reduce CO2 emissions by nearly 4 million tons over a 30-year period.

While USC is not a big percentage saving, the influence from environmental desires to reduce CO2 makes for changed economics. The added expense is sure to get to ratepayers, but it looks as though the costs are not nearly as scary as some ideas on carbon trading and other schemes to get carbon out of energy systems would be. In any case that 39% efficiency rating is a great advantage both in raw power production and downstream use such as charging electric vehicles.

On the emissions front USC offers as good or better performance on the emissions that matter like particulates, metals as in mercury, volatile organics, and sulfur. Over time a continuous upgrade in coal burners may be transitional to more biomass as a fuel. With the heating units and turbine sets already in place the biomass fuel market could get big quickly if the genetics and production costs get competitive with coal. We’ll be looking into that, later.

Ultra supercritical is worth knowing and understanding. It’s sure to be around until some form of fusion takes off in a big way.

Sixty two percent of the financing comes from industry, local distributors, i.e. local utilities put in nineteen percent, state and local government eleven percent and the Feds just eight percent. Your were thinking that government funded research was getting the answers? Eighty one percent of the money comes from business large and small.

GTI Simple Gasification Process Graphic

The results are coming to the U.S. – finally. The GTI has been researching gasification for over 50 years and now has extensive experience in designing, constructing and operating gasification systems. Two systems are patented, and licensed now. One is coal gasification and the other is biomass gasification. Multifuel plants that combine the two are now commercialized and built and building in Finland and China for a world total of 4 industrial sized gasification units. These actually work with tens of millions of dollars behind the projects and serious production coming to consumer markets.

One main player is Synthesis Energy Systems Inc. who has a license of the technology from GTI for coal use and coal combined with biomass at less than 40% of total fuel supply. Carbona Corporation has a license for technology fueled by biomass using a fluidized bed. Carbona also has a joint development agreement with GTI for gasification of biomass to liquids.

SES is the company with the three projects in China. The Chinese project’s range of outputs get up to making 1 million tons of methanol or 660,000 tons of DME. SES is working with CONSOL Energy Inc., the largest producer of bituminous coal in the U.S. to investigate the development of coal-based gasification facilities to replace domestic production of various industrial chemicals that have been shut down due to the high cost of natural gas. CONSOL produces over 20 million tons per year of coal preparation plant tailings that can be used to make valuable liquid and gas products instead of landfilling the coal trapped in this material.

This spring SES and CONSOL finished feasibility and engineering studies that analyze possible projects in Pennsylvania and West Virginia, which could use the GTI technology. The partners have secured land options for a site near one of Consol’s West Virginia mines while working out the front-end engineering design for the site and finalizing the terms of a joint venture agreement. The West Virginia plant will go online in the middle of 2011.

SES CEO Tim Vail said during a recent interview that SES is talks with “two other very large coal operators” in the United States and expects to announce further projects this fall.” Vail also said, “Demand for the product here in the States has exceeded our expectations many times over. By this time next year, we will probably have more things going on in the U.S. than in China.”

What has slipped out is SES is also evaluating projects with NACCO Industries Inc. a unit of The North American Coal Corp.

Plants must be located at coal mines because the low rank coal and coal wastes the company uses as feed stocks are difficult to transport. SES makes synthetic gasoline that produces about the same amount of automobile emissions as traditional gasoline.

The overall process of producing SES’ product, however, produces far fewer emissions than petroleum-based gasoline, Vail said. The process does produce carbon dioxide, which SES plans to capture and store underground at the West Virginia plant. Here’s is a bit of a surprise – Vail says, “If you compare it to the petroleum refining and transporting it over the ocean, you are going to have a much larger carbon footprint then you would with a fully sequestered coal plant.”

SES technology produces gasoline that is “very competitive” with today’s oil prices, though Vail declined to specify the cost per barrel. “At $100-a-barrel oil we have a very, very strong business.”

Carbona UPM Andritz Gasification Process Graphic

Carbona is a privately owned technology based company started in 1996. It’s specialized in the development and commercialization of the GTI biomass gasification process with offices in Finland and U.S. With partners UPM and Andritz, Carbona intends to cooperate on the development of the technology for biomass gasification and synthetic gas purification. Using the GTI’s pilot plant located close to Chicago, Carbona will focus on the development of the technology for biomass gasification and synthetic gas purification for the production of ‘synthetic biofuels’, also known as second-generation biodiesel, or biomass-to-liquid fuels.

The partners plan to spend between US$6.7 to 13.4 million for the pilot run. Pilot testing should be finished by the end of 2008. The cooperation also covers the design and supply of a commercial scale biomass gasification plant.

UPM (sales in 2006 of EUR 10 billion, and about 28,000 employees) one of the world’s leading forest products groups announced in October 2006 that it will strongly increase its stake in second-generation biodiesel in the next few years and prepares to become a significant producer of renewable biofuels. The main raw material used in UPM’s biodiesel production will be wood based biomass. Biodiesel production plants adjacent to existing UPM pulp or paper mills would further enhance the company’s ability to utilize the wood raw material efficiently.

The Andritz Group (approximately 10,400 employees running 35 production/service facilities in over 120 affiliates and distribution firms around the world) develops high-tech production systems and industrial process solutions for an array of standard and highly specialized products. Andritz focuses on five business areas: Pulp and Paper, Rolling Mills and Strip Processing Lines, Environment and Process, Feed and Biofuel and Hydro Power.

Meanwhile Carbona is partnered with the U.S. DOE, U.S. Forest Service, Community Power Corp., the European Commission, and the Government of Denmark in a multi-phase Small Modular Biopower (SMB) Initiative for developing efficient and clean biomass-based electricity generating systems of less than 5 megawatts.

