I wrote a little analysis of synfuel upgrades to existing coal plants. I was going to give it a vanity thread, but instead I think I’ll post it here.
A 1GWe coal-fired power plant consumes ~ 7400 tons of coal per day, at a 2008 fuel cost of over $900K (at today’s rather high coal price of $120 per ton).
The plant produces 24 million kw/h per day, worth about $1.44M at $0.06 per kw/h.
The $540,000/day difference in fuel cost vs. electricity cost must cover plant amortization and operations.
Modern coal plants perform extensive processing of this coal (pulverizing, cleaning, etc.) before burning it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karrick_process -
By adding a “Karrick process” step to the pre-processing, the coal demand of the plant would increase by about 1/3 - i.e. the plant would require 9200 tons of coal worth $1.2M per day.
However, in addtion to producing the $1.44M worth of electricity per day, the “Karrick process” augumented plant would produce 9200 barrels of synthetic crude per day, worth over $1.1M at todays extremely high oil prices.
Total US coal-fired powerplant installed capacity is over 300 GWe. If half of these plants were equipped to also produce syncrude, they would increase US domestic crude oil production by 16%.
Most of the infrastucture required for coal liquification is ALREADY in place at these power plants, and they are already cleared for the environmental impact. The cost of adding a 9K barrel/day Karrick extractor to an existing 1GW coal plant should be less than 1/5th the cost of building an identically sized (in output) F/T or “Bergius process” coal liquification plant.
At > $100/barrel crude prices, the payback time for adding a “Karrick process” step to a 1GW coal power plant would be less than two years.
Oops.
> the plant would require 9200 tons of coal
Little typo on my calculator there. 9900 tons of coal is the correct number, with corresponding increases in the amount of oil extracted as well.
Two year payback time is more than acceptable!
Are there any plans that you know of to do this?
"No, actually it's...synfuel!"
"Bookmarking for later, dude.
Cheers!