Free Republic

A new power plant in West Texas that could transform coal into cleaner-burning natural gas is poised to break ground later this year, an executive in charge of the project said at a conference in Houston Wednesday. The project, located on a 600-acre site in Odessa, uses coal as a feedstock for a 400 megawatt power plant. But instead of burning it, the plant uses a chemical process to first strip it of carbon, sulfur and mercury. The result, project leaders say, is a hydrocarbon that can fuel the power plan but burns even cleaner than natural gas — even...

An Anchorage Native corporation said this morning it aims to build a new electric power plant on the west side of Cook Inlet -- using coal instead of the region's dwindling natural gas supply. The 100-megawatt plant would rely on an emerging but proven technology that doesn't require the coal to be mined. Instead, the coal would be transformed into gas underground, according to officials from Cook Inlet Region Inc., which owns several hundred thousand acres in the vast Beluga coal fields. CIRI proposes drilling wells into coal seams, then injecting oxygen into those wells, causing the coal to combust...

Alberta will be the site of a unique $30-million demonstration project aimed at unlocking the clean energy potential of the province’s vast coal reserves. The province is contributing $8.83 million toward a $30-million underground coal gasification demonstration project that taps into coal seams that are too deep to be mined economically — and would otherwise sit idle — to produce clean, synthesis gas for power generation. The demonstration project, with Calgary’s Swan Hills Synfuels LP, is the first of its kind in North America and, at roughly 1,400 metres below the surface, the deepest underground coal gasification ever conducted in...

What is UCG? Underground Coal Gasification - a mining method utilizing linked well bores...

Afterburning engine tests of synthetic fuel are under way, and the US Air Force is preparing to certificate its second aircraft type to fly on the natural gas-based jet fuel. "We have started doing [Rockwell] B-1 engine testing and we have flown the [Boeing] C-17," says the USAF. Running a blend of synthetic and conventional jet fuel in the Pratt & Whitney PW2000-powered C-17 transport will be a bridge to commercial aviation use, with airlines and manufacturers closely watching tests of fuel produced using the Fischer-Tropsch process.

Coal contains anywhere from 25 to 90 percent carbon, which combines with oxygen when burned to release energy... [C]arbon in coal can also be used to strip oxygen from water, producing clean-burning hydrogen gas... Gasification itself is nothing new. Cut off from petroleum imports, German engineers in World War II used the process to make synthesis gas, or syngas, a mixture of hydrogen and carbon monoxide that they converted to diesel fuel. Today, about half a dozen American plants burn syngas to generate electricity. They emit about the same amount of CO2 as conventional plants but make capturing the pollutant...

A simple, low-energy, and very fast way to transform crops into useful fuels and chemicals could help ease the United States' dependence on foreign oil. Now researchers at the University of Minnesota, reporting their work in the November 3 issue of Science, say they've done just this. They have developed a system that uses catalysts to transform soy oil and sugar water (which can be captured from corn) into syngas, a combination of hydrogen and carbon monoxide that can be burned as a fuel or transformed into synthetic gasoline. By adjusting the amount of oxygen fed to the catalyst, the...