At this writing the coal plus biomass projects are in front, as coal is a very dense input that is piled up near mines with no or very little transport to feed the plants. But the biomass research is coming along as well.

From a technical perspective the gasification process is using a little air for an oxygen input to yield syngas that is made into biocrude before refining. Pyrolysis takes place without oxygen so yields pyrolysis oil. Depending on what you plan to sell determines the choice. Gasification allows a simpler range, carbon monoxide and hydroge earlier in the process.

Those look like the leading technologies and the companies involved. With working plants running, being built and planned for and research continuing biomass to fuel is closer than many would think. Its also cleaner from an environmental perspective than one would first think. Coal gasification in the early stage will clean up tailing piles, mountains of coal and dirt that need attended to in any case.

It’s looking quite good. The larger China unit making a million tons of methanol annually would be equivalent to 333.3 million gallons, about equal to 165 million gallons of gasoline, about half a days US consumption. That is progress.

Coal in Hand

Coal is born in the soil so it brings with it all the stuff that concentrates while the coal was forming. The minerals of note are usually mercury, expelled into the air by volcanoes to settle in or washed in by water, and sulfur in much the same way.

The down side is that coal is the weakest fossil fuel for hydrogen content. All the petroleum fuels have larger proportions so making them liquid in the first instance and handy in a much different way. But when it comes to carbon, the main player in energy handling by any sensible description – coal is king.

The future from what we saw yesterday is in gasification of coal then on to other processes to make other fuel products. Its gasification that we’ll look at today.

For the most part gasification is a vessel fed the coal, sometimes water and air. Under intense heat and pressure the coal comes apart into carbon monoxide (the air is to get the oxygen part) and hydrogen. What’s left is the ashes or slag, the mineral part that can be used for building roads and constructing other things. The stuff that won’t settle out into the ash or slag are things like mercury, sulfur products and the ammonia that forms from the nitrogen in the air. These things are cleaned with well-known technology leaving hot, ready to process syngas as the hydrogen and carbon monoxide is now described.

Gasification to liquid fuels is an expensive investment. This spring the highly respected Oil and Gas Journal (March 24, 2008, GTL, CTL Finding Roles in Global Energy Supply) revealed that Sasol of South Africa has between $67 and $82 in each barrel of fuel. Granted the fuel products are comparable to refined petroleum such as diesel, but the price would be close to $2.00 a gallon. That works good when coal is still low cost and oil is a high price. But the plants, as well known as the design and engineering is, are still quite complex and expensive. The National Academies suggested in 2005 that building coal gasification would be $25,000 per barrel. But the current budgets exceed $120,000 per barrel of capacity as with the American Clean Coal Fuel project. It will take a very long time to amortize that amount off the books.

The investment issue will likely see economizing over additional projects. It also explains why these projects are headed to high-density fuels in the middle distillate range like diesel and jet fuel. Airplanes, heavy equipment in mining and construction, farm equipment and other high power uses need high-density fuels. At low loads, such as personal transportation, with a few hours of operation time, would be better served when coal is turned directly into electricity where the efficiency would be three times higher even when charged into a vehicle.

The financial problem is only exacerbated by the carbon capture and sequestration of the approximately 3/4s of the carbon that cannot be hydrogenated by the coal fuel stream to a liquid fuel. That might seem to be an insurmountable problem, but to some algae people the CO2 flow would be a bonanza. The question coming is at what price for the CO2 flow.

That brings us to the old/new innovation of gasification in the coal bed without mining it at all. The history begins with the idea first floated by Sir William Siemens in 1868, then to a UK experiment beginning in 1912 that fell incomplete during WWI. The USSR began research in the 1930s and got to industrial scale in the 1950s and 1960s, but cheap abundant natural gas killed the effort. Uzbekistan still keeps its unit running, though. The Europeans took up underground gasification again in the late 1940s focusing on shallow deposits in narrow seams. Cheap oil and natural gas in the 1960s killed that off, too. The US used Soviet experience beginning in 1972, the Europeans restarted in 1989 to mixed results. But Australia tried again in 1999 to 2003 and should have a commercial startup imminently. China is said to have 16 trials underway.

What keeps the underground technology “back” is the facts of the lessons learned. The coal has to be deep, at least 300 feet and much better deeper than 1000 feet. Seams must be thick enough, more than 15 feet. No water can be nearby. The proportion of ash cannot be over 60%. That thins the applicable locations to only 600 of 847,488 million tons, less than 0.1%. Most coal is going to be dug up and processed at the surface.

In the other hand are the CO and CO2 issues. Fossil fuels are dauntingly effective at sequestering carbon. About 12 billion metric tons of CO2 comes from annual coal use of about 5 billion metric tons. (Gee, sequestered a lot of O2 doesn’t it?) So you liquefy the CO2 cooled to 32 degrees F and pressurize it to 2940 psi for storing it and you still have more than 11 cubic kilometers (A bit more than six tenths of a miles per side each) of cold high-pressure plant food. Which would make quite a lot of algae very happy indeed.

Gasification can be quite efficient, burn the syngas to propel a generator, use the remaining heat to make steam for another generator and whatever CO left over can be run through a catalytic converter to make CO2 releasing even more heat. By then you have a lot of plant food available for adding hydrogen and making liquid fuel. Should the integration of gasification and combining heat uses and the processes to making a plant food at the end be engineering and financially viable the overall efficiency of coal would be much higher. That might reduce the need for so much being dug out in the first place. But when can the algae industry afford to buy CO2? Maybe a bug to just make methane would be more viable.

A Sharp Hat Tip to Al Fin for prodding a deeper look. Thanks Al.