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Green Fuel to harness unused coal
By MICHAEL STOTHARD
UPI Energy Correspondent
WASHINGTON, Nov. 9 (UPI) -- A new type of coal-based fuel, which will soon be commercialized with federal backing, could harness America's vast low-rank coal reserves and make the country energy self-sufficient for the next 300 years or significantly supplant oil consumption, the chief of Fairbanks, Alaska-based Silverado Green Fuels.
The company is planning to use new technology to turn low rank coal into Green Fuel, which is made by "cooking" low rank powdered coal to drain its water content. The water is treated and then added back to the dried coal. The end product is a thick oily liquid called Green Fuel.
Green Fuel can be used to power oil-fired power plants directly, or be used as a feedstock for the gasification and in the Fischer-Tropsch process.
Importantly, half of the U.S. coal reserve is low-rank coal -- 35 to 44 percent water -- which is not used in coal plants due to its high-water, low-energy levels. Green Fuel has the potential to harness a previously untapped resource.
Part of the excitement for this new fuel is the price. It costs $13 to $15 to produce the energy equivalent of a barrel of oil, the company's Chief Executive Officer and Chief Financial Officer Garry Anselmo, says, which is about 2.2 barrels of Green Fuel.
"Fifteen dollars is better than $60," he said, referring to current oil prices.
Green Fuel is non-flammable unless burned as a fine spray in a generator. This has positive benefits for the military, as tankards of this fuel, cannot be destroyed.
Coal-to-liquid fuels are about to be the "driving force for President Bush's Energy Policy Plan, the National Energy Technology Center's Vision 21 Program, and the United States DOE's Clean Coal Power Initiative," a statement from Silverado says.
The company plans over the next five years to build a plant in Alaska to produce the fuel.
Green Fuel works in oil-fired electrical plants, but "there are only a couple in this country, and you are not allowed to build them any more," pointed out Ted Venners, the chief technology adviser for Evergreen Energy, a company that specializes in refining coal for coal fuelled power plants.
The Energy Information Administration, the U.S. Department of Energy's data arm, predicts that "oil-fired generation (is) expected to continue to decline." This raises the question of why the government should invest in the Silverado plant, which will take five years to build, and produce a fuel whose primary use is for outdated generators.
The answer could be that Silverado Green Fuels initiative is also planning to build a tertiary industry where the Green Fuel is used as the feedstock for the gasification and liquefaction process.
The gasification process uses extreme pressure to break down the liquid coal into its basic elements, and then re-forms these elements to create synthetic natural gas, or synfuel. This synfuel is then be pressurized and turned into a liquid that can be used as a jet fuel, explosive, fertilizer or a clean burning diesel.
"There is such as huge market and such a high demand that there cannot be enough coal-to-liquid plants built in this country," said Venners, whose company also plans to enter the coal-to-liquid industry.
Green fuel is accepted to be a cheap and efficient feedstock for the coal-to-liquid process. However, many question whether or not the problems outweigh the benefits.
The process can domestically produce clean, high performance motor fuel and take America a step toward energy independence. However, Frank O'Donnell, president of Clean Air Watch, said "environmentalists are against it" because the gasification and liquefaction process releases massive amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, and will also require a large increase in coal mining "with all the environmental problems which that entails."
Venners acknowledges that the gasification process produces four times as much carbon dioxide as simply burning the coal. "Right now the environment is better off without the gasification process," he told United Press International.
Ideally, the carbon dioxide released by the gasification process is then sequestered underground. Luke Popovich, from the Coal and National Mining Association, said there was not yet the "capture technology" for a large-scale power plant to contain the carbon dioxide, but he was convinced it would be available soon.
Anslemo from Silverado said that by the time they will have built the tertiary plant to gasify and liquefy their Green Fuel, the technology will be in place to sequester the carbon dioxide.
If the technology does improve, then Green Fuel could be a useful feedstock for the Fischer-Tropsch process, even if critics are correct to argue that its primary use is of limited commercial value.
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