Improved Gasification and Fischer-Tropsch for Age of Liquid Fuels

It is good to be realistic at the beginning of a new year. One dose of realism which energy observers must force themselves to swallow, is that the near-term electrification of transportation has been over-hyped. Which means that we will need to find as many sources of liquid fuels as we can -- just in case the US ever gets rid of the Obama regime so as to allow the necessary economic re-structuring for a global economy.

Gasification of coal and biomass hold a vast potential for new liquid fuels. So any improvement in gasification of F-T technology should be welcome in an energy-starved environment.

In a paper published in the ACS journal Energy & Fuels, Zhang et al. note that in current major commercial gasification technologies, the series of mutually interactive reactions are fully coupled in a singe gasification reactor. The proposed decoupling gasification (DCG) facilitates or suppresses the interactive effects between the separated and other reactions. The paper generalizes the decoupling approach into two types: isolating and synergizing.

The decoupled reactions can be arranged into two isolated reactors to separate their products to realize polygeneration and also suppress the intereffects between the products of the decoupled reactions. This kind of decoupling approach is called “isolating” decoupling, and the resulting technology integrates usually two reactors, thus calling it “dual-bed” technology.

Another approach of decoupling is termed as “synergizing” decoupling...In this method, the decoupled reactions are rearranged to facilitate the beneficial interactions or to suppress the undesired interactions between the linked reactions (for example, the effect of the products from one reaction on the other reaction). Via this kind of decoupling, it is expected to lower pollutant formation, enable high product quality and high conversion efficiency, and/or enhance the fuel adaptability of the technology.
—Zhang et al. _GCC

More efficient catalytic synthesis of high value fuels would also make a big difference in the economics of new liquid fuels production.

A team from Shiraz University in Iran is proposing a novel reactor configuration for Fischer-Tropsch synthesis (FTS) that utilizes a fixed-bed water perm-selective membrane reactor followed by a fluidized-bed hydrogen perm-selective membrane reactor. The concept (FMFMDR) produces gasoline from synthesis gas.

The walls of the tubes of a fixed-bed reactor (water-cooled reactor) in a FMFMDR configuration are coated by a high water perm-selective membrane layer. In this configuration, two membrane reactors instead of one membrane reactor are developed for FTS reactions.

The researchers used a one-dimensional heterogeneous model to investigate the performance of FMFMDR. A paper on their work is in press in the journal Energy. _GCC

2010 was supposed to be the year of the electric car, but in fact California itself gulped ever more liquid fuels in 2010 and looks to swallow even more gasoline and diesel in 2011.

All of the lefty-Luddite "cures" for energy shortages are nothing but Austrian wall-paper meant to cover the worsening problems, to keep the public complacent in their cattle-cars until time to open the doors on the great human die-off, the ultimate goal of the leftist greens.