Beam me to Planet Gore !
Posted on 10/11/2010 5:37:32 AM PDT by Red Badger
It’s OK.
I’ve digested a lot of information about syngas and pyrolysis over the years and don’t use it enough to keep the information straight. I appreciate getting set straight if I have incorrect data filed away.
After WWII, charcoal reformers were used to make syngas that powered transportation busses. That thought keeps buzzing around in my brain but it just occurred to me that that was not an anaerobic environment. They were allowing a little bit of air into the system which would turn carbon to CO.
I may be missing something as well but the steam reforming used at refineries to make hydrogen uses methane as feedstock.
Then I find:
Hydrogen from Coal Research
http://www.fe.doe.gov/programs/fuels/hydrogen/Hydrogen_from_Coal_R&D.html
Still learning....
So I wonder what progress has been made on this since the March date of this article?
You’re right. The phrase “check your work” comes to mind.
They just write down stuff the guy says, not understanding a word of it, then ignore the conflicting “facts”.
“Check your work” means go to the Sierra Club, ACLU, DNC, or Media Matters websites.
Think catalyst and seawater(Additional CO2).
The big problem in doing this is the scale and cost of the mining. The reason that you see trains loaded full of coal from the Rockies headed down from the Panhandle to Texas electricity plants is that it is VERY expensive to reclaim the land after you stripmine it for the lignite.
Another way to think of it is Rings to Strings.
The coal molecule is a ring, crude a string, so you have to disassemble and reassemble the parts(C-O-H) in the form you want.
Related thread:
Australia minister: Carbon tax not only option ( More on the Global Warming Scam )
The Global Governance Crowd of Socialists are going to be very UPSET....CO2 was their ticket to get control!!!
That isn't as speculative as you may think, it is being done to convert in situ coal to methane gas which is captured and piped to the refinery as feed stock.
On a related note they've discovered that the Barnett shale formation increases methane production after fall off when CO2 is pumped in, they think it is an in situ catalyst reaction due to iron ore in the rock.
Hey, that's great! Little wrinkles ..... or does the pressuring-up with CO2 open up some joint patterns and enable enhanced flow to the take point?
But ..... "whatever works"! ;)
Researchers at the University of Texas at Arlington (UTA) announced last month that they have developed a clean way to turn the cheapest kind of coal -- lignite, common in Texas -- into synthetic crude.I wonder how one ignites lignite? ;') Thanks Ernest.
Researchers at UTA work on turning lignite into oil
12:00 AM CDT on Sunday, June 15, 2008
Researchers at the University of Texas at Arlington think they can turn the state's 200-year reserves of lignite into a supply of heavy crude that will return Texas to its glory days as one of the oil capitals of the world.
As a result of their research, they say, the cost of heavy crude could eventually drop to around $30 a barrel. Heavy crude sells for slightly less than the light, sweet crude that is trading in the $130-a-barrel range.
The time frame? They say they could have biodiesel fuel available in quantity in about two years and liquid lignite converted into heavy crude in four or five years.
http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/bus/columnists/rmiller/stories/DN-miller_15bus.ART.State.Edition1.4db8cbf.html
And you average about 18 to 22 gallons of gasoline from each barrel.
"We're improving the cost every day. We started off some time ago at an uneconomical $17,000 a barrel. Today, we're at ... $28.84 a barrel,"
Not only that, they calculate that $18 per ton can produce 63 gallons of gasoline at 28 cents per gallon. The problem is they fail to take into account processing, refining, distribution, or taxes. It’s magic!
Ok, let's try to deal with facts. $18 is the cost of 1 tons of lignite, which will produce 1.5 barrels of a synthetic equivalent to crude oil. Current technology can produce roughly 18-22 gallons of gasoline per barrel - let's call it 20 for the sake of argument. So this $18 ton of lignite can be processed into 30 gallons of gasoline.
But wait, it actually costs something to do the processing - $28.84 per barrel, or $43.26 per ton (1.5 barrels). So the raw materials and processing cost of 30 gallons of gasoline is $18.00 + $43.26 = $61.26 = $2.042 per gallon of gasoline. Not bad - except that this doesn't include the cost of refining the synthetic crude into gasoline, nor the cost of distribution, nor taxes nor profits for everyone along the line.
All told, I'd be willing to bet that the cost will be in the neighborhood of $3.00 - $3.50 per gallon, more than the current cost. Cost is not, at the present time a reason to convert coal to gasoline - though someday it might well be. And that someday is when oil supplies are less plentiful than right now, and we're not too terribly far from that time. I don't know enough to agree or disagree with those that say we've reached Peak Oil already, or if we'll reach it in 5 or 10 or 50 years, but we'll certainly hit it someday (and I suspect that it is probably sometime before 10 years from now). That is the time when the TRUE advantage of this process and all of our available coal come to fruition: we will HAVE liquid fuels in large quantities. If the U.S. has 300 billion tons of coal, that equates to some 450 billion barrels of oil using this process, way more than enough to allow scientists and engineers time to develop better solar, nuke, fusion and battery technology without derailing ours or the world's economies - and that's without considering the other 700 billion tons of coal that we presently know about elsewhere in the world. In short, the doom & gloom about the end of oil and the end of our way of life (from that source - others are still out there) is nothing more than bunk. Human ingenuity combined with good old self-interest triumphs again!
As an aside, it is amazing how often reporters get their facts wrong - quite literally almost every time that I KNOW the facts about a particular story or issue, they botch it. This has happened enough times (including the subject article here) regarding enough different subjects that I can only conclude that virtually everything the report is crap.
Saudi production costs are still less than $5/barrel. This article talks about producing from coal for $30/barrel. That doesn’t sound like putting the Saudis out of business. At best, you could limit the Saudi profit to $25/barrel if the coal-to-gas producer was willing to accept zero profit. By accepting less than $30/barrel, the Saudis could prevent the production from coal at all, since those producers could not operate indefinitely at a loss.
Now ... if you were gung-ho about eliminating dependence on oil imports, the government could manipulate the price by guaranteeing to pay $30/barrel for oil produced from US coal; essentially, guaranteeing the producers would not lose money and thereby protecting them from OPEC pulling the rug out from under them.
This kind of government intervention via price supports is not typically supported by conservatives. Building the CAPACITY to produce from coal at $30/barrel, however, waiting in the wings to be brought online at the drop of a hat, would effectively limit the price of OPEC oil to $30/barrel. Doing it that way would not stop the flow of money out of the US and into OPEC but would mitigate the effect oil price fluctuations have on our economy. The underlying coal feedstock already amounts to $12/barrel, so this coal-to-gas process is unlikely to ever compete with $5/barrel OPEC oil production costs.
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