Information Bridge: DOE Scientific and Technical Information - - Document #1029975
We are including a number of different links to the United States Department of Energy report, authored by West Virginia University, which is the subject of this dispatch. All of them, at the time of this transmission, function, and should get you to the core document.
We are compelled to do so since the US Government's electronic libraries of documents related to energy issues has been, from our outside perspective, undergoing significant change and revision over the past few years, especially in recent months; and we here are determined to make certain the information we present remains accessible to our addressees, and to our readers on the West Virginia Coal Association web site.
Further, although our core resource document for this report is of a rather large size, we will attempt separate transmission of a file of it to the West Virginia Coal Association for reliable archiving.
First, we remind you of our immediately prior report, now accessible via:
West Virginia Coal Association | USDOE Demonstrates Economic Feasibility of Coal Liquefaction | Research & Development; concerning: "Subtask 3.3 - Feasibility of Direct Coal Liquefaction in the Modern Economic Climate; Final Report for the period June 25, 2008, through June 30, 2009; U.S. Department of Energy; National Energy Technology Laboratory; Pittsburgh, PA; Prepared by: Benjamin G. Oster, et. al.; University of North Dakota, Grand Forks, ND; Cooperative Agreement Number DE-FC26-08NT43291; Abstract: Coal liquefaction provides an alternative to petroleum for the production of liquid hydrocarbon-based fuels. There are two main processes to liquefy coal: direct coal liquefaction (DCL) and indirect coal liquefaction (ICL). ... The United States has been conducting direct coal liquefaction (DCL) research for
decades. This research was spurred by the petroleum price disruptions of the early 1970s. Large scale
DCL demonstrations and bench-scale research efforts resulted in an increased knowledge of DCL process operations and led to a better understanding of DCL process chemistry. (Established) cost data support the hypothesis that a DCL facility could be competitive with petroleum and profitable";
wherein the University of North Dakota, under the sponsorship of the United States Department of Energy, demonstrated that a direct Coal liquefaction process, which would produce a synthetic petroleum product fully compatible with our current petroleum refining and distribution infrastructure, could not only "be competitive with petroleum" in terms of cost, right now, but, in fact, "profitable".
As we noted in that report, West Virginia University had been participating, as well, concurrently with the University of North Dakota project, with the US Department of Energy, to maximize the value of a direct Coal liquefaction, "DCL" industrial process, wherein a full range of Carbon products, as typically derived from petroleum refining as by-products or co-products, could be derived from such direct Coal-to-Petroleum conversion.
The production of such Carbon-based co-products would not only increase the profitability of a DCL commercial operation; but, would enable us to fully displace, and make unnecessary, the use and consumption of imported OPEC petroleum.
Moreover, as will be seen in our excerpts, West Virginia University explains herein that our vast reserves of domestic United States Coal, via such processes, could supply our needs for those products currently derived from imported OPEC petroleum for more than 1,000 years.
Further, in an advance excerpt that will be repeated in our full exposition, West Virginia University says:
"The coal liquefaction process described herein is suitable for expansion to multiple millions of barrels per day of crude oil that in turn can be upgraded using standard refining processes.
It is therefore possible for the United States to reduce or eliminate the 12 million barrels per day of liquid crude that it currently imports."
All as explained in excerpts from the initial link in this dispatch to:
"Development of Continuous Solvent Extraction Processes For Coal Derived Carbon Products
http://www.osti.gov/bridge/
View Full Text or Access Individual Pages; 10.2172/1029975
(Note, that, due to the recent unreliability of links connecting to US Government-archived documents, which we've explained in one or two previous reports, we are including multiple links to our subject. And, although the file is large, we have downloaded a file of it, and will attempt later, separate transmission of that file to the West Virginia Coal Association for reliable archiving.
Date: December 31, 2009
Authors: Elliott Kennel, et. al.
