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Tuesday, January 30, 2007

Cheaper Natural Gas from Coal

Great Point says that its catalytic process could put coal back in your basement.

By Peter Fairley

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Great Point Energy uses its proprietary catalysts to produce 13,000 to 14,000 cubic meters of natural gas per day from coal at this Des Plaines, IL, gasification pilot plant.
Credit: Great Point Energy

In the second half of the 20th century, oil- and natural gas-burning furnaces drove coal out of the home-heating business across North America. But if Great Point Energy--a Boston-area startup with a low-cost process for converting coal into pipeline-grade natural gas--has its way, coal may start keeping us toasty again before long.

Great Point Energy of Cambridge, MA, says its process is cheaper and more reliable than drilling for new natural gas or importing liquefied natural gas from the same unstable regions. "We can take coal out of the ground and put it in a natural-gas pipeline for less than the cost of new natural-gas drilling and exploration activities," says CEO Andrew Perlman.

Traditional coal-to-methane plants like the 1970s-era Dakota Gasification plant in Beulah, ND, and new plants envisioned by General Electric (GE) and ConocoPhillips are costly because they require a series of chemical plants operating at a wide range of conditions. In these plants, cryogenic equipment operating just a few degrees above absolute zero feeds pure oxygen to the gasifier, where coal baked to up to 2,500 ºF breaks down into a mixture of carbon monoxide and hydrogen called syngas. From there, the syngas is subsequently catalytically transformed into high-grade methane in a separate reactor.

In contrast, Great Point compresses the process into one single, efficient reactor by moving the catalysts into the gasifier itself. The key is a proprietary, recyclable catalyst developed in house with help from gasification and catalysis experts at Southern Illinois University, the University of Toronto, and the University of Tennessee, among others. The catalyst (which Perlman cagily describes as "a formulation of abundant low-cost metals") lowers the amount of heat required to gasify coal and simultaneously transforms the gasified coal into methane. In fact, the heat released in the syngas-to-methane step is sufficient to sustain the gasification, eliminating the need to fire up the reactions with purified oxygen. "It's perfectly heat balanced," says Perlman.

On the strength of lab-scale demonstrations with its catalyst, Perlman and his partners have picked up $37 million from venture-capital firms Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, and Advanced Technology Ventures to test their catalyst in a pilot plant. Rather than building a pilot plant from scratch, Great Point accelerated the process by leasing one from the utility-supported Gas Technology Institute at Des Plaines, IL. Perlman says Great Point ran the plant's 14-inch-in-diameter, 60-foot-high gasifier for a week in November with the firm's proprietary catalyst, converting Illinois Powder River Basin low-sulfur coal into between 13,000 and 14,000 cubic feet of natural gas per day. He anticipates that a second run this spring will give him and his partners the data they need to take the next step: designing a larger but still precommercial plant that he expects to have operating by 2009. Subsequent testing at Des Plaines will evaluate the catalysts with dirtier yet more energetic petroleum coke, a byproduct that the average refinery generates at the rate of 5,000 to 10,000 tons per day--more than enough to fuel a commercial-scale synthetic-gas plant.

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Comments

  • Natural gas from coal
    protn7 on 01/30/2007 at 10:27 AM
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    18
    Avg Rating:
    2/5
    Sequester all of the CO2 from power plants to get 20 in ten.
    Rate this comment: 12345
  • BURP
    abcarterjr on 01/30/2007 at 12:59 PM
    Posts:
    45
    Avg Rating:
    4/5
    Liquidfied CO2 gas bomb underneath an oil tanker
    sinks ship in a burp of bubbles when bubbles
    dissipate ghost ship bobs up again??
    Rate this comment: 12345
    • Re: BURP
      abcarterjr on 01/30/2007 at 5:13 PM
      Posts:
      45
      Avg Rating:
      4/5
      Could high pressure CO2 fracture geothermal steam
      well fields into a reliable source of heat?
      Rate this comment: 12345
  • Not buying it
    westpower on 02/01/2007 at 11:48 PM
    Posts:
    1
    I knew guys working with exxon on this 20 years ago and they thought it was a doe boondoggle then.  They still think it is now. They couldn't get it to work, so how are these 28 year old kids from the software industry going to do it? sorry, not buying it.
    Rate this comment: 12345
    • Re: Not buying it
      bbindlepete on 03/24/2007 at 9:14 AM
      Posts:
      1
      Avg Rating:
      1/5
      The field of catalytic chemistry has changed sincee the days of Exxon Donor Solvent. Have you kept up with the photocatalytic conversions? Sunlight and water to hydrogen and oxygen. A nice neat split. Close the loop with a fuel cell and off to tomorrow.

      Be well  
      Rate this comment: 12345
    • Re: Not buying it
      kiewolf on 04/21/2007 at 12:34 PM
      Posts:
      1
      I would guess that these 28 year old kids, much like Bill Gates did, have the technical imagination and scientific intellect to design just what they did.  If all engineers, scientists, and entrepenuers thought as you do, we would all still be riding horses and using the out house.
      Rate this comment: 12345
      • Re: Not buying it
        jabailo on 06/16/2007 at 9:25 PM
        Posts:
        4
        Avg Rating:
        5/5

        Why is the Technology Review so obsessed with "Bill Gates"?   He never invented anything.
        Rate this comment: 12345
  • geography
    walt on 02/05/2007 at 1:09 AM
    Posts:
    13
    Avg Rating:
    3/5
    These guys a big-time operators:  they have moved the Powder River Basin from Wyoming to Illinois.
    Rate this comment: 12345
  • Comment
    mnlbison on 08/17/2007 at 5:48 AM
    Posts:
    1
    The technology was developed in the 1930's by the Germans as an alternative to oil, then further advanced by South Africa during the embargoes on that country. World GTL (gas-to-liquid) does the same thing with natural gas and a different catalyst in what is basically a methanol plant. GE is in a joint venture building many coal-to-diesel plants in China, so the technology is not pie-in-the-sky.
    Rate this comment: 12345
  • This plus Algae Growing solves the problem
    ecpioneer on 06/13/2008 at 7:38 PM
    Posts:
    1
    The producers of natural gas from coal yield carbon dioxide. C02 is gold to Algae growers. We are ready to setup an Algae growing factory using our local pig farm manure and C02 in photobioreactors. We need the natural gas from coal and shale and convert cars to compressed natural gas for about 2000 usd. These 2 ideas alone could solve our energy problems. Where is our USA government leaders on this? We can easily have $2 a gallon fuel forever. Vote for me as president and this is how I will do it.
    Rate this comment: 12345
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