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GreatPoint, a company made by three enterpreneurs from Boston (Andrew Perlman, Avi Goldberg and Aaron Mandell) has announced that they have created a cheap method to obtain natural gas from coal. Obtaining gas from coal (called syngas) is not the latest technology around: At the end of the 19th century, many cities had gas lights and Germany had syngas-powered vehicles from the '20s until the end of WWII. During the Oil crisis in the '70s, the US Government funded research, until syngas became non-competitive against oil prices.
Nevertheless, syngas is not the cleanest fuel you can burn and it's not very efficient to obtain. GreatPoint claims that their method goes even further and can transform syngas into natural gas by using catalysts (possibly potassium) which also allow to use lower temperatures for the process. Natural gas is much cleaner and it's a proven and reliable source of energy, and a lot of automakers have at least some vehicles that can burn CNG.
GreatPoint is also looking for other raw materials to obtain gas for, such as petroleum coke (a refining byproduct) and other plants, in order to gather data and test the catalyst.
For those of you who recognize the name Vinod Khosla as the Daddy Big-bucks of the ethanol scene, take note about his reasons for investing in GreatPoint: "I'm a pragmentalist, not an environmentalist. I'd love to get rid of coal, but politically it won't happen."
Sometimes you have to step away from the daily updates and take a peek at the larger "domestic and global fuels supply situation.' If you're the DOE Task Force on Strategic Unconventional Fuelthat just released a three-volume report on exactly that matter, you'll discover that the "outlook is urgent." The good news is that efficiency gains and other "alternatives" will help reduce the need for oil imports in the coming decades. The task force's "alternatives" to importing oil include: shale oil, heavy crude, tar sands, coal-to-liquids and enhanced oil recovery (EOR) using captured carbon dioxide. Remember, this is a military-based "strategic" fuel document here.
And, as The Energy Blog points out, the report says: "Aggressive development by private industry, and encouraged by government, could supply all of the Department of Defense's domestic fuels demand by 2016, and supply upwards of 7 million barrels per day of domestically produced liquid fuels to domestic markets by 2035." My question, what about the DoD's foreign fuel demand? The U.S. military uses around 312 million barrels of petroleum a day (2006 figure). [UPDATE: that's what the EV World post says, but as you've pointed out in the comments, it can't be right. Daily world petroleum consumption is "just" 84.5 million barrels a day.]
The details, with graphs and analysis, can be found at EV World.
Penn State University has really been on a green roll these last few days, getting three stories featured on our site. One had to do with a novel way to extract hydrogen from water using nanotechnology and sunlight and the second had to do with using coal and papermaking waste to make a liquid fuel. This third story again has to do with coal-based liquid fuels. Instead of looking at paper mills as potential sources for products to add to coal, they are looking to existing fuel refineries. They believe that many different fuels, including jet fuel, gasoline substitutes and diesel substitutes, can be made from coal if you add the correct refinery by-products. Penn State researchers have been working on this idea for a while now, first focusing solely on jet fuel. But, they found that while making the jet fuel they also ended up with certain amounts of fuel oil, diesel fuel and gasoline as co-products.
The refinery by-products of coal tar, refinery solvent and decant oil are being mixed with coal in different fractions. Fuel-grade coke, which is a fuel used in the steel industry, has also been used. Penn State should be familiar with the steel industry being that Pennsylvania is known as the steel capital of the U.S. (and hence the Pittsburgh Steelers football team). No mention was made of the emissions of these various fuels, so we are not suggesting that these are green fuels in any way. In fact, they are almost assuredly not green in any way. None of that means that the fuels will not be used, of course. Hopefully, the nation and the world will be on to bigger and better things by then!
Sometimes, people just need to make the best with what they have got to work with. This is what paper mills are trying to do by burning the "black liquor" waste which is a leftover remnant of chemicals and the lignin. As part of the Kraft process (.pdf link), the leftovers are burned to create steam which turns large generators, which in turn provide electricity for the plant. In fact, enough electricity is generated that they can feed some back into the grid. This Kraft process is used for about 80% of all paper made. But what if there was a better way to generate power than by burning the black liquor for steam generators?
