Coal Polygeneration: Cleaner, More Efficient Coal

A new special report from Nexant provides information on the exciting new possiblities from the co-production of power,chemicals, or fuels using clean and efficient coal gasification technologies.

Advanced coal gasification technologies have raised the efficiency of coal conversion far above that of conventional coal combustion. As a result, these advanced technologies offer the promise of economically and environmentally acceptable uses of coal for chemicals and liquid fuels.

One of the more promising advanced development concepts is polygeneration from coal. Polygeneration involves the gasification (or conversion) of coal to produce synthesis gas (syngas) that can be simultaneously used for the generation of electricity and in the manufacture of chemicals and liquid fuels. This approach offers an integrated strategy for optimizing the value of coal.

In polygeneration from coal, electricity is produced in conventional integrated gasification/ steam turbine combined cycle (IGCC) systems, while commodity chemicals (methanol, ammonia, and their derivatives such as olefins and acetic acid from methanol and fertilizers from ammonia) or liquid fuels (methanol, diesel, dimethyl ether (DME), and gasoline) are produced via state-of-the-art chemical processes.

Since 2006, the unprecedented rise in prices of crude oil and other forms/sources of energy, along with a range of technology advances, has resulted in a significant favorable change in coal's potential investment economics. In the interim, despite price volatility, mid-2008 prices are still well above those in the first quarter of 2008. Thus, we observe that many petrochemicals can now be made very competitively on a full cost basis by using syngas made via polygeneration. Polygeneration-based syngas as a feedstock is demonstrating increasing competitiveness. _Nexant

The greatest obstacle to the use of clean, efficient coal polygeneration is the US Congress--particularly Nancy Pelosi, Barbara Boxer, Harry Reid, and their co-religionist US Congressional believers in the orthodoxy of carbon hysteria. Boxer, Pelosi, and their ilk have brought the US economy to the brink of disaster, and US energy supplies to a choking point. Religion and legislation should not be allowed to mix, but Pelosi and Boxer are mixing it up at a record pace.

If US voters decide in favour of the carbon hysteria orthodoxy in November, by giving Boxer and Pelosi's co-religionists complete control of the US government, they will have slit their own throats. Such a suicidal gesture will not be the end, but it will be the acceleration of some very bad times.