Research Organization: West Virginia University; Sponsoring Organization: US Department of Energy
Contract Number: FC26-03NT41873
Abstract: NETL sponsored effort seeks to develop continuous technologies for the production of carbon products, which may be thought of as the heavier products currently produced from refining of crude petroleum and coal tars obtained from metallurgical grade coke ovens. This effort took binder grade pitch, produced from liquefaction of West Virginia bituminous grade coal, all the way to commercial demonstration in a state of the art arc furnace. Other products, such as crude oil, anode grade coke and metallurgical grade coke were demonstrated successfully at the bench scale. The technology developed herein diverged from the previous state of the art in direct liquefaction (also referred to as the Bergius process), in two major respects. First, direct liquefaction was accomplished with less than a percent of hydrogen per unit mass of product, or about 3 pound per barrel or less. By contrast, other variants of the Bergius process require the use of 15 pounds or more of hydrogen per barrel, resulting in an inherent materials cost. Second, the conventional Bergius process requires high pressure, in the range of 1500 psig to 3000 psig. The WVU process variant has been carried out at pressures below 400 psig, a significant difference. Thanks mainly to DOE sponsorship, the WVU process has been licensed to a Canadian Company, Quantex Energy Inc, with a commercial demonstration unit plant scheduled to be erected in 2011.
(They might have been premature in announcing the Quantex Energy agreement, which we reported on several years ago via:
West Virginia Coal Association | WVU CO2-Free Coal to Oil | Research & Development; wherein we're told, in part: "West Virginia University researchers have developed a way to convert coal into synthetic oil in a carbon dioxide-free economical process and, through a licensing agreement, two international firms are planning to demonstrate its viability. Quantex Energy Inc. of Canada and New Hope Corporation Ltd of Australia announced an agreement in September to commercialize the technology acquired under license from WVU. The companies are hoping to eventually produce up to 50,000 barrels of synthetic oil per day in up to three different demonstration facilities".
There is little web-based information available on the WVU-Quantex "arrangement", and, as we further reported in dispatches concerning the issuance of United States Patents for Coal liquefaction technology, some of which we'll provide links to further on, to WVU, the relationship and plans might no longer be viable. But, therein is yet another opportunity for one of the Coal Country journalists who are among the primary addressee's of these dispatches. If any of them actually do give a hoot about Coal Country, about the security and economy of the United States of America, what's the story?)
Executive Summary: This NETL (USDOE National Energy Technology Laboratory) sponsored effort seeks to develop continuous technologies for the production of carbon products, which may be thought of as the heavier products currently produced from refining of crude petroleum and coal tars obtained from metallurgical grade coke ovens.
This effort took binder grade pitch, produced from liquefaction of West Virginia bituminous grade coal, all the way to commercial demonstration in a state of the art arc furnace. Other products, such as crude oil, anode grade coke and metallurgical grade coke were demonstrated successfully at the bench scale.
The technology developed herein diverged from the previous state of the art in direct liquefaction (also referred to as the Bergius process), in two major respects.
First, direct liquefaction was accomplished with less than a percent of hydrogen per unit mass of product, or about 3 pound per barrel or less. By contrast, other variants of the Bergius process require the use of 15 pounds or more of hydrogen per barrel, resulting in an inherent materials cost. Second, the conventional Bergius process requires high pressure, in the range of 1500 psig to 3000 psig. The WVU process variant has been carried out at pressures below 400 psig, a significant difference.
(We've made many reports concerning the "Bergius" direct Coal hydrogenation/liquefaction process. See, for one example:
West Virginia Coal Association | CoalTL Wins Nobel Prize - in 1931 | Research & Development.)
