New Sources of Oil and Gas: Gases from Coal; Liquid Fuels from Coal, Shale, Tar Sands, and Heavy Oil Sources
By S Penner, S B Alpert and V Bendanillo
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New Sources of Oil and Gas - S Penner
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PREFACE
In 1978, senior officials of the U. S. Department of Energy established a joint industry-university-government committee, known as the Fossil Energy Research Working Group (FERWG). FERWG was asked to perform a detailed evaluation of research and development issues relating to new sources of oil and gas from coal, oil shale, heavy oil sources, and tar sands. Abbreviated versions of the lengthy FERWG reports have been published previously in Energy, the International Journal. These papers are here reprinted because they provide a coherent and up-to-date account of developing fossil-fuel technologies that are likely to represent the world’s primary energy sources for a very long time to come.
It is our hope that the FERWG studies will be of interest to industry executives and engineers, to governmental officials and planners, as well as to university scientists and engineers.
Chairman. S.S. PENNER, FERWG
RESEARCH NEEDS FOR COAL GASIFICATION AND COAL LIQUEFACTION
†
S.S. PENNER‡, ‡Energy Center and Department of Applied Mechanics and Engineering Sciences, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92093, U.S.A.
S.B. ALPERT, V. BENDANILLO, J. CLARDY, L.E. FURLONG, F. LEDER, L. LEES, E. REICHL, J. ROSS, R.P. SIEG, A.M. SQUIRES and J. THOMAS
Abstract
We describe essential features of developing coal-gasification and coal-liquefaction technologies and summarize the current development status and important R&D needs for these processes.
1 INTRODUCTION
The Fossil Energy Research Working Group (FEW), at the request of J. M. Deutch (now Under Secretary of DOE), E. Frieman (now Director, Office of Energy Research) and G. Fumich, Jr. (now Assistant Secretary for Fossil Energy), has reviewed and evaluated DOE-funded coal-gasification and coal-liquefaction technologies. These studies were performed in order to provide an independent assessment of critical research areas that affect the long-term development of these important coal-conversion processes. The findings of FEW have been published in two extensive documents¹,² from which this paper has been abstracted.
Members of FEW performed extensive schedules of site visits to process-development units and facilities, as well as to university and DOE laboratories, in order to familiarize themselves with current and planned research programs. Site-visit reports and evaluations, with emphasis on identified process and fundamental research needs, were prepared by participating FERWG members after each site visit.
FERWG members held numerous discussions with the Under Secretary of DOE, the Director of the Office of Energy Research, the Assistant Secretary for Fossil Energy, members of their staffs, DOE program managers, directors of laboratories and development engineers who are involved in coal-gasification and in coal-liquefaction research and development (R&D) in both industrial and governmental organizations, and university-based scientists and engineers who perform research related to coal-liquefaction studies. In addition, FERWG received written comments from experts on coal gasification and liquefaction.
2 COAL GASIFICATION
Coal-gasification technologies and processes have been developed and commercialized for a long time. Although the proliferation of named and identified technologies is very large (a National Research Council Report³ identifies 37 individual representative processes
among perhaps 180 gasification technologies), the number of generically different, aboveground gasifiers is closer to 7 (e.g. fixed-bed gasifiers that produce dry ash or slag; fluidized-bed gasifiers that produce dry or agglomerating ash; entrained-flow gasifiers that yield dry ash or slag during primary gasification; and molten-bath gasifiers).
2.1 Introduction
The coal gasification industry has been well established for some time, and the large body of accumulated knowledge and experience must be taken into account, relearned if necessary, appreciated, and applied. Numerous differing gasification techniques are necessary to produce the desired variety of products, including low-, medium-, and high-Btu gas, from the wide range of available coal feedstocks. The needs of the electric power industry for gasification products are different from those of the gas utilities and these, in turn, differ from the requirements for production of, for example, chemical feedstocks, industrial power, and steam generation. The steady increase in environmental regulations has brought about the need for gas cleanup processes.
Coal gasification is a mature technology but it is not now economically competitive, and potentially attractive alternatives to the Lurgi gasifier have been beset by operational difficulties of every conceivable variety. There have been surprises,
and, according to W. G. Schlinger (manager of the Texaco entrained, downflow coal-gasification process), the absence of surprises
on scaling would itself be surprising.
Coal-gasification technologies are very sophisticated. Proposals for technological implementation clearly lead understanding and mundane operational problems may reflect gaps in basic understanding. For example, clinker formation in pilot-scale gasifiers may perhaps be elucidated through research on (i) the mechanisms and rates of nucleation during gas-phase combustion; (ii) forces between tiny particles, agglomeration, and growth kinetics on collisions between particles; (iii) surface forces in nonuniform structures of carbon and hydrogen; (iv) surface physics; and (v) surface kinetics. Coal scientists have had little impact on the development programs in the past, partly because the real problems are dirty
, are extraordinarily complex, and do not lend themselves to ready modeling or useful first-order descriptions.
The U.S. Bureau of Mines Mineral Industry Survey of 1 January 1974 yielded a demonstrated coal reserve base of 437 × 10⁹ tons. This number must be multiplied by a fraction recoverable for use (usually taken to be 0.5) and also reduced somewhat to correct low-Btu coals to some standard (e.g. 25 × 10⁶Btu/ton). Thus, demonstrated recoverable coal reserves are about 200 × 10⁹ tons, worth trillions of 1979 dollars. The ultimately recoverable resource, according to P. Averitt (1967), may be as large as 3.2 × 10¹² tons (not including Alaskan resources). At reasonable costing, the value of these ultimately available resources may exceed $50 trillion (1978 dollars), of which perhaps one-third ($15–$20 trillion) may well become attributable to coal gasification processing.
