Energy Citations Database (ECD) - - Document #7308281
Four Companies Consider Ethane Cracker - News, Sports, Jobs - The Intelligencer / Wheeling News-Register; wherein we're treated to even more printed-word drooling over the fabled Marcellus Shale Gas riches that dangle before us.
Some excerpts:
""There are four companies interested in building an ethane cracker or two or three," (a source is quoted as saying, who also noted that) the New Martinsville site is a possibility in addition to the Kanawha Valley.
(The source) said Kanawha Valley was home to as many as six ethane crackers in the 1950s, noting the South Charleston operations played a major role in the expansion of the plastics industry.
"We are very optimistic about getting the cracker because we have the sites and we have the gas," he said.
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Well, we also have "the Coal"; and, actually, it might be a lot cheaper, if we do want "two or three" Ethane crackers, to make the Ethane, for those crackers, out of Coal.
Comment follows excerpts from the initial, headline link in this dispatch to:
"Title: Synthesis of Light Hydrocarbon Gases from Coal Gas
Source: National meeting of the American Chemical Society, New York, NY, USA, Apr 1976
Authors: S. Singh, et. al.; Battelle Columbus Labs, OH
Abstract: A process is being developed that produces a product stream of methane rich in ethane and propane. The process would make use of the existing technology for coal gasification and gas purification and product separation. An experimental program was carried out. Catalysts were prepared and evaluated in isothermal differential reactors. The catalysts consist of sulfur-resistant components. The conversions of carbon monoxide were between 25 and 48 percent per pass and the hydrocarbons in the product stream for one such catalyst were ... ethane, propane, and methane (at) 24, 6.9, and 69 percent, respectively. The conditions of pressure and temperature were mild. No liquids were detected in the product and only traces of water were formed.
The cost of producing ethane in 1975 dollars could be 8 cents per pound."
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So, to be clear: If we really do want to build a bunch of Ethane crackers in the valleys of the Ohio and Kanawha Rivers, we can supply them with the needed Ethane at a cost, in 1975 dollars, of 8 cents a pound.
If, that is, we make that Ethane from our abundant Coal, instead of hydro-fracking the bejeebers out of the Marcellus Shale, and thereby lighting every rural West Virginia resident's well water on fire, as seen in:
Gasland - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia; wherein we learn that one inquisitive individual, who investigated shale gas drilling in PA, NY and WV, actually "met families able to light their tap water on fire as well as suffering from numerous health issues and fearing their well water had been contaminated" after the Marcellus Shale beneath them had been "fracked" to recover natural gas.
All of that, of course, doesn't take into account the fact, in the Battelle Labs report, that:
Such inexpensive Ethane is produced from Coal as a by-product of producing Methane from Coal.
And, we are compelled to belabor the point, as documented in:
WVU CO2 + CH4 = Hydrocarbon Syngas | Research & Development | News; which reports details of:
"New Catalysts for Syngas Production from Carbon Dioxide and Methane; 2001; Mahesh V. Iyer; Thesis submitted to the College of Engineering and Mineral Resources at West Virginia University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science in Chemical Engineering"; wherein, as Iyer, with the approval of his distinguished panel of WVU thesis advisors, reveals: we can effect "methane dry reforming with carbon dioxide to produce synthesis gas"; and which "synthesis gas" derived from such "reforming" reactions between Methane and Carbon Dioxide, can be catalytically condensed into "long-chain hydrocarbons" and "valuable ... alcohols"; that:
Once we have the Methane, as co-produced with the seemingly much-desired Ethane, so cheaply, from Coal, we can combine, react, that by-product Methane with Carbon Dioxide, recovered from whatever source, and thereby make a synthesis gas suitable for conversion, as the West Virginia University scholar Iyer puts it, via the "Fischer-Tropsch synthesis", into "long-chain hydrocarbons".