Introduction: The purpose of this DOE-funded effort is to develop continuous processes for solvent extraction of coal for the production of carbon products. These carbon products include materials used in metals smelting, especially in the aluminum and steel industries, as well as porous carbon structural material referred to as “carbon foam” and carbon fibers. Current sources of materials for these processes generally rely on petroleum distillation products or coal tar distillates obtained as a byproduct of metcoke production facilities. In the former case, the American materials industry, just as the energy industry, is dependent upon foreign sources of petroleum. In the latter case, metcoke production is decreasing every year due to the combined difficulties associated with poor economics and a significant environmental burden. Thus, a significant need exists for an environmentally clean process which can use domestically obtained raw materials and which can still be very competitive economically.Historical Background: Direct Liquefaction of coal was first accomplished by Bergius in Germany before
the Second World War. The coal is finely ground and dried in a stream of hot gas. The dry product is mixed with heavy oil recycled from the process. Catalyst is typically added to the mixture. A number of catalysts have been developed over the years, including tungsten or molybdenum sulfides, tin or nickel oleate, and others. Alternatively, iron sulphides present in the coal may have sufficient catalytic activity for the process, which was the original Bergius process.
The mixture is pumped into a reactor. The reaction occurs at around 400 C and 20 MPa hydrogen pressure or higher. The basic notion is that hydrogen is transferred from the gas phase to hydrocarbons contained in coal. Usually an intermediate liquid is used (referred to as a donor solvent). The donor solvent is able to capture hydrogen from high pressure gas (for example, in the conversion of naphthalene to tetrahydronaphthalene). Then the donor solvent gives up extra hydrogen to molecules in the coal, enabling them to be fluid.
The net result is that coal is converted to a crude oil and a few percent gas.
The synthetic crude can be further processed to output synthetic fuels of desirable quality, including a substantial gasoline fraction ... .
Historically, the interest in coal liquefaction was focused on high grade transportation fuels including gasoline and diesel fuel. In the current study, however, carbon products such as pitches and cokes have been developed as potential applications. Though usually priced at a lower level than sweet crude, they are nevertheless very viable as commodities.
(We interrupt to note that WVU, in the course of their reportage herein, makes reference to a number of precedent Coal liquefaction technologies, including, for one example, the Exxon Donor Solvent process, about which we have previously reported. For the sake of concision, we are not including reference links to our past reports documenting those precedent technologies. If desired or needed, we could however do so, although the West Virginia Coal Association's excellent Research and Development electronic library is equipped with a very capable search engine that should enable anyone interested to accomplish the background research on their own, using information provided in the full text of this WVU report.
Further, WVU goes into a rather lengthy discussion of Carbon emissions, how Carbon emission legislation might affect the use of Coal in these applications; and, how the DCL process discussed herein relates to Carbon restrictions. As WVU notes, the DCL process emits far less CO2 than indirect Coal conversion processes like the nearly ancient "Fischer-Tropsch" synthesis. We'll have more on that further on.)
The major accomplishments of this effort were as follows:
1. Demonstrated the ability to digest coal in mildly hydrogenated commodity coal tar distillate solvents.
2. Demonstrated the ability to remove ash precursors via centrifugation of the extracted coal digest, thus resulting in a solution that can be further processed to make carbon products and/or the equivalent of crude petroleum.
3. Produced over 4500 pounds of coal extract, which was processed to yield 1500 pounds of pure synthetic binder pitch.
4. With the assistance of Koppers Inc and GrafTech International, demonstrated commercial scale electrode performance.
5. Anode grade cokes were demonstrated at the bench scale as anodes used for aluminum smelting via the electrochemical (Hall-Heroult) process. In the aluminum industry commercial scale anode production implies production quantities of hundreds of tons of materials, which was beyond present capabilities. For this reason the demonstrations were limited to bench scale.
