IEI believes Israel may be sitting on vast reserves of shale oil, second only to those in the United States.

By Daniella Cheslow (AFP) – December 18, 2011

BEIT GUVRIN, Israel — Among the serene vineyards and pine trees of Israel’s wine-growing heartland, a towering drill is boring 600 metres (2,000 feet) underground, dredging up black rocks that smell like petrol.

This is oil shale, rocks saturated with kerogen, a material that turns into oil and gas under intense heat.

Huge deposits of this kerogen-rich rock lie deep underground in southern and central Israel in quantities which Israel Energy Initiatives (IEI) says could make the country an oil superpower and break its dependence on imports.

Shale oil production is often attacked for its high carbon footprint and for being prohibitively expensive, but the entrepreneurs at IEI insist they have found a cleaner, greener and cheaper method of extraction.

And they plan to prove it in the Ela Valley, a Biblical site in the Judaean hills some 30 kilometres (18 miles) southwest of Jerusalem where David is said to have battled Goliath.

But two years into a first round of experimental drilling, IEI faces a firestorm of criticism from environmentalists who say the project is a dangerous experiment in an ecological corridor that lies over the main source of Israel’s limited national water supply.

Oil shale exists in deposits around the world, including major sites in the United States, China, Estonia, Australia and Jordan. IEI believes Israel may be sitting on vast reserves of shale oil, second only to those in the United States.

If their estimates are right, shale oil could have a revolutionary impact on the Jewish state’s energy portfolio.

Israel currently consumes around 100 million barrels of oil a year, most of it imported from Russia and former Soviet states. It also relies on natural gas, around 60 percent of which comes from domestic sources while the rest is supplied by Egypt.

And while two major offshore gas finds have raised hopes that Israel could supply its own needs, the shale oil deposits could potentially dwarf these discoveries and provide for Israel’s energy needs many times over.

Scott Nguyen is vice-president of technology at IEI, a subsidiary of American telecoms giant IDT. A veteran of Dutch Shell Oil, he wears the tan leather boots and giant belt buckle of his native eastern Texas.

"Even in the early 1900s, people said oil shale will be the heir apparent to oil," Nguyen said. "The difficulty is implementing the technology to make it economic to do it."

The key to oil shale is kerogen, an organic material locked into rocks that, given a few aeons, would develop into petroleum. Production is expensive because it speeds up millions of years of geological processes.

While shale oil has been a known fuel source for centuries, it has always been more expensive and less convenient to produce than crude oil.

In Estonia, which produces 90 percent of its power from oil shale, production has declined as a result of cheaper alternatives and more stringent EU environmental penalties.

Extraction involves mining the rocks and heating them with large amounts of energy to convert the kerogen into oil and gas in a process which spews out pollution, litters the land with spent shale, consumes torrents of water and rips gaping scars in the landscape.

And burning it is four times as polluting as natural gas.

But Harold Vinegar, Nguyen’s boss and former chief scientist at Shell, has developed a new form of "in-situ" conversion, which converts the kerogen into shale oil underground, thereby cutting out the mining process.

His method involves drilling 200 metres into the deposit, inserting heating elements, then ratcheting up the temperature to 300 degrees Celsius (572 degrees F) for at least three years. At that heat, the rocks release the kerogen and it can be pumped up in liquid form.

But first, the extraction process, which has been under development since the 1980s, must be shown to work.

To date, IEI has carried out only small-scale field studies of the conversion technology, and should it get the necessary licence to run a full pilot in Israel, it will be the first proper commercial-scale trial of the process.

"If we are successful in implementing our in-situ conversion technology in Israel, it will make it easy to do it around the world," Nguyen said.

For years, the main way of extracting shale oil was through open-pit mining, a dirty process which which is very expensive, with production costs of around $70-$100 per barrel.

But using its technology, Nguyen says the barrel production cost would be $30-40.

And he says the amount of carbon dioxide emitted by extraction would "be lower than the emissions from the mix of comparable oil supplies once we reach the commercial phase."

The firm sees the process of sequestering part of the carbon dioxide emissions as "economical and technically favourable," he says.

No one knows how much oil is trapped in the rocks in Israel.

Vinegar believes there could be up to 250 billion barrels of oil, a figure far higher than that published by the London-based World Energy Council which in November 2010 put the figure at closer to four billion barrels.

Whatever the size of the resource, it is substantial. To date, IEI has invested about $20 million in the appraisal phase, and plans to invest up to $30 million more to design the pilot, which in its next stage involves oil shale exploration.

Nguyen says IEI has carried out some field experiments in Canada, but Israel is the first commercial site.

"There is no prior experience in the world (for in-situ conversion), and therefore this is exactly the time to do it," said Moshe Shirav, a researcher at the Israeli Geological Survey.

Shirav says IEI will keep a close eye on the environmental impact of the process through monitoring wells dug alongside the oil shale drill shafts.

But Akiva Flexer, a geology expert at Tel Aviv University, is concerned about the possible impact on the Mountain Aquifer, Israel’s main source of drinking water which lies just 200 metres below the shale oil deposits.

"It’s Israel’s most important aquifer," Flexer said. "If you have some dry crack, and there’s a certain leak it is enough that one drop of oil gets in and you can’t drink the water."

But Nguyen says a leak would be out of the question because an impermeable layer of clay separates the shale from the aquifer.

"In the pilot, we will have ground water monitoring wells where water can flow above and below the pilot areas," he said.

"If there is contamination in the water, we will stop heating and treat the contamination by removing and diluting it."

IEI, he says, will fully restore the land where they extract and produce shale oil, and the company is working with environmentalists to ensure their concerns are addressed.

But they have not managed to convince a local activist group called "Save Adullam" which fears the project may do irreversible damage to the aquifer which supplies both Israel and the Palestinians.

"I don’t want to risk the safety of the Israeli and Palestinian water supply on the ‘hope’ that everything will be OK," said spokeswoman Rachel Jacobson.

According to Israel’s infrastructure ministry, IEI was granted a licence to appraise the area for oil production from shale with the aim of "testing the method and its impacts from every angle, including, of course, the environmental impact."

So far, however, no environmental impact statement has been prepared, prompting Save Adullam and the Israeli Union for Environmental Defence (IUED) to petition the high court last year for a stop-work injunction.

But the court rejected their argument, saying the exploration fell under Israel’s 1952 Petroleum Act which grants energy explorers a free hand to search for oil and gas with minimal government interference.

For now, IEI has drilled into five sites, searching for the best place to start a full-scale pilot, with oil production set to begin as early as 2013.

By 2020, IEI expects to be extracting some 50,000 barrels per day (bpd), representing about a sixth of Israel’s daily oil imports, which in 2009 stood at 282,200 bpd, Nguyen says.

Mikhal Harm, secretary general of the Estonian branch of the World Energy Council, said that even Estonia, a leading producer of shale oil, had yet to solve the problem of carbon dioxide emissions.

He also said that in-situ conversion has not yet been proven commercially feasible anywhere in the world.

But he believes the shale oil deposits will end up benefiting Israel.

