134 octane CTL gasoline produced by WVU.
Converting Coal: State Develops an Opportunity
Posted 7/27/2006 06:00 AM
Mountain State researchers look for ways to take advantage of coal conversion.
Story by Pam Kasey Email | Bio
Turning coal into liquid fuels is a decades-old technology. Yet because it has been economical only in places denied petroleum through embargo -- Nazi Germany during World War II and South Africa under apartheid -- it is not yet a mature one.
Now, though, with oil expensive everywhere, research is gearing up. West Virginia researchers are at the forefront.
Progress in China
The world's two largest energy-consuming countries, the U.S. at number one and China at number two, both are looking to decrease their dependence on foreign oil through liquefaction of their abundant domestic coal resources.
As part of China's effort, the Chinese coal company Shenhua Group is constructing the world's first direct coal liquefaction plant -- a plant that will transform coal directly into liquid fuels rather than gasifying it first -- and the Natural Resource Analysis Center at West Virginia University is studying the plant's environmental and economic impacts.
NRAC Director Jerald Fletcher and faculty member Qingyun Sun visited Inner Mongolia, where the plant's first reactor was under construction.
"It's the largest reactor that's ever been built," Fletcher said. "It's going to put out 10,000 barrels (of liquid fuel) a day."
The major product will be diesel, he said.
Direct liquefaction is untested at this scale, so the U.S. Department of Energy funded NRAC to study the plant's economic and environmental impacts.
"The indirect process is more flexible," Fletcher explained. "You first turn the material into synthetic gas, syngas. ... Then you use other processes to regenerate the products you're after."
That can include a range of fuels, chemicals and hydrogen.
But "theoretically, direct liquefaction" -- which skips the syngas step -- "is more efficient," he said.
Environmental impacts may be significant. For example, three to four barrels of water will be needed for every barrel of liquid fuel output, Fletcher said. And Shenhua doesn't know yet what it will do with the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide that's released by the process.
But Xiangkun Ren, director of Shenhua Coal Liquefaction Research Institute, said he believes the plant will provide valuable information toward the development of direct coal liquefaction technology worldwide.
The plant is expected to go into operation in 2007.
Progress at Home
Right here at home, about two months ago, carbon products researchers at WVU succeeded in making gasoline from coal by using a solvent-based process that is a variant of direct liquefaction, according to Elliot Kennel, administrative coordinator for carbon products research.
The gasoline's octane rating tested out at 134 -- compared with 87 to 92 at local filling stations.
"If this were a baseball game, we knocked the ball out of the park," Kennel said.
"We've performed a heavy metals test and did very well, and so our next step is to test this in an actual automobile engine and obtain tailpipe emissions," he said.
That should happen in the next couple of weeks.
He said he hasn't tried it in his own car yet, although he's been tempted.
Gasoline is just one of a suite of hydrocarbons Kennel's group aims to produce from coal.
Think of it as a buffalo to the American Indian, he said.
"They used to make sure they used every single part of the buffalo and didn't waste any of it," he said." Our objective is the same with the coal."
Some of the processes have been patented toward a commercialization timeline that could bring a plant to create synthetic pitches in perhaps two years, a plant after that to produce coke, fuels and hydrogen and gasoline at the pump in as little as seven years.
Kennel's research is funded by the Department of Energy, and he said he hopes ultimately to co-locate a plant with the DOE's FutureGen coal-fueled zero-emissions power plant -- a plant that it announced on July 25 will not be built in West Virginia but in Illinois or Texas.
Research Consortium
Here's a plan for getting beyond U.S. dependence on foreign oil: 50 coal-fueled plants, each of which would produce 50,000 barrels of liquid fuels a day. That production would be enough to completely displace U.S. oil imports.
This plan was proposed by Gerald Huffman, director of the University of Kentucky-based Consortium for Fossil Fuel Science, when he spoke at consortium member WVU last November.
He still thinks it's a good one.
"It becomes more and more realistic as the price of oil goes higher and higher, and I don't see any end in sight to that," he said in a recent interview.
CFFS researchers are studying processes to make coal conversion to liquid fuels and to hydrogen more efficient. Presentations at the group's gathering at the Resort at Glade Springs in Raleigh County this weekend include technical titles such as "Chain Initiation in the Fischer-Tropsch Synthesis with Acetylene."
But the basic technology already is available for coal conversion to transportation fuels to begin in the U.S., Huffman said.
What is needed, he said, is for investors to have a guaranteed market. He'd like to see the U.S. military step up.
"I don't know if they would make such an assurance," he said, "but if they were to say, 'If you build it, we'll guarantee that we'll take your product at no less than $60 a barrel,' I think it might happen."
Even without that, Huffman believes coal-to-liquids is just a matter of time. He has predicted that coal-derived fuels will replace at least a quarter of petroleum-based fuel consumption within 30 years with a little help, he hopes, from CFFS research.
"We are going to have to use our coal eventually to drive our cars," he said. "I don't see any way around that."
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