(Keep in mind, that, if we're going to smelt Aluminum ore with Coal-based electrodes, we can, as seen for only one example in:
West Virginia Coal Association | USDOE Says Coal Ash Could End Aluminum Ore Imports | Research & Development; which included links to information about the recovery of Aluminum and other metal ore from Coal Ash, including "Resource Recovery from Coal Residues; 73rd Annual Meeting of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers; 1980; G. Jones, et. al.; Oak Ridge National Laboratory; USDOE; Abstract: Several processes are being developed to recover metals from coal combustion and conversion residues. Methods to obtain substantial amounts of aluminum, iron, and titanium from these wastes are presented. The primary purpose of our investigation is to find a process that is economically sound or one that at least will partially defray the costs of waste processing. A cursory look at the content of fly ash enables one to see the merits of recovery of these huge quantities of valuable resources. The major constituents of fly ash of most interest are aluminum (14.8%), iron (7.5%), and titanium (1.0%). If these major elements could be recovered from the fly ash produced in the United States (60 million tons/year), bauxite would not have to be imported, iron ore production could be increased, and titanium production could be doubled";
get the Aluminum ore itself from Coal Ash.)
6. Demonstrated proof of concept for creating anisotropic coke domains that can result in coke. This was accomplished using an extrusion method to use shear forces to create anisotropic domains.
7. Demonstrated high strength carbon foams fabricated using commodity feedstocks.
8. Duplicated pilot scale verification tests of blended binder pitch, using a variant of pitch product produced without using gaseous hydrogen to enhance the digestibility of coal in the solvent.
9. Demonstrated the bench scale ability to produce binder grade pitches and anode grade cokes from low rank coals including sub-bituminous and lignite coals.
The coal liquefaction process described herein is suitable for expansion to multiple millions of barrels per day of crude oil that in turn can be upgraded using standard refining processes.
It is therefore possible for the United States to reduce or eliminate the 12 million barrels per day of liquid crude that it currently imports.
The main reason for not producing crude petroleum is likely the environmental concern associated with global warming. It is widely if not universally accepted that carbon dioxide emissions threaten to accelerate the global warming trend of the 1990’s to such a point that it might threaten the global ecosystem.
There are a number of arguments based on socio-political factors that might lead the US to decide to not produce additional liquid crude. Nevertheless, from the standpoint of the technology, the WVU process is scalable to millions of barrels per day, and offers the possibility of substantially reducing or eliminating dependence upon unstable foreign sources of oil.
Coal liquefaction is economically attractive because the United States faces a deficit in liquid fuels.
(Many) analysts fear that demand for steam coal in North America may be flatter than in previous years.
The DOE Energy Information Agency summarizes projections as follows: In the AEO2010 Reference case, increasing coal use for electricity generation, along with the startup of several CTL plants, leads to growth
in coal production averaging 0.2 percent per year from 2008 to 2035.
This is significantly less than the 0.9-percent average growth rate for U.S. coal production from 1980 to 2008.
Although the demand for coal is expected to slacken, the availability of coal is high.
The EIA estimates that the US has 17.8 billion tons of recoverable reserves from producing mines, and a total of 275 billion tons of recoverable coal, with a total reserve base of almost 4 trillion tons.
Given that the US currently consumes about a billion tons of coal for commercial power and other applications, while at the same time US petroleum consumption accounts for 20 million barrels per year, or about 1.1 billion Metric Tonnes per year. Assuming that liquefied coal has half the net energy of oil due to the presence of ash, processing energy penalties and the like, it might take 2.2 billion Tonnes of coal to supply oil replacement via liquefaction.
It appears possible that coal could be used as a feedstock to satisfy current commercial power and liquid product needs.
Assuming 300% consumption compared to today’s rates (i.e., a total of 3 billion Tonnes per year), the supply of North American coal - for value-added liquid fuels if not electric power - might plausibly last for the next 1300 years.
From an environmental standpoint, the WVU liquefaction process results in a liquid product that can be processed using standard refining techniques. Hence the emissions from liquefied coal will be more or less like the emissions from petroleum rather than from coal combustion.