According to Andre Boehman, professor of fuel science at Penn State, "Black liquor is routinely burned in a recovery boiler, but it has more energy value as a synthesis gas which is then used to create other fuels." The researchers are suggesting that the black liquor instead be turned into a syngas and then into DME or dimethyl ether.
Diesel engines can be configured to run on DME, and Penn State actually has a staff shuttle which runs on the fuel. The researchers found that by adding a coal slurry to the black liquor and processing it into the DME, as opposed to using the Fischer Tropsch method, is the right way to use the waste. The researchers further say that DME is close to gasoline in efficiency, but not quite there. But, the black liquor/coal slurry process that they are suggesting would reduce greenhouse gas emissions much more than if only coal were used to make DME. Since the U.S. has so much coal available, until the country is truly weaned off our current power sources, we should clean them up as much as possible. As much as we would all love to see that coal stay in the ground, realistically we know how unlikely that is to happen. For now, let's use it as cleanly as possible.
The headlines for this story indicate that a team from LSU, Oak Ridge National Lab, Clemson, Conoco-Phillips and the Department of Energy are trying to make ethanol a more efficient fuel. I don't know that this is the case, as it seems that what they are trying to do is manufacture ethanol from the U.S. supplies of coal. They appear to be doing this by generating syngas from the coal and then converting the gas to ethanol. The same syngas could potentially be a source for hydrogen as well, but as the story points out, liquid fuels are easier to transport and can fuel vehicles that are already on the roads.
There are many different processes being studied to turn coal into syngas and then into some sort of fuel. This one has plenty of funding, so perhaps people in the know see potential in it. The idea of using the huge amounts of coal here in the U.S. in a way which is cleaner than what we are doing now (and what isn't) has plenty of merit. Using it to move our current fleet of E85 capable vehicles is not a bad start, but hopefully researchers find a good way to use it to generate electricity for our electric cars too.
Arguments could be made about the green credentials of any alternative fuel vehicles such as the chemical content and energy required to produce batteries, the problem of producing and storing hydrogen and more. But here is a racer produced by a group of Chrysler employees that is completely green. OK, not including any energy required for the computers used to design it and the machines used to build it, so no one is completely green.
A team from Chrysler's Pacifica Design Center in California designed and built an Extreme Gravity Racing car relies entirely on gravity for propulsion. Extreme Gravity Racing is form of soap box derby that includes steep hills and sharp turns with speeds up to 60mph. The Chrysler team has come out on top in the elapsed time category two years running. Now if only we could make all roads face downhill so that we could just use gravity propelled cars we would never produce carbon emissions or run out of fuel.
Why did Gov. Schweitzer (D), a long-time supporter of biodiesel, veto a bill designed to give biodiesel users a $500 tax credit? According to Biodiesel Magazine, "Schweitzer said the bill's estimated $3 million economic impact was simply too much to approve without final numbers in place." The veto came back in May and, because it hadn't passed with a two-thirds majority in the first place, a veto override was unlikely.
Still, biodiesel advocates in Big Sky country might take solace in that U.S. Sen. Jon Tester (D) said the compromise energy bill passed this week Thursday will bring help to the state's farmers because it calls for more biofuels. Tester's amendment in said bill, which he inserted at Schweitzer's request, did not survive into the final bill. Biodiesel folks will likely cheer this, too, since the amendment called for $200 million in grants for new coal-to-liquid fuel plants.
Oil from shale is one of the many alternative sources of petroleum that has been researched for the past several decades but to date no one has actually brought it to mass production. As with the tar sands in Alberta, Canada, there are huge quantities of petroleum locked in other materials in North America. Unlike traditional oil drilling, shale and tar sands development is not as simple as just poking a hole in the ground.
Shell is one of the companies trying to develop shale oil, but extracting the oil requires actually heating the shale to high temperatures to literally melt out the oil. The company has now withdrawn one of its three permit applications for shale development because the process requires so much more work. In order to keep the oil from leaking into ground water and keep the water out of the shale, the ground water below the shale deposit has to be frozen. All this heating and cooling requires a great deal of energy input and that drives up the cost of the oil.