"The fact is that people need energy, and in the near future oil shale will be a big part of the energy portfolio," he told AFP.

"I don?t think people should be afraid of oil shale in Israel. They should welcome it, but with strict enough rules."

Copyright © 2011 AFP. All rights reserved.

By Rachel Neiman, Israel21C, February 22, 2009

A new US-Israel agreement of cooperation in renewable energy was announced at the opening of the 2nd Eilat-Eilot International Renewable Energy Conference last week. The US-Israel Energy Cooperation Act is an international collaboration aimed at creating a renewable energy storage initiative to reduce the world’s oil dependence.
The Cooperation Act will fund eligible joint ventures between US and Israeli businesses. Two million dollars, or $1 million from each country, has already been allocated for this year with a significant increase expected in future years.
At the opening, Jonathan Shrier, acting assistant secretary at the Office of Policy and International Affairs of the US Department of Energy, told the conference plenum that the agreement had the support of Dr. Steven Chu, the new US Secretary of Energy. “The secretary sees the power of international arrangements,” such as those brokered by the Binational US-Israel R&D Foundation (BIRD), the US-Israel Binational Science Foundation and others. “These various parties are involved because we need to push R&D of already available technologies and not neglect the cutting edge research at the basic science level.”
Shrier told ISRAEL21c that, while the US has similar agreements with countries such as Japan and the EU, “This one is special because we have a partner who brings a lot to the table. Israel is world-renowned in the field and we meet as equals,” he said.
US-Israel already in cooperation
Examples of US-Israel cooperation in renewable energy are already underway, noted Shrier. Seambiotic and Better Place, have already received approval. Seambiotic is the first company in the world utilizing flue gas from coal burning power stations for algae cultivation. The company aims to grow and process marine microalgae using an ecologically based environmental system to reduce air pollution and global warming. Better Place is a venture-backed company aiming to reduce global dependency on oil through the creation of an electric car network with a swappable battery.

The US Department of Energy and Israel?s Ministry of National Infrastructures agreed that the exchange researchers and conferences are two important elements of the collaboration. Two conferences in the US and two in Israel will take place annually. The annual conference in Sde Boker, Israel, will focus on the technological advancements in the Renewable Energy industry while the annual Eilat-Eilot conference will serve as a platform for industry-ready technologies to exhibit and market their offerings. In addition, Israeli researchers will spend significant time working in the US market and Israeli researchers will do the same in Israel.
The three-day conference focused on the latest innovations in renewable energy, with the participation of internationally-recognized alternative energy companies such as SCHOTT Solar of Germany, SunPower of the UK and Concentrix of the US, and speakers from around the world, as well as leading Israeli firms and start-up companies in the field. Close to 1,000 people attended the event and exhibition at Eilat’s Herod’s Palace conference center.
At the opening, keynote speaker, Israel’s Minister of National Infrastructure Binyamin “Fouad” Ben Eliezer, said his office was concentrating on two areas, that of assuring energy sources, primarily natural gas; and developing alternative energy sources, “primarily solar, given Israel’s optimal climate conditions,” and others, such as oil shale, as well.
The Silicon Valley of renewable energy
By 2020, 10 to 20 percent of Israel’s energy production will be solar, Ben-Eliezer told delegates, adding that he had full confidence that the energy economy division would be 20% solar, 40% natural gas and 40% coal-based. Energy would be generated at solar power projects at Ashalim, a 250MW BOT project whose tender will be offered shortly; Timna, a 250MW project whose bid for tender will be announced this coming summer; and Tel Arad, which is in the planning stages.
Ben-Eliezer called for the government to implement the decision to declare the Negev and Arava national priority regions. Also in attendance were MKs Avishay Braverman and Ophir Pines-Paz and Minister of Environmental Protection Gideon Ezra.
Noam Ilan, director of business development for the Eilat Eilot region said: “We truly believe that this event will place us firmly on the international map as a true world leader in the renewable energy and solar industries and the participation of Ministers Ben Eliezer and Ezra underscores that belief.”
His sentiments were echoed by Meir Yitzhak-HaLevy, Mayor of Eilat, who said he intended to make Eilat, “the world’s first solar city,” and Udi Gat, chairman of the Hevel Eilot Regional Council, who said: “We want to be the Silicon Valley of renewable energy.”
Other announcements made at the conference include the Timna Renewable Energy Park, which will be a center for R&D, and the AORA Solar Thermal Module at Kibbutz Samar, the world’s first commercial hybrid solar gas-turbine power plant that is already nearing completion. Solel Solar Systems announced it was beginning construction of a 50 MW solar field in Lebrija, Spain, and Brightsource Energy made a pre-conference announcement that it had inked the world’s largest solar deal to date with Southern California Edison (SCE).

© 2001-2008 ISRAEL21c.org. All rights reserved.

Press Release, University of Wyoming, October 30, 2008

"When completed, this center is expected to enable the University of Wyoming and GE Energy to advance cleaner coal technology and create the next generation of gasification experts. The acceleration of reliable, low-cost, cleaner coal power technology will help meet a growing demand for power, create jobs, support economic growth and positively impact the environment."

Oct. 30, 2008 — GE Energy and the University of Wyoming have reached agreement on a proposed development plan for the High Plains Gasification Advanced Technology Center. The agreement outlines the framework for the development, design, construction and operation of the facility, and enables work to begin immediately.

Plans are for the High Plains Gasification Advanced Technology Center to enable researchers from both GE and UW to develop advanced gasification and "cleaner coal" solutions for Powder River Basin and other coals. The center will consist of a small-scale gasification system.

"This is the beginning of what I hope is a productive, long-term relationship with GE to demonstrate how Wyoming coal can be utilized into the future," Gov. Dave Freudenthal said. "There is a community of interests here — for GE, there is a desire to develop and utilize new technology to gasify Powder River Basin and other Wyoming coals. For the state of Wyoming, there is a desire to continue to sell that coal in an evolving energy market. As the demand for electricity continues to rise, this question of managing carbon while still utilizing coal is an issue we will be confronting for many years to come. I am confident that the research developed at this facility will help us answer some of these questions and keep coal in the mix of cleaner and more secure domestic fuels long into the future."

"We are pleased to be working with the University of Wyoming to build a gasification research facility," said Steve Bolze, president and CEO, GE Energy’s Power & Water business. "A diverse fuel mix for power generation is necessary to ensure the security and reliability of our customers’ power generation portfolios, as well as the nation’s energy independence.

"When completed, this center is expected to enable the University of Wyoming and GE Energy to advance cleaner coal technology and create the next generation of gasification experts. The acceleration of reliable, low-cost, cleaner coal power technology will help meet a growing demand for power, create jobs, support economic growth and positively impact the environment."

The agreement outlines the development process for the facility including design, engineering, and construction; the operation of the governance board, which will serve as the board of directors for the joint project and additional contracts to be negotiated.

"We’re very pleased to reach this step in the process," UW President Tom Buchanan said. "This project allows UW to advance critical coal research and to offer unique educational opportunities to our students. This kind of research will allow us to attract highly-skilled faculty to continue to build our world-class expertise in the area of energy research."