(An) energetically favorable process such as direct liquefaction may be useful for producing liquid products with greenhouse gas signatures comparable to that of petroleum. Hence the present authors foresee that coal will increasingly be viewed as a solid form of crude oil. By converting it to a liquid form, it is possible to directly produce heavy hydrocarbon products such as coke, pitch, bunker oil and the like. Alternatively, it is possible to upgrade coal derived crude oil to be the equivalent of petroleum crude."
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We repeat, with only some rearranging and paraphrasing:
West Virginia University says, in a report primarily devoted to the fuller range of Carbon products that could be realized from a direct Coal liquefaction process, that:
Our "North American coal" "could ... satisfy" our "liquid product needs" "for the next 1300 years". And, the "coal liquefaction process described herein" could enable "the United States to reduce or eliminate the 12 million barrels per day of liquid crude that it currently imports".
And, it might even be better than that, since, even though "the WVU (Coal) liquefaction process ... results in a liquid product that can be processed using standard refining techniques (with) emissions ... more or less like the emissions from petroleum", as we've seen in:
West Virginia Coal Association | WVU May 28, 2013, Carbon-recycling Coal Liquefaction | Research & Development; concerning: "United States Patent 8,449,632 - Sewage Material in Coal Liquefaction; 2013; Inventor: Alfred H. Stiller, Morgantown, WV; Assignee: West Virginia University; Abstract: The present disclosure provides methods and systems for coal liquefaction using a sewage material. A method of obtaining a de-ashed coal extract includes exposing a coal to a sewage material in the presence of a coal-derived solvent to form a slurry, elevating the temperature of the slurry to facilitate liquefying the coal and liberating a volatile matter, and separating the insoluble components from the slurry to obtain a de-ashed coal extract, wherein the coal extract is suitable for downstream processing"; and:
West Virginia Coal Association | WVU June 18, 2013, Carbon-Recycling Coal Liquefaction | Research & Development; concerning: "United States Patent 8,465,561 - Hydrogenated Vegetable Oil in Coal Liquefaction; 2013; Inventors: Alfred H. Stiller and Elliot B. Kennel, Morgantown, WV; Assignee: West Virginia University; Abstract: The present disclosure provides methods and systems for coal liquefaction using a hydrogenated vegetable oil. A method of obtaining a de-ashed coal extract includes exposing a coal to a hydrogenated vegetable oil in the presence of a coal-derived solvent to form a slurry, elevating the temperature of the slurry to facilitate liquefying the coal and liberating a volatile matter, and separating the insoluble components from the slurry to obtain a de-ashed coal extract, wherein the coal extract is suitable for downstream processing";
West Virginia University knows how to incorporate certain Carbon-recycling botanical products and organic wastes into "the WVU liquefaction process", which might well reduce a Coal-to-Petroleum plant's effective net "emissions" of CO2 below those "from petroleum", and also extend the ability of Coal to "satisfy" our domestic US "liquid product needs" for well more than "the next 1300 years".
In closing, we caution and advise that there is much more to the WVU report "Development of Continuous Solvent Extraction Processes For Coal Derived Carbon Products", and the concepts embodied in the report, than our excerpts make clear, or even allude to. And, there are many references to prior reports we have not, in the interests of concision, made which would anchor, corroborate and illuminate most of the statements made herein by WVU.
We have deliberately focused our attention herein on certain key aspects of WVU's report, although it treats both "carbon products and/or the equivalent of crude petroleum" as can be made from Coal, in the hopes that they might entrain enough of the interest of at least one of the group of Coal Country journalists who are among the primary addressees of these dispatches to thereby motivate a direct inquiry of the West Virginia University scientists who composed it.
They would be far better qualified than are we here to explain to you how our domestic US Coal, with emissions that are no worse than those of conventional petroleum, could supply us with liquid hydrocarbon fuels and with carbon byproducts for well more than the next 1,000 years, thereby "eliminating" our economically and politically crippling "dependence upon unstable foreign sources of oil".