In our recent dinner discussion with Gary Smyth and Nick Zielinski, Gary talked about shale, coal and other potential petroleum replacements and he didn't think any of these would ever be economically viable. Shale oil in particular is likely to cost well over $100/barrel, a price point that makes almost any alternative much less expensive. In discussions with people in the auto industry, no one seems to believe shale, coal to liquid or any of these synthetic oil projects are viable or desirable replacements for crude. Throw in the potential environmental disaster that is likely to accompany any shale oil development and all of these projects should be abandoned now.
Many ABG readers may know that the Senate is debating energy issues this week and next. I have snuck into the Senate chambers several times (via C-SPAN) to check on their progress.
As you know, electric vehicles keep appearing on ABG. Some have electricity generated on board only, but the trend is on plug-in hybrids or pure EVs. That means electric power has to be generated. How? Will it be clean or dirty? Will it be renewable like sun or wind or consumable, like coal or gas or nuclear? Will it be cheap or expensive?
The Senate created the Renewable Portfolio Standard in the 1990s to encourage utilities to use at least some renewables in their mix of energy sources. This has proven successful. The electric utilities have dipped their toes in the renewable marketplace and the states have encouraged this practice as well. Many (actually 23) have set goals for their regulated industries such as "20 by 20" – 20 percent generation using renewables by 2020.
Renewables are not, however, identically equal to clean energy, and not all states have sufficient wind or sun to make economic sense. Renewables can be dirty such as improper burning of wood. And clean fuel need not be renewable such as clean coal (burning coal with sequestration of CO2) or nuclear power (clean when being used but not clean when the fuel is expended.) Hence, some Senators have proposed a new standard focusing on clean, not renewable. Hence the new term "Clean Portfolio Standard" or CPS.
Following the Challenge-X presentation presentation at General Motors headquarters last week, a group of bloggers including myself, Matt Kelly of The Next Gear, Lyle Dennis of gm-volt.com, Todd Kaho of Green Car Journal, Scott Anderson of Hydrogen Forecast, Philip Proefrock of Ecogeek, and Matt Mayer of GroovyGreen.com were invited to sit down to dinner with Nick Zielinski and Gary Smyth of General Motors.
Nick is the Chief Engineer for the Volt program and Gary is the Director of Powertrain Systems Research and Development. Each will play a major role in shaping the direction and leading the teams that define the future of transportation at GM. We had a wide ranging discussion that covered topics ranging from a certain concept car as it advances toward production, battery and engine technology, various fuels including coal to liquid and more. I'm not providing a transcript for this one because of the number people in the discussion, and the length but it's definitely worth listening too. Unfortunately a jazz band started playing in the next room about 40 minutes in and that lasts about twenty minutes but you can still hear the discussion. The whole recording runs a few minutes shy of two hours and it's unedited.
China has been moving aggressively to wean itself from reliance on petroleum both because of terrible pollution problems in the big cities like Beijing an Shanghai and because it has few domestic petroleum reserves. Recently the Chinese government has put a lot of emphasis on coal to liquid synthetic petroleum, but now appears to moving away from that path.
Coal to liquid production facilities take a huge amount of investment to build, consume a lot energy themselves and ultimately are not renewable. Instead, the Chinese government will be refocusing on biomass fuels. All of this is good because coal to liquid is probably one of the worst possible options from an environmental standpoint. 119 percent worse.
Even if you disregard the environmental catastrophe that is mountaintop removal, the reasons not to increase the use of coal are numerous. The current popular idea for using coal is convert it to liquid fuel via the Fischer-Tropsch process for use in transportation. Like petroleum, coal is a fossil fuel so burning it or any derivative of it is taking carbon that is trapped in the earth and releasing it into the atmosphere.
While coal to liquid diesel fuel is definitely an alternative fuel, it is most definitely definitely not renewable and absolutely not green. According to the EPA even if coal to liquid production is combined with carbon capture and storage, greenhouse gases will rise by four percent compared to petroleum. Since no one has done a commercial scale coal to liquid plant with carbon capture it is likely that at least early plants will not have it. Without carbon capture, coal to liquid could increase well to tank greenhouse gas emissions by 119% compared to petroleum.