The University of Wyoming, with the support of GE Energy, will execute a site selection and acquisition process based upon a set of jointly developed criteria. The criteria will include consideration of a number of factors, including availability of land appropriate for the facility, availability of necessary utilities and waste disposal facilities, proximity to coal supply, environmental permitting requirements, and others.

The cost of the center will be split by GE Energy and UW. The state’s contribution will come from appropriations to the university from the federal Abandoned Mine Reclamation Fund. The initial state appropriation in 2008 was $20 million. Gov. Freudenthal proposes to seek an additional $30 million during the 2009 legislative session. The university will own the facility and be responsible for its operation. Under the agreement, GE Energy will lease the facility from the university, with options to renew.

Wyoming is uniquely positioned in the nation’s energy landscape and has vast coal reserves capable of supporting a substantial portion of the nation’s energy needs. Wyoming produces approximately 40 percent of all the coal used in the United States to generate electricity.

About Gasification
Gasification is more than a century old. The process uses pressure, heat and steam to convert carbon-based materials like coal into a synthesis gas (syngas) that can be used for a variety of products including the production of chemicals or fertilizers and power generation.

About GE Energy
GE Energy (www.ge.com/energy) is one of the world’s leading suppliers of power generation and energy delivery technologies, with 2007 revenue of $22 billion. Based in Atlanta, Georgia, GE Energy works in all areas of the energy industry including coal, oil, natural gas and nuclear energy; renewable resources such as water, wind, solar and biogas; and other alternative fuels. Numerous GE Energy products are certified under ecomagination, GE Energy’s corporate-wide initiative to aggressively bring to market new technologies that will help customers meet pressing environmental challenges.

On the Web: www.uwyo.edu/GE

For more information, contact:
Cara Eastwood
Office of Gov. Dave Freudenthal
(307) 777-7437
ceastw@state.wy.us

Jessica Lowell
University of Wyoming
(307) 766-2929
jlowell@uwyo.edu

Cynthia Coleman
GE Energy
(832) 671 4540
cynthia.coleman@ge.com

Hatch talked about how developing oil shale will require far less water and land than ethanol production. He said the entire process of oil shale production, even without carbon capture technology, emits only 7 percent more carbon than gasoline, compared to 93 percent more with ethanol or 50 percent more by turning to switchgrass for alternative fuel development. Hatch also pointed out how the U.S. has between 1 trillion and 2 trillion barrels of recoverable oil from shale, compared to the world’s current oil reserves of about 1.6 trillion barrels.

By Stephen Speckman, Deseret News, August 20, 2008

For the second time in two months, Sen. Orrin Hatch was at the state Capitol stumping for the development of Utah’s oil shale.

Utah Republicans Hatch and Rep. Rob Bishop appeared in front of the state Natural Resources, Agriculture and Environment Interim Committee Wednesday to talk about how progress of shale development is being held up by "liberals" in Washington, lawsuits by environmental groups and a moratorium on leasing federal land for shale development.

It is estimated that there is about 800 billion recoverable barrels of oil locked in shale under the Green River formation, which is in portions of Utah, Wyoming and Colorado.

Hatch said the trend since 2000 shows that there has been an increase of 100 percent in the number of applications for permits to drill, permits granted by the Bureau of Land management and wells completed, while "environmentalist protests" are up 700 percent in that time. He based the drilling figures on data collected from a Utah BLM office in Vernal. Hatch said the current climate allows for any "wacko" to file a lawsuit and hold up energy development projects.

"A common argument used by extremists against oil shale production is that it would take 10 to 15 years to get to commercial production, so we should not allow it to start," Hatch said. "Another argument has been that oil shale development is probably not economic, so we should never let companies even have a go at it. Both arguments are based on fallacious circular logic, but the media continues to print them as though they make perfect sense."

Hatch said Democratic leadership in Congress has adopted an agenda of the "extreme anti-oil movement" as their own energy policy. Hatch said the time to develop shale is now, partly because oil companies no longer have the spare capacity to flood the market and roll oil prices back to 25 years ago.

"Other arguments used to defend the oil shale moratorium relate to concerns over water, land use and greenhouse gas emissions associated with oil shale development," Hatch added. "They are valid questions with valid answers. The fairest way to analyze these arguments is to compare oil shale with gasoline and with ethanol, our country’s most significant alternative transportation fuel."

Hatch talked about how developing oil shale will require far less water and land than ethanol production. He said the entire process of oil shale production, even without carbon capture technology, emits only 7 percent more carbon than gasoline, compared to 93 percent more with ethanol or 50 percent more by turning to switchgrass for alternative fuel development. Hatch also pointed out how the U.S. has between 1 trillion and 2 trillion barrels of recoverable oil from shale, compared to the world’s current oil reserves of about 1.6 trillion barrels.

Hatch is also worried Congress will allow a moratorium to continue that prevents commercial leases for shale projects on federal lands, which make up about 73 percent of the U.S. oil shale resources.

Bishop held up a huge map of the country that depicted how most Western states are made up of vast amounts of federal land, which is in sharp contrast to Eastern states, where Bishop said lawmakers have no problem locking up resources on federal lands.

"This is the mind-set problem we must deal with," Bishop said. Adequate access to roads on public lands, he noted, is critical to developing energy projects in Utah.

Bishop said the country needs to focus on developing alternative energy sources while, at the same time, going after traditional sources such as oil from shale. One by-product of relying on shale oil to someday reduce gas prices, he added, is to help a population of poor people dig their way out of poverty by spending less on energy needs.

Hatch and Bishop recommended that more people get involved in voicing their opinion about shale development and by learning more at two Web sites: www.unconventionalfuels.org and ostseis.anl.gov.

E-mail: sspeckman@desnews.com

© 2008 Deseret News Publishing Company | All rights reserved

International Energy Agency, press release, May 15, 2007

For a sustainable energy future, we need to accelerate the development and deployment of new technologies. We will work urgently to bring this about. We will enhance our programmes for the deployment of renewables and, subject to national policies, nuclear power, to cope with the emerging threat of global warming. We will promote clean coal and press ahead through the IEA and the Carbon Sequestration Leadership Forum (CSLF) with the full scale demonstration and early deployment of Carbon Capture and Storage, paying due regard to regulatory and safety issues. We will encourage the strengthening of our R&D efforts to reduce the costs of new technologies such as advanced biofuels, solar, hydrogen fuel cells and electric vehicles.

1. We, the Ministers of the Member countries of the International Energy Agency (IEA), convene in Paris to review the state of global energy markets and to provide guidance to the Agency, a leading international organisation in energy market and policy analysis and energy crisis management. We highly value the contribution of the Agency in these matters and commit to further strengthening its role and capability. 

2. We are pleased to welcome the Slovak Republic and Poland to our meeting, both of whom are expected to soon become IEA Member countries. But even with our expanding membership, actions within our own borders will never be enough to achieve a truly sustainable energy future. We therefore welcome the Agency’s reinforced work with major non-IEA consumers and producers of energy as essential partners in achieving a secure and sustainable energy future and combating energy poverty. Today’s greater involvement of these countries in the day-to-day work of the Agency is motivated by the common objectives of greater global energy market security and sustainability. We see this convergent effort with our partners in energy dialogue strengthening over time and call upon the IEA to continue to deepen its global reach.

