Press

Gasification Technologies Moving World Away From Petroleum; Houston Workshop Explores Energy Paradigm Shift
Wednesday, November 1, 2006 8:00 AM CT

Sustained high-energy prices for the foreseeable future resulting from the growing global demand from the emerging Chinese, Indian and other economies as well as constrained supply have spurred governments, project developers, technology providers and the world's financial institutions to firmly back the development of alternative energy sources, especially the gasification of coal, petroleum coke and biomass.

This dynamic global trend combined with legitimate concerns from the scientific community about global warming and the need for climate change mitigation has accelerated the acceptance and commercialization of gasification technology that will incorporate the capture and sequestration of carbon dioxide for enhanced oil recovery and the permanent, safe storage of that greenhouse gas in deep, underground saline aquifers.

The need to significantly increase supplies of synthetic gas from clean sources to generate electricity and produce clean transportation fuels, hydrogen, petrochemicals, fertilizers and substitute natural gas has never been greater. The development of these coal-based plants are moving ahead now with incentives from the Energy Policy Act of 2005 and the sheer determination of entrepreneurs that no longer want to be dependent on oil and natural gas from politically unstable regions of the world.

International governments and private companies are quickly coming together in the FutureGen Alliance to learn how to produce hydrogen from abundant coal resources in a clean and efficient manner to generate electricity and to provide it to refineries to produce clean low-sulfur fuels and to eventually fuel a clean, environmentally benign hydrogen-based transportation infrastructure.

The combustion of coal has also been traditionally used for power generation and steelmaking. Now coal-derived syngas cannot only be used for large-scale operations, but also has the potential to provide relief to small-to-medium-scale industrial facilities that are forced to rely on natural gas with its volatile pricing. Syngas can be the stable energy source that will allow flourishing businesses to grow by being able to efficiently expand and modernize manufacturing plants and factories.

"Planning, financing, expanding and guaranteeing the overall profitability of a manufacturing business for example would be much easier if the company owner could depend on having predictable long-range energy prices based on syngas derived from coal, petcoke or biomass," explains Tim Cornitius, syngas analyst, Zeus Development Corporation, an energy research and publishing firm. "Retail electricity prices could also become stable if they were based on clean coal as a fuel instead of natural gas. Imagine the profitability and dependability of the airlines industry if it could depend on coal-based jet fuel that was no longer tied to the price of crude oil."

December 6, 2006, SYNGAS Refiner will host the first annual Gasification Technologies Outlook in Houston to address these issues. Workshop attendees will learn the history of gasification as well as the current and, most importantly, the future impact of these technologies that will enable the global economy to no longer be based on petroleum, but to use coal and renewable biomass sources such as agricultural, forestry and animal wastes. They will find out the role substitute natural gas will have in replacing natural gas and supplementing LNG supplies and how coal liquids can be transported and used in existing and proposed gas-fired power plants.