General background information, thermodynamic analyses, and descriptive material on selected process configurations appear in textbooks.⁴,⁵
2.2 Applications of coal-gasification technologies
There are three principal areas for application of coal-gasification products. The gas-distribution companies require high-Btu syngas (SNG) that may be freely intermingled with natural gas. Electric utilities and industrial users of gaseous fuel generally find low-Btu gas most cost effective. The chemical process industries prefer mixtures of carbon monoxide (CO) and hydrogen (H2), as contained in medium-Btu gas.
The user-oriented presentations in this chapter describe the initial process-related R&D needs of the coal-gasification industries.
2.2.1 High-Btu gas for the gas industry
The main interest of the gas utilities in coal gasification is to produce high-Btu, pipeline-quality SNG to augment the available supplies of natural gas. Current cost projections (1976–78) for a 250 billion Btu per day (Btu/d) coal-gasification plant to produce SNG, regardless of the process selected, will require a capital outlay of well over $1 billion. This amount approaches the total worth of the Nation’s largest utilities. Thus, one such coal-gasification plant could roughly double the net worth of a large gas utility, while adding only a small amount (∼ 10–15%) to the utility’s gas supply.
Because of the high capital requirements, coal-gasification plants are difficult to finance and non-technical problems, primarily financial and regulatory uncertainties, are generally the principal obstacles to coal-gasification processes. At present prices of alternative energy sources, technical breakthroughs are needed to make the financial, economic, and regulatory aspects of the coal-gasification technologies more attractive.
The Lurgi process is commercially available for coal gasification to produce high-Btu gas, and all of the commercial plants currently proposed for SNG production in the United States will be using this technology. Thus, the Lurgi process serves as the baseline for measuring the economic potentials of technical improvements in coal gasification. Table 1 shows the cost breakdown of a commercial Lurgi plant using noncaking Western coals as reported by WESCO. Reference to Table 1 leads to the following conclusions: (a) The gasification section accounts for only about 15% of the total investment; however, its construction impacts heavily on what processes or operations are needed before and after the gasifier. (b) Gas purification and upgrading represent a high-cost area (27.3%) for high-Btu gas plants. For coal-gasification plants for electric power generation, only gas purification is required. (c) The costs of steam and oxygen plants (26.6%) exceed those of the gasification section.
Table 1
Cost breakdown for a Lurgi gasification plant using non-caking Western coals. Source: Private communication between Western Coal Gasification Company (WESCO) and V. Bendanillo, GRI.
Research directed toward improving high-cost areas through process simplification and the use of improved materials, equipment, and instrumentation should reduce costs and increase plant operability and reliability.
2.2.2 Low-Btu gas for electric power systems
Clean gaseous fuel can be produced and used in electric power systems by either (a) combined-cycle turbogenerators, (b) fuel-cell systems, or (c) direct firing of the fuel gas in boilers.
In any of these cases, electric-generating equipment is not simply added to a coal-gasification plant. Coal-gasification plants must be highly integrated with the power equipment in order to be cost-competitive with other electricity-generating systems. An operating, combined-cycle generating plant based on coal has not yet been built and operated in the United States. The Steag Lünen plant has operated in West Germany at a scale of 170 MWe. It uses Lurgi coal gasification to produce fuel gas, which is combusted in a pressurized boiler. The pressurized flue gas is then used to generate electricity in a power-recovery turbine. In the Lünen experience: (a) environmental requirements are not comparable to those in the United States; (b) the configuration of the plant yields relatively low overall system efficiency; (c) the cycle is not representative of equipment offered in the United States; (d) improvements to increase efficiency and make the system competitive with present electricity-generating systems using coal combustion and flue-gas cleaning are improbable.
A Gasifier characteristics for the power industry
The objective of advanced electric systems is the integrated operation of coal gasifiers with combined-cycle electric systems. Utility experience with gas-turbine, combined-cycle systems, which use oil or gas, corresponds to about 10,000 MWe of planned and installed capacity. To take advantage of this background, coal gasifiers should meet desirable criteria (see Table 2 of Ref. 1). No single gasifier technology can satisfy all of these criteria; however, a number of the second-generation coal gasifiers (now operating at scales in excess of 100 tons/d) incorporate satisfactory compromises that should be applied to electric power generation. Coal-gasification plants for electric power must emphasize factors relating to the economic competitiveness of presently available high-capacity generating systems that produce power in a cost-effective manner and meet today’s environmental standards.
Table 2
Comparison of coal-gasification and pulverized-coal power plants (plant capacity = 1000 MWe); costs are given in mid-1976 dollars. Source: The Electric Power Research Institute, Palo Alto, California.
B Incentives for combined-cycle generation
In Table 2, we summarize and compare the estimated performance characteristics of coal-gasification and pulverized-coal powerplants. Powerplants using coal gasification are seen to be competitive; they provide for better resource utilization of coal and water and they markedly reduce emissions. The potential for improvements is large and involves advanced, high-reliability gas turbines, as well as advances in engineering and improved cycle configurations; the influence of the gasification process on the potential for further improvement is small.
Of high priority for the power industry is integration of component units from separate technologies into an optimal system to assure that coal gasification is used to generate electricity in a reliable and economically competitive manner.
2.2.3 Medium-Btu gas (275–425 Btu/SCF) as an industrial fuel and petrochemical feedstock
Gasification of coal to produce a mixture of hydrogen (H2), carbon monoxide (CO), and methane (CH4), termed medium- (or intermediate-) Btu gas, is a particularly economical and environmentally sound route to coal-derived energy supplies. In addition to meeting most industrial fuel specifications, medium-Btu gas is also a potential gaseous feedstock for the petrochemical