Shell aims to combine coal gasification with gas-to-diesel technology in an alliance with coal miner Anglo American.
Coal Gasification is a well-known, tried and true technology, dating back to the mid-1800s.
FORBES: Underground Coal Gasification: A Trend Worth Watching
Cinergy, an American utility just bought by Duke, is looking into coal gasification and carbon sequestration in Indiana.
With shale gas still very cheap in North America, Underground Coal Gasification may not make major progress on this continent anytime soon.
FORBES: Underground Coal Gasification: A Trend Worth Watching
The Weyburn-Midale CO2 project is burying carbon dioxide from a coal gasification plant in North Dakota in a depleted oil field in Saskatchewan.
Ohio-based American Electric Power, the largest consumer of coal in the U.S., is trying to build the country's first super-efficient commercial-scale coal gasification plant.
Another crucial hire was Donald Anthony, now chief technology officer, a former Bechtel executive who'd built the two largest coal gasification plants in North America.
In China, Shell technology is at the center of 15 coal gasification plants being built to produce chemical feedstocks at a lower cost than using natural gas.
Cleaner coal technologies such as coal gasification will reduce that need by as much as half but, emerging concepts like carbon capture and burial could increase consumption between 30-100 percent.
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There's nothing new about coal gasification--Hitler ran his war machine on it--but GE was only in the turbine side of the business until it bought ChevronTexaco's coal gasification business last year.
During the energy crisis of the late 1970s the government financed research into catalysts for coal gasification, only to drop the projects after oil prices fell and natural gas was deregulated.
At that time underground coal gasification (UCG, also known as in-situ coal gasification or ISCG) was increasingly seen as a relatively low-impact way of tapping the huge US coal resource, while potentially managing emissions.
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The coal sector can maintain its pertinence, he insists, but only if it pursues a new path by embracing investments in coal gasification and carbon capture and sequestration tools that improve efficiencies and reduce emission levels, all of which would give coal leverage in competitive energy markets.
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Hodel's Summit Power Group aims to build the first low-emissions coal-gasification power plant in oil-rich west Texas.
Gasification of coal offers the potential to turn dirty burning hydrocarbons into cleaner burning liquid fuels, such as synthetic natural gas, jet fuel and gasoline, as well as hydrogen for fuel cell use, a developing field.
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At a high temperature and pressure, gasification converts coal, or other carbon fuels, into synthesis gas that is either burned in a turbine to produce electricity, as in Summit's case, or turned into other products, like diesel oil, fertilizer and pipeline-quality natural gas.
Wison also last year cooperated with Shell Global Solutions to jointly develop a new hybrid gasification technology to convert coal into more valuable products.
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Shell's gasification technique consists of partially combusting pulverized coal to yield carbon monoxide and hydrogen gas, which combine to form synthetic natural gas.
Perlman says the process consumes about 15% of the energy contained in the coal going in, far more efficient than the integrated gasification combined-cycle plants promoted by General Electric.
During gasification, the carbon dioxide generated from the coal or other feedstock, like biofuels, is captured and then used to inject deep into the earth as part of oil recovery or otherwise sequestered in a geologic formation.
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Perlman says the process consumes about 15% of the energy contained in the coal going in, far more efficient than the integrated gasification combined-cycle plants promoted by General Electric (nyse: GE - news - people ).
Two other techniques, called gasification and oxy-combustion, work by reacting coal with pure oxygen rather than air, and thus produce exhausts that require little treatment before burial.
The gasification process scrubs out most of the heavy pollutants in coal.
To those concerned about emissions, it emphasized that the 400, 000-barrel-a-day refinery, plus an integrated gasification combined cycle plant, could sequester carbon more cheaply than a coal plant.
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