It would appear that the only advantage of coal to liquid technology is the security issue since we have lots of coal. Beyond that it is even more of a boondoggle than corn ethanol.
The Department of Energy's National Energy Technology Laboratory has completed a feasibility study for a proposed Coal to Liquid fuel production facility in Illinois. The proposal would include a plant that would convert 24,500 tons of coal daily into 50,000 barrels of fuel along with 124 MW of electrical power that would go back into the grid. The output would include almost 28,000 barrels per day of diesel that would still require additional additives before it could be used. The rest would be naptha for use as a chemical feedstock.
The input to the plant would be high-sulfur bituminous coal which would be gasified and then the gas would be converted to liquids by the Fischer-Tropsch method. The study projected the $3.65 billion plant would have a twenty percent annual return on investment. The problem remains, though, that coal is a fossil fuel and any fuel you make from it will be releasing carbon from the earth into the atmosphere. While the fuel may displace some imported fuel it does nothing at all about environmental concerns.
Coal is a dirty word. Coal is also a four letter word. That is never going to change, or is it? If Silverado Green Fuels has its way, it just might. I don't have a great understanding of coal power to begin with, and reading this information didn't help too much. But, from what I can tell, the reason they are referring to this as a green fuel is that the fuel burns clean, giving a "carbon burnout of over 99%", as opposed to 97 percent for standard coal in their tests. Additionally, the fuel is cheap, because they are able to use a type of coal previously unwanted. The coal they use contains much higher concentrations of water than more desirable coal types, and the water is reused in the making of the liquid fuel. It appears that the main use of this "Greenfuel" is for burners set up to use coal gasification. I will take a "wait and see" attitude towards this new fuel, but if what they are claiming is true, the U.S. in particular could gain much from the use of this new fuel source.
The company has set up operations in Mississippi and has begun building a plant in that state. The Department of Defense plans to purchase fuel from this new plant, and the Department of Energy is keeping tabs on their progress.
Chemical engineers from Purdue University are proposing an environmentally-friendly process for producing liquid fuels from biomass. It involves adding hydrogen during the gasification step, which suppresses the formation of carbon dioxide and converts all the carbon atoms to fuel. Normally when you break down a biomass or coal by gasification, 60 to 70 percent of the carbon atoms are lost to the atmosphere as carbon dioxide, unless it's captured or sequestered. Using the Purdue process, which is called H2CAR, no carbon atoms would be lost.
Engineers say the idea is to treat the biomass as a supplier of carbon atoms, not just as an energy source.
The problem, of course, is that you need an efficient supply of hydrogen for this process, and that means using energy to pull it away from another source such as water. We've gone through this argument with those proposing a hydrogen economy. I wonder, if we eventually find a carbon-free method or renewable energy source to produce hydrogen, why not just put the hydrogen in a fuel-cell vehicle? It would seem to be an unnecessary extra step to cultivate the biomass material and process it into fuel, and then have to distribute it to vehicles that eventually will burn it and create CO2 emissions.
Purdue officials say hydrogen vehicles would require a major change in the infrastructure and advancements in battery and fuel cell technology. My point is that we're supposed to be striving for carbon-free emissions from vehicles. Using internal-combustion engines to burn carbon-based fuel, regardless of how clean it was produced, continues the problem.
GreatPoint, a company made by three enterpreneurs from Boston (Andrew Perlman, Avi Goldberg and Aaron Mandell) has announced that they have created a cheap method to obtain natural gas from coal. Obtaining gas from coal (called syngas) is not the latest technology around: At the end of the 19th century, many cities had gas lights and Germany had syngas-powered vehicles from the '20s until the end of WWII. During the Oil crisis in the '70s, the US Government funded research, until syngas became non-competitive against oil prices. 
Following the Challenge-X presentation presentation at General Motors headquarters last week, a group of bloggers including myself, Matt Kelly of The Next Gear, Lyle Dennis of 
China has been moving aggressively to wean itself from reliance on petroleum both because of terrible pollution problems in the big cities like Beijing an Shanghai and because it has few domestic petroleum reserves. Recently the Chinese government has put a lot of emphasis on coal to liquid synthetic petroleum, but now appears to moving away from that path. 
