Proponents Say Clean Coal Needed To Meet Energy Needs

BY DEBRA McCOWN
BRISTOL HERALD COURIER

KINGSORT, Tenn. – Concerned about meeting the growing demand for energy, presenters discussed current research on clean-coal technologies during Tuesday’s second day of the Eastern Coal Council’s 29th annual conference.
“We have some real concerns, real issues with keeping the lights on,” said Matthew LaRocque, manager of regulatory and legislative affairs for PJM Interconnection, as he showed a map with red flags in places where electric reliability is expected to be a problem beginning in 2012.
LaRocque said among the threats to reliability of the electrical grid are changing environmental standards, the “not in my backyard” reaction to proposed energy projects, increasing demand for energy and the need for $1.5 trillion worth of infrastructure by 2030.
“A lot of people may not know, but on Aug. 8 last summer, we were running everything we could run, and we lost some generation,” LaRocque said. “We were basically one forced outage short ... of having to do some rolling blackouts.”
A variety of projects were discussed Tuesday that proponents say will improve U.S. energy security and reduce negative environmental impacts of energy production.
Coal-eating bugs
Richard Wolfe, senior adviser to ARCTECH Inc., spoke about a technology that uses microbes to break down coal into natural gas and fertilizer.
“You have tanks the size of this room, and you’ve got coal slurry coming in one end and you’ve got these bugs working in here and methane gas going into the pipeline,” Wolfe said. “This is how you can envision this happening.”
He said the technology has been proven in the laboratory and is ready for larger demonstration – and when all the byproducts are utilized, it can increase the value of coal to more than $1,000 per ton.
“This is on the frontier of being able to develop a completely different way to use coal in a clean fashion,” Wolfe said. “These cloned microbes were taken from the termites in Africa and they’ve been cloned or developed so they can eat wood or they can eat carbon material ... and the efficiency is right significant.”
Wolfe said he believes the power plant proposed for Wise County will become an incubator for clean-coal technologies.
Storing carbon dioxide
Jerry Hill, a technical adviser to the Southern States Energy Board and the Southeast Regional Carbon Sequestration Partnership, and Nino Ripepi, a graduate student at Virginia Tech, talked about the status of tests on the underground storage of carbon dioxide.
Locally, 1,000 tons of carbon dioxide will be injected into the ground this fall at a gas well in Russell County, Va., after the permitting process is complete, Hill said. A similar project is under way in Alabama, as well as two projects in saline formations along the Gulf Coast.
For the local project, Phase I, a feasibility study, was completed in 2005. Phase II, a small-scale test of the technology, is scheduled for completion next year. Phase III, which is in the planning stage, is a large-volume carbon dioxide injection test to prove the technology to potential investors.
Ripepi said the primary reason coal seams are a desired place to store carbon dioxide is their proximity to facilities that produce significant carbon dioxide waste. He said it also provides greater potential storage capacity, and the absorbed carbon dioxide would displace methane gas, allowing recovery of an estimated $4 billion worth of the gas.
“There are challenges out there, [but] I think they can be overcome,” Hill said. “It becomes a question of whether you think it can occur in the next 10 years or whether it’s going to take another 20 years to do it.”
Profitable gas for the environment
CNX Gas is dedicated to turning a potent greenhouse gas into profit, said Gary Slagel, director of government affairs for CONSOL Energy.
“It developed because of CONSOL Energy personnel looking at the huge amounts of coalbed methane that was being vented to the atmosphere in the late 80s [and] early 90s,” Slagel said. “Some forward-thinking folks said we’re seeing some other companies capturing this methane; maybe we can do the same thing.”
Slagel said they saw a business opportunity and CNX, a spin-off from CONSOL, is now the most profitable producer in the natural gas industry.
“We can talk about energy efficiency in one of two ways,” he said. “It’s using less energy – conservation – or we can extract more energy from the same product.”
He said capturing methane also benefits the environment by keeping it out of the atmosphere – and there’s been a shift to a “dual-product mindset, where not only do you get the value of the coal, the energy from the coal, but you get the energy from the gas.”
Coal for the gas tank
“There are lots of opportunities for different types of products from coal,” said Diana Tickner, vice president of generation and BTU development for Peabody Energy. “Natural gas and transportation fuel are two areas where Peabody is concentration. All of these are areas that start out with gasification.”
Tickner said fuel can be produced from coal with the same carbon dioxide-emission rate as foreign oil – and a natural gas substitute produced from coal could help lower the price of natural gas. She said other promising technologies may be on the horizon too – and the company invests in some entrepreneurs’ ideas.
“When you hear about these technologies, it’s really easy to laugh them off,” she said. “Everybody’s laughing at these guys saying it isn’t going to work, it isn’t going to get us there.
“We need all these kinds of technology to see if there’s a way they can succeed because we’re going to need a lot of options.”

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