3. Since our last meeting in 2005, the world has confronted even greater energy challenges: energy prices remain high and volatile and are a particularly heavy burden for the economies of less-developed countries; geopolitical risks are mounting; investment costs are soaring; capital spending is falling short of what is needed to ensure secure supply; and CO2 emissions are growing even more rapidly.

4. We nonetheless welcome the progress on commitments we took on behalf of our Member countries and on the instructions we gave the IEA at the 2005 Ministerial. Our response after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, which shut down much of the oil production and refining capacity in the Gulf of Mexico, was a display of the collective strength of the organisation and of its great solidarity and decisiveness. We stand ready to respond to any further disruption. We commit to sharpening and strengthening our emergency response mechanisms in line with changing market realities, including by increasing our co operation with non-Member countries during significant supply disruptions. We also call on the IEA to advise on emergency response mechanisms and policies for gas markets, and their potential international implications, as we have seen an increase in supply tensions and evidence of a lack of transparency.

5. We asked the IEA, in our Communiqué of 2005, for strategies to help bridge the gap between what is happening and what needs to be done for a sustainable and secure energy future. Since then, the IEA has identified many elements of a more sustainable path. Embarking on that path means acting now on cost-effective strategies in national policies and practices. We welcomed the recommendations on energy efficiency agreed at the St Petersburg G8 Summit. We now strongly welcome and consider implementing as soon as possible, according to national circumstances, the further recommendations on improving energy efficiency that the IEA has prepared as part of the programme supporting the G8 Gleneagles Plan Of Action, such as energy efficiency standards for new buildings, fuel efficiency standards for vehicles, and mandatory appliance standards. We call on the IEA to promote the development of efficiency goals and action plans at all levels of government, making use of sector-specific benchmarking tools to bring energy efficiency to best practice levels across the globe. We invite the IEA to evaluate and report on the energy efficiency progress in IEA Member and key non-Member countries. We also call on the IEA to continue to work towards identifying truly sustainable scenarios and on identifying least-cost policy solutions for combating energy-related climate change.

6. For a sustainable energy future, we need to accelerate the development and deployment of new technologies. We will work urgently to bring this about. We will enhance our programmes for the deployment of renewables and, subject to national policies, nuclear power, to cope with the emerging threat of global warming. We will promote clean coal and press ahead through the IEA and the Carbon Sequestration Leadership Forum (CSLF) with the full scale demonstration and early deployment of Carbon Capture and Storage, paying due regard to regulatory and safety issues. We will encourage the strengthening of our R&D efforts to reduce the costs of new technologies such as advanced biofuels, solar, hydrogen fuel cells and electric vehicles. And we will enhance our energy technology collaboration with major emerging economies, bilaterally and through the IEA’s technology network.

7. Achieving security and sustainability will require hard decisions by all nations. Collectively, we will need to draw on all energy sources, origins, suppliers and routes to markets. We remain committed to being guided by market principles but markets need more transparent, stable and predictable regulatory frameworks to boost investment as well as better data for timely investment. All countries must accept the responsibility of creating such conditions. The indivisibility of security and sustainability must guide each and every aspect of our work.

8. Our key message today is about motivation and implementation. We need to respond to the twin energy-related challenges we confront: ensuring secure, affordable energy for more of the world’s population, and managing in a sustainable manner the environmental consequences of producing, transforming and using that energy. These challenges are not insurmountable. The world can achieve a clean, clever and competitive energy future. To do so everyone will have to assume greater responsibility in all their activities, basing all of our energy decisions on best practices. We recognise that with every delay, the challenges become that much greater.

Communication and Information Office: (+33) 1 40 57 65 50 ; e-mail IEAPressOffice@iea.org

http://www.iea.org/Textbase/press/pressdetail.asp?PRESS_REL_ID=225 

By SAM SER, THE JERUSALEM POST,  Mar. 8, 2007

You don’t want to die. Not in a catastrophic flood caused by the melting of the polar ice caps. Not in a monstrous hurricane spawned by unnatural weather patterns. Not of thirst, after all your local water sources have dried up in a relentless series of heat waves. You don’t want to suffer the fate promised to you in An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore’s over-the-top, Oscar-winning movie about the impending doom of global warming.

So, you listen to Avi Harel, CEO of Vortex Ecological Technologies, and take solace in the company’s solution, which makes pollution and global warming nothing more than a tempest in a teacup.

With the company’s Advanced Vortex Chamber, industrial emissions stream into a cone-shaped device that accelerates the flow of gas through a spiral, creating a kind of cyclone. Into that maelstrom, a cleansing liquid is sprayed. Droplets of this liquid attach to hazardous particles that a factory would normally belch into the air we breathe. In the chamber, however, they are shuffled into a separate container where they are rendered into either an easily treatable powder or a liquid fertilizer.

Harel claims the company’s products can neutralize 99 percent of the poisonous sulfurous gas particles emitted by the burning of fossil fuels, and that they’ll also reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 10%-15%.

“That’s enough,” he says, “to make a difference.”

Indeed, while removing pollutants is boon enough, the Advanced Vortex Chamber’s reduction of CO2 is much more significant when it comes to fighting global warming. CO2 is by far the biggest factor in creating the greenhouse effect that is, almost all scientists now agree, behind the record temperatures being felt around the world. And it is produced mostly by factories and power stations – precisely Vortex’s target customers.

There’s just one snag: Vortex currently has systems that can handle only smaller factories and power stations. It would take a sizable contract with a large facility – like the oil refineries in Haifa or the Hadera power station, both of which are currently in negotiations with Vortex – for the young company to be able to produce a system on a larger scale. Until that happens, Vortex can only go so far.

Although the company has contracts with some Scandinavian companies, and it is in talks with firms in the US, “Israel is not much of a market for us yet,” Harel admits.

In a sense, then, Vortex is representative of Israel’s efforts at confronting global warming. There is plenty of potential here, but it is not being realized. The country is merely taking baby steps toward progress.

AS IT IS, Israelis’ environmental record is a poor one, from picnickers littering in parks to industrial factories dumping toxic chemicals into rivers and streams. More than these, though, government inaction is the main reason for pessimism that the country will turn its act around to handle a problem as large as global warming.

“The government isn’t doing much at all about the issue, really. There just isn’t enough shock yet. No one’s trying to actually make things better,” complains Dr. Eli Galanti, fellow and research coordinator at Tel Aviv University’s Porter School of Environmental Studies.

Just because Israel contributes very little to the problem of global warming – the scale of our industry and of our transportation system simply pales in comparison to nations like the US and China – doesn’t mean that we should contribute little to its solution, Galanti says. After all, we’ll feel the effects just the same.

That could mean more forest and bush fires, more invasive species or pests, a delayed growing season or any of several other ill effects of global warming.

“We will have hotter and slightly longer heat waves in the summers,” Galanti says. “That may seem trivial, since it’s already pretty hot here, but it’s not trivial at all. A major implication is a drop in the amount of rainfall we get, since even a minor change could mean trouble for our drinking water supply.”

