Shell aims to combine coal gasification with gas-to-diesel technology in an alliance with coal miner Anglo American.
The oil goes into a de-gasification plant, and then four-fifths of it is stored for export.
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Coal Gasification is a well-known, tried and true technology, dating back to the mid-1800s.
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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.
Cinergy, an American utility just bought by Duke, is looking into coal gasification and carbon sequestration in Indiana.
The gasification process scrubs out most of the heavy pollutants in coal.
With shale gas still very cheap in North America, Underground Coal Gasification may not make major progress on this continent anytime soon.
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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.
The Weyburn-Midale CO2 project is burying carbon dioxide from a coal gasification plant in North Dakota in a depleted oil field in Saskatchewan.
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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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.
Or it can produce chemical feedstocks, at a lower cost than natural gas, as at the 15 gasification plants being built, using Shell technology, in China.
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.
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.
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 biofuel will be produced through a high-temperature gasification process, and will also result in annual production of 50, 000 tons of biodiesel, bionaptha, and 20 MW of electricity.
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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.
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.
General Electric is part of several announced deals, including a project to expand high-speed rail in the U.S. using Chinese technology and a joint effort with Shenhua Gasification to building clean energy generators.
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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Graves has touted gasification for over 20 years.
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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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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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The two other possibilities, which were ruled out, were on-island heat treatment - in an incinerator, gasification or pyrolysis plant - or a further stage of processing to produce a fuel product, which would also be shipped off-island.
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