The water supply is already precariously low, thanks to skyrocketing demands on our modest resources from a burgeoning population and from an agricultural industry that farms crops with high water needs.

Several answers to these problems are already here. In addition to techniques of drip irrigation that Israel has mastered, universities and private firms are developing methods of raising crops that grow well in our climate with much less water. Ending water subsidies for farmers producing water-intensive crops could bring those methods into wider use. Such a step, however, is not on the government’s agenda.

Neither is it clear when or even if the government plans to build desalination plants that would increase the amount of water available, despite the fact that Israel boasts the world’s largest seawater reverse osmosis desalination plant, in Ashkelon.

Another step, installing water saving devices throughout the country, remains just an idea.

“If every household were fitted with water saving devices – at a cost of NIS 185 million – we could save NIS 375 million in a year. So, in six months, that project would pay for itself. Yet the government won’t make that investment,” bemoans Noga Levtzion-Nadan, an environmental economist.

“The government thinks so short-term… but for environmental issues, you can’t just think short-term. The problems are all long-term,” she says.

BACK TO carbon dioxide: The government is choosing to continue to produce more of it, when clean alternatives are available.

Over the objections of the Environmental Protection Ministry, the National Infrastructure Ministry plans to push through construction of a third coal-burning power plant in Ashkelon to meet the ever increasing electricity demands of the country. Meanwhile, plans for a non-polluting solar power station in the Negev continue to drag on fruitlessly, thanks to administrative delays.

Although National Infrastructure Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer says the government is committed to its 2006 decision to produce up to 10% of the country’s electricity through renewable energy in 10 years, the plans to construct another coal-burning power plant are an indication that there is little action behind those words.

“[The decision] is not moving and not being implemented in the field because this plan has not been placed very high on the national agenda,” Dr. Yishayahu Bar-Or, the Environmental Protection Ministry’s chief scientist, told The Jerusalem Post recently. “Right now the government is dragging its feet on this.”

“It’s bizarre that Israel hasn’t invested heavily in alternate fuels and energies,” says Tel Aviv University’s Galanti.

It’s not only bizarre but economically misguided, says Levtzion-Nadan, who has carried out extensive research on the government’s budgetary commitment to environmental policy.

“If 10% of our energy consumption came from renewable energy sources, over 20 years we would save NIS 9 billion. Yet in the budget, Israel invests only NIS 2.1 million per year in renewable energy. It’s a joke.”

What’s more, there are hidden costs to the ostensibly cheaper fossil fuels.

“We pay about NIS 4.3b. per year – in health costs, lost labor costs, lost tax revenues, etc. – because of our complete reliance on fossil fuels, and the health hazards they cause,” says Levtzion-Nadan. “We don’t see that cost at the gas pump, or in our electric bill, so we think that those things are cheap. But the cost is there. It adds up and has an effect on the economy. We all pay the price for that way of life.”

FORTUNATELY, there are also positive developments, although they are small.

The government has ordered that oil-burning power stations change over to natural gas, for example. Burning natural gas still contributes to the greenhouse effect, but to a significantly lesser extent, and it pollutes much less as well.

The Finance Ministry announced last month that it would exempt a new electric scooter from purchase tax, to make the clean-running vehicle more attractive. Tax on the two hybrid cars available here, the Toyota Prius and a hybrid model of the Honda Civic, is already a fraction of the tax on other cars.

Diesel emissions standards, unchanged for 30 years, have been updated so that older, polluting models will be taken out of use.

“The things that we have accomplished, just in the transportation field and just in the past year and a half, have been significant,” says Shuly Nezer, head of the Environmental Protection Ministry’s air quality department. “And there’s hope that we can make even more changes.”

Nezer notes that there is now a “green taxation committee” in the Finance Ministry, working together with the Environmental Protection and Transportation ministries to classify vehicles according to their emissions. It is conceivable, she says, that higher efficiency vehicles, such as small cars, modern diesels and scooters and motorcycles, could receive tax breaks in the very near future.

“We are also working to make Israel more efficient in its energy usage,” Nezer adds. “We have put out a call to local councils to use more efficient lighting on roads, for example. As we explain, these steps are not just good for the environment, they are more economical in the long term.”

While government efforts to fight environmental damage began in earnest a decade ago, they are finally bearing fruit now, thanks in part to a larger public awareness of the problem and pressure from an increasing number of environmental groups.

As Nezer says, Israel has a long way to go – but it has also come a long way, too. Despite being classified as a developing country in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the country’s greenhouse gas emissions per capita are on par with levels in superstrict Western Europe.

“We are not China and India,” Nezer says, referring to two of the largest polluter states. “It’s true that we could do much more. But things are beginning to change, they really are. What you see here today is much more advanced than it was five years ago. I am very optimistic.”

UNTIL NOW, economics has been used as an excuse for inaction on pro-environmental projects. Ultimately, though, financial concerns may end up as just the thing that pushes Israel to act.

As noted above, several policy changes would provide financial savings over time, in addition to their positive environmental impact. At some point soon, the benefits of change will become too evident to ignore – and they may serve officials who care less about the environment than they do about their ability to fund some other project with the savings of an environmental one.

Already, the private sector is showing an interest in environmental issues.

What more and more people are discovering, says Levtzion-Nadan, is that “companies that manage their environmental obligations are often well managed in general. If they have a sound, coherent strategy for dealing with environmental issues, they usually have sound, coherent strategies for other areas of operations as well. So it’s a very good way to evaluate companies, from an investment standpoint.

“In fact, I do that a lot for investors. Investors need to have a complete view of a company; they need to know everything about the company. They are now starting to realize that if a company pollutes today, it’s going to be looking at a fine, or at the costs of a clean-up, or at a major lawsuit.”

So maybe Avi Harel will soon be getting more calls at Vortex’s headquarters in Haifa.

“Not only can we help the environment,” he says, “we can help companies save money.” And that, as he already mentioned, is enough to make a difference.

What can Israel do?
‘Sustainable development doesn’t mean going back to living in the Stone Age,” says environmental economist Noga Levtzion-Nadan. “It means recognizing that our resources are limited, and finding ways to manage those resources as best we can.”

The following are some suggested ways of better managing Israel’s resources.

Steps the government could take to reduce CO2 emissions:
* Building solar energy power plants instead of coal-burning power plants.

“Today, solar energy is absolutely worthwhile in Israel. Unfortunately, what’s holding it up is bureaucratic snafus,” says Shuly Nezer, of the Environmental Protection Ministry. “Without a doubt, if there were the will to do so, this could be achieved immediately.”

* Strengthening – and, more importantly, enforcing – restrictions on pollution and CO2 emissions.

“Industry will move forward only if enforcement is tough enough. otherwise, it’s too cheap to just continue polluting,” says Levtzion-Nadan. “Furthermore, there has to be consistency from the government. If, for example, a company feels that today’s stiff regulations won’t be in effect five years down the road, then it probably won’t bother to comply today. Why should it?”

Steps the government could take to increase the country’s drinking water supply:

* Ordering the installation of water-saving devices;

* Building more desalination plants.

In October 2006, a little more than a year after it commenced initial production, the seawater reverse osmosis desalination plant in Ashkelon delivered its first 100 million cubic meters of water. The plant produces around 13% of the country’s domestic consumer demand at one of the world’s lowest prices for desalinated water.

Source:

http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1173173961558&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FPrinter

Like PFBC, the technology is relatively new in connection with power generation. Coal-based IGCC plants for power generation passed through a critical stage in their development during the 1990s.

IGCC uses a combined cycle format with a gas turbine driven by the combusted syngas, while the exhaust gases are heat exchanged with water/steam to generate superheated steam to drive a steam turbine. Using IGCC, more of the power comes from the gas turbine. Typically 60-70% of the power comes from the gas turbine with IGCC, compared with about 20% using PFBC.

Coal gasification takes place in the presence of a controlled ‘shortage’ of air/oxygen, thus maintaining reducing conditions. The process is carried out in an enclosed pressurized reactor, and the product is a mixture of CO + H2 (called synthesis gas, syngas or fuel gas). The product gas is cleaned and then burned with either oxygen or air, generating combustion products at high temperature and pressure. The sulphur present mainly forms H2S but there is also a little COS. The H2S can be more readily removed than SO2. Although no NOx is formed during gasification, some is formed when the fuel gas or syngas is subsequently burned.

Three gasifier formats are possible, with fixed beds (not normally used for power generation), fluidized beds and entrained flow. Fixed bed units use only lump coal, fluidized bed units a feed of 3-6 mm size, and entrained flow gasifiers use a pulverised feed, similar to that used in PCC.

IGCC plants can be configured to facilitate C02 capture. The new gas is quenched and cleaned. The syngas is ‘shifted’ using steam to convert C0 to C02, which is then separated for possible long-term sequestration.

Characteristics

The IGCC demonstration plants use different flow sheets, and will therefore test the practicalities and economics of different degrees of integration. These are discussed in the IEA Coal Research report OECD coal-fired power generation – trends in the 1990s, IEAPER/33. In all IGCC plants, there is a requirement for a series of large heat exchangers, which become major components. In such exchangers, solids deposition, fouling and corrosion may take place. Currently, cooling the syngas to below 100°C is required for conventional cleaning, and it is subsequently reheated before combustion. Substantial heat exchange vessels are needed. At Puertollano, quenching is used to cool the syngas. This is a simple, but relatively inefficient procedure, however, it avoids deposition problems, as the ash present is rapidly cooled to a solid non-sticky form. The cold gas cleaning processes used are variants of well proven natural gas sweetening processes to remove acid impurities and any sulphur present.

Ash behaviour in a gasifier is a critical parameter, both in terms of the satisfactory formation of a slag in entrained flow, and the possibility of solids deposition in the syngas cooler/heat exchanger. At lower temperatures, such as those in fluidized and fixed bed gasifiers, tar formation and deposition may prove to be a difficulty. One advantage of gasification under pressure is that the effective gas volumes involved are far smaller from gasification than from PCC.

There are significant technical challenges. Highly integrated plants tend to have long start-up times (compared to PCC units), and hence may only be suitable for base-load operation.

With pressurized gasification (as with PFBC), the supply of coal into the system is considerably more complex than with PCC. Some gasifiers use bulky and costly lock hopper systems to inject the coal, while others have the coal fed in as a water-based slurry. Similarly, by-product streams have to be depressurized, while heat exchangers and gas cleaning units for the intermediate product syngas must themselves be pressurized.

Source: http://www.iea-coal.org.uk/content/default.asp?PageId=74

Press Release, US Dept. of Energy

November 27, 2006 – Washington, DC – Building on the continuous operation of a prototype coal dryer that uses waste heat to remove moisture from coal, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has given the go-ahead to Great River Energy to conduct the first-ever full-scale demonstration of the utility company’s innovative technology.

Great River Energy will soon begin the demonstration at its Coal Creek Station near Underwood, N.D., during the second phase of a cost-shared project with DOE. The $31.5 million project, which received $13.5 million in funding from DOE, was one of eight projects selected in the first phase of DOE’s Clean Coal Power Initiative, a 10-year $2-billion commitment to advance of clean coal technologies and an integral part of the Administration’s National Energy Policy. The projects are managed by DOE’s National Energy Technology Laboratory.

“This unique coal-drying system enables the nation to tap into vast resources of high-moisture coal while simultaneously providing environmental benefits,” according to Jeffrey Jarrett, Assistant Secretary for Fossil Energy. “The successful demonstration of the system will further indicate that the nation can cost-effectively use its most abundant resource and still contribute to the President’s Clear Skies Initiative.”

During the first phase of the project, Great River Energy used its prototype dryer to supply about 14 percent of the coal fed to a 546-megawatt unit at the station. Positive results from the operation indicated that the stack flow rate decreased 1 percent, boiler efficiency increased 0.3 percent, pulverizer power consumption decreased 3.5 percent, sulfur oxide emissions fell 1 percent, nitrogen oxide emissions decreased 7.6 percent, and carbon dioxide emissions fell 0.9 percent.

The full-scale demonstration planned for phase 2 of the project will include the final design and construction of a four-dryer integrated system that will supply all of the coal (high-moisture lignite) to the 546-megwatt unit. The demonstration of the integrated system is expected to occur sometime in 2008 and will operate through that year, generating data that will be useful to operators of other power plants that burn high-moisture coal. After 2008, the unit is expected to operate as an integral part of the utility’s power grid.

The likely benefactors of a successful demonstration would be those power plants, primarily in the western United States, that burn the lignite and Powder River Basis coals. These coals have a high moisture content and therefore create challenges for utility operators. As an example, Great River Energy’s Coal Creek Station burns lignite that can contain as much as 40 percent water by weight.

Until Great River Energy’s project, the cost of thermal coal drying often exceeded any predicted gains in a plant’s operational performance. At the Coal Creek Station, however, the approach of capturing and reusing the excess heat, rather than burning additional fuel to generate the heat, holds the promise for commercial application of thermal coal drying.

Today in the United States, power generation units that burn lignite and Power River Basin coal have a combined capacity of 115 gigawatts. Over the next 20 years, the capacity of those types of units is projected to increase by another 100 gigawatts. If the coal-drying system is applied at power stations totaling just 10 gigawatts, the annual reduction in air emissions will be nearly 7,000 tons of nitrogen oxides, more than 18,000 tons of sulfur dioxide, more than 7 million tons of carbon dioxide, more than 9,000 tons of particulates, and nearly 300 pounds of mercury.

The advantages inherent in Great River Energy’s system is that drying the coal increases its heating value and requires less coal to generate the same amount of energy. The system also emits less flue gas and thereby reduces the workload on other equipment in the plant, such as fans. The overall result is an estimated increase in efficiency of about 5 percent, considered a significant improvement in plant performance and cost savings.

In conjunction with Great River Energy, other project partners include the Electric Power Research Institute (Palo Alto, Calif.), Lehigh University (Bethlehem, Pa.), Barr Engineering, (Minneapolis, Minn.), Headwaters Inc. (South Jordan, Utah), and Falkirk Mining (Underwood, N.D.).

Source: http://www.careenergy.com/news/articleview.asp?iArticle=226

Briefing Paper # 83
May 2006 

 Uranium Information Center, Australia, http://www.uic.com.au/nip83.htm

Coal is a vital fuel in most parts of the world.
Burning coal without adding to global carbon dioxide levels is a major technological challenge which is being addressed.
The most promising “clean coal” technology involves using the coal to make hydrogen from water, then burying the resultant carbon dioxide by-product and burning the hydrogen.
The greatest challenge is bringing the cost of this down sufficiently for “clean coal” to compete with nuclear power on the basis of near-zero emissions for base-load power.

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Coal is an extremely important fuel and will remain so. Some 23% of primary energy needs are met by coal and 39% of electricity is generated from coal. About 70% of world steel production depends on coal feedstock. Coal is the world’s most abundant and widely distributed fossil fuel source. The International Energy Agency expects a 43% increase in its use from 2000 to 2020.
However, burning coal produces about 9 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide each year which is released to the atmosphere, about 70% of this being from power generation. Other estimates put carbon dioxide emissions from power generation at one third of the world total of over 25 billion tonnes of CO2 emissions.

New “clean coal” technologies are addressing this problem so that the world’s enormous resources of coal can be utilised for future generations without contributing to global warming. Much of the challenge is in commercialising the technology so that coal use remains economically competitive despite the cost of achieving “zero emissions”.

As many coal-fired power stations approach retirement, their replacement gives much scope for ‘cleaner’ electricity. Alongside nuclear power and harnessing renewable energy sources, one hope for this is via “clean coal” technologies, such as are now starting to receive substantial R&D funding.

Managing wastes from coal

Burning coal, such as for power generation, gives rise to a variety of wastes which must be controlled or at least accounted for. So-called “clean coal” technologies are a variety of evolving responses to late 20th century environmental concerns, including that of global warming due to carbon dioxide releases to the atmosphere. However, many of the elements have in fact been applied for many years, and they will be only briefly mentioned here:

Coal cleaning by ‘washing’ has been standard practice in developed countries for some time. It reduces emissions of ash and sulfur dioxide when the coal is burned.
Electrostatic precipitators and fabric filters can remove 99% of the fly ash from the flue gases – these technologies are in widespread use.
Flue gas desulfurisation reduces the output of sulfur dioxide to the atmosphere by up to 97%, the task depending on the level of sulfur in the coal and the extent of the reduction. It is widely used where needed in developed countries.
Low-NOx burners allow coal-fired plants to reduce nitrogen oxide emissions by up to 40%. Coupled with re-burning techniques NOx can be reduced 70% and selective catalytic reduction can clean up 90% of NOx emissions.
Increased efficiency of plant – up to 45% thermal efficiency now (and 50% expected in future) means that newer plants create less emissions per kWh than older ones.
Advanced technologies such as Integrated Gasification Combined Cycle (IGCC) and Pressurised Fluidised Bed Combustion (PFBC) will enable higher thermal efficiencies still – up to 50% in the future.
Ultra-clean coal from new processing technologies which reduce ash below 0.25% and sulfur to very low levels mean that pulverised coal might be fed directly into gas turbines with combined cycle and burned at high thermal efficiency.
Gasification, including underground gasification in situ, uses steam and oxygen to turn the coal into carbon monoxide and hydrogen.
Sequestration refers to disposal of liquid carbon dioxide, once captured, into deep geological strata.
Some of these impose operating costs without concomitant benefit to the operator, though external costs will almost certainly be increasingly factored in through carbon taxes or similar which will change the economics of burning coal.
However, waste products can be used productively. In 1999 the EU used half of its coal fly ash and bottom ash in building materials (where fly ash can replace cement), and 87% of the gypsum from flue gas desulfurisation.

Carbon dioxide from burning coal is the main focus of attention today, since it is implicated in global warming, and the Kyoto Protocol requires that emissions decline, notwithstanding increasing energy demand.

Capture & separation of CO2

A number of means exist to capture carbon dioxide from gas streams, but they have not yet been optimised for the scale required in coal-burning power plants. The focus has often been on obtaining pure CO2 for industrial purposes rather than reducing CO2 levels in power plant emissions.

Where there is carbon dioxide mixed with methane from natural gas wells, its separation is well proven. Several processes are used, including hot potassium carbonate which is energy-intensive and requires a large plant, a monoethanolamine process which yields high-purity carbon dioxide, amine scrubbing, and membrane processes.

Capture of carbon dioxide from flue gas streams following combustion in air is expensive as the carbon dioxide concentration is only about 14% at best.

However, today’s Integrated Gasification Combined Cycle (IGCC) plant is a means of using coal and steam to produce hydrogen and carbon monoxide which are then burned in a gas turbine with secondary steam turbine (ie combined cycle) to produce electricity. If the gasifier is fed with oxygen rather than air, the flue gas contains highly-concentrated CO2 which can readily be captured – at about half the cost of capture from conventional plants. Ten oxygen-fired gasifiers are operational in the USA.

Development of this oxygen-fed IGCC process will add a shift reactor to oxidise the CO with water so that the gas stream is basically just hydrogen and carbon dioxide. These are separated before combustion and the hydrogen alone becomes the fuel for electricity generation (or other uses) while the concentrated pressurised carbon dioxide is readily disposed of.

Currently IGCC plants have a 45% thermal efficiency.

Capture of carbon dioxide from coal gasification is already achieved at low marginal cost in some plants. One (albeit where the high capital cost has been largely written off) is the Great Plains Synfuels Plant in North Dakota, where 6 million tonnes of lignite is gasified each year to produce clean synthetic natural gas.

Another technology being developed has potential for retrofit to existing pulverised coal plants, which are the backbone of electricity generation in many countries. This is oxy-fuel combustion, which involves feeding oxygen and recycled flue gases into the boiler to reduce the overall volume of flue gases and increase toe CO2 concentration to allow more ready capture of it for sequestration.

Storage & sequestration of CO2

Captured carbon dioxide gas can be put to good use, even on a commercial basis, for enhanced oil recovery. This is well demonstrated in West Texas, and today over 3000 km of pipelines connect oilfields to a number of carbon dioxide sources in the region.

At the Great Plains Synfuels Plant, North Dakota, some 13,000 tonnes per day of carbon dioxide gas is captured and 5000 t of this is piped 320 km into Canada for enhanced oil recovery. This Weyburn oilfield sequesters about 85 cubic metres of carbon dioxide per barrel of oil produced, a total of 19 million tonnes over the project’s 20 year life. The first phase of its operation has been judged a success.

Overall in USA, 32 million tonnes of CO2 is used annually for enhanced oil recovery, 10% of this from anthropogenic sources.

The world’s first industrial-scale CO2 storage was at Norway’s Sleipner gas field in the North Sea, where about one million tonnes per year of compressed liquid CO2 separated from methane is injected into a deep reservoir (saline aquifer) about a kilometre below the sea bed and remains safely in place. The US$ 80 million incremental cost of the sequestration project was paid back in 18 months on the basis of carbon tax savings at $50/tonne. (The natural gas contains 9% CO2 which must be reduced before sale or export.) The overall Utsira sandstone formation there, about one kilometre below the sea bed, is said to be capable of storing 600 billion tonnes of CO2.

West Australia’s proposed Gorgon natural gas project from 2009 will tap natural gas with 14% CO2. Capture and geosequestration of this will reduce the project’s emissions from 6.7 to 4.0 million tonnes of CO2 per year.

Injecting carbon dioxide into deep, unmineable coal seams where it is adsorbed to displace methane (effectively: natural gas) is another potential use or disposal strategy. Currently the economics of enhanced coal bed methane extraction are not as favourable as enhanced oil recovery, but the potential is large.

While the scale of envisaged need for CO2 disposal far exceeds today’s uses, they do demonstrate the practicality. Safety and permanence of disposition are key considerations in sequestration.

Research on geosequestration is ongoing in sevaral parts of the world. The main potential appears to be deep saline aquifers and depleted oil and gas fields. In both, the CO2 is expected to remain as a supercritical gas for thousands of years, with some dissolving.

Large-scale storage of CO2 from power generation will require an extensive pipeline network in densely populated areas. This has safety implications.

Economics, R&D

The World Coal Institute notes that at present the high cost of carbon capture and storage (US$ 150-220 per tonne of carbon, $40-60/t CO2 – 3.5 to 5.5 c/kWh relative to coal burned at 35% thermal efficiency) renders the option uneconomic. But a lot of work is being done to improve the economic viability of it, and the US Dept of Energy (DOE) is funding R&D with a view to reducing the cost of carbon sequestered to US$ 10/tC (equivalent to 0.25 c/kWh) or less by 2008, and by 2012 to reduce the cost of carbon capture and sequestration to a 10% increment on electricity generation costs.

More recently the DOE has announced the $1.3 billion FutureGen project to design, build and operate a nearly emission-free coal-based electricity and hydrogen production plant. The FutureGen initiative will comprise a coal gasification plant with additional water-shift reactor, to produce hydrogen and carbon dioxide. About one million tonnes of CO2 (at least 90% of throughput) will then be separated by membrane technology and sequestered geologically. The hydrogen will be burned in a 275 MWe generating plant and in fuel cells.

Construction of FutureGen is due to start in 2009, for operation in 2012. The project is designed to validate the technical feasibility and economic viability of near-zero emission coal-based generation. In particular it aims to produce electricity with only a 10% cost premium and show that hydrogen can be produced at $3.80 per GJ, equivalent to petrol at 12.7 cents per litre.

In Denmark a pilot project at the 420 MWe Elsam power plant is capturing CO2 from post-combustion flue gases under the auspices of CASTOR (CO2 from Capture to Storage). Flue gases are passed through an absorber, where a solvent captures about 90% of the CO2. The pregnant solution is then heated to 120°C to release pure CO2 at the rate of about one tonne per hour for geological sequestration. Cost is expected to be EUR 20-30 per tonne.

A 2000 US study put the cost of CO2 capture for IGCC plants at 1.7 c/kWh, with an energy penalty 14.6% and a cost of avoided CO2 of $26/t ($96/t C). By 2010 this is expected to improve to 1.0 c/kWh, 9% energy penalty and avoided CO2 cost of $18/t ($66/t C).

Figures from IPCC Mitigation working group in 2005 for IGCC put capture and sequestration cost at 1.0-3.2 c/kWh, thus increasing electricity cost for IGCC by 21-78% to 5.5 to 9.1 c/kWh. The energy penalty in that was 14-25% and the mitigation cost $14-53/t CO2 ($51-200/tC) avoided. These figures included up to $5 per tonne CO2 for transport and up to $8.30 /t CO2 for geological sequestration.

Gasification processes

In conventional plants coal is burned with excess air (to give complete combustion), resulting in very dilute carbon dioxide.

Gasification converts the coal to burnable gas with the maximum amount of potential energy from the coal being in the gas.

The first gasification step is pyrolysis, from 400°C up, where the coal in the absence of oxygen rapidly gives carbon-rich char and hydrogen-rich volatiles.

In the second step the char is gasified from 700°C up to yield gas, leaving ash. With oxygen feed, the gas is not diluted with nitrogen.

The key reactions today are C + O2 to CO, and the water gas reaction: C + H2O to CO & H2, which is endothermic.

In gasification, including that using oxygen, the O2 supply is much less than required for full combustion, so as to yield CO and H2. The hydrogen has a heat value of 121 MJ/kg – about five times that of the coal, so it is a very energy-dense fuel. However, the air separation plant to produce oxygen consumes up to 20% of the gross power of the whole IGCC plant system.

In future, the water-shift reaction will become a key part of the process so that:
C + O2 gives CO, and
C + H2O gives CO & H2, then the
CO + H2O gives CO2 & H2 (the water-shift reaction).
The products are then concentrated CO2 which can be captured, and hydrogen* which is the final fuel for the gas turbine.

* There is also some hydrogen from the coal pyrolysis.

Overall thermal efficiency for oxygen-blown coal gasification, including carbon dioxide capture and sequestration, is about 73%. Using the hydrogen in a gas turbine for electricity generation is efficient, so the overall system has long-term potential to achieve an efficiency of up to 60%.

Present trends

The clean coal technology field is moving very rapidly in the direction of coal gasification with a second stage so as to produce a concentrated and pressurised carbon dioxide stream followed by its separation and geological storage. This technology has the potential to provide what may be called “zero emissions” – in reality, extremely low emissions of the conventional coal pollutants, and as low-as-engineered carbon dioxide emissions.

This has come about as a result of the realisation that efficiency improvements, together with the use of natural gas and renewables such as wind will not provide the deep cuts in greenhouse gas emissions necessary to meet future national targets.

The US DOE sees “zero emissions” coal technology as a core element of its future energy supply in a carbon-constrained world. It has in place an ambitious program to develop and demonstrate the technology and have commercial designs for plants with an electricity cost of only 10% greater than conventional coal plants available by 2012.

Australia is very well endowed with carbon dioxide storage sites near major carbon dioxide sources, but as elsewhere, demonstration plants will be needed to gain public acceptance and show that the storage is permanent.

In several countries, “zero emissions” technology seems to have the potential for low avoided cost for greenhouse gas emissions.

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References:
Prime Minister’s Science Engineering and Innovation Council, Australia 2002, Beyond Kyoto report.
David Cain & staff, Rio Tinto, pers. comm.
Smith, D 2002, CO2 capture articles in Modern Power Systems, Nov-Dec 2002.
World Coal Institute, publications on Clean Coal Technologies.
World Coal Institute, Sustainable Entrepreneurship: the Way Forward for the Coal Industry.
International Energy Agency 2002, Key World Energy Statistics.
International Energy Agency 2002, Solutions for 21st Century – Zero emissions technologies for fossil fuels.
US DOE 27/2/03 announcement.
US DOE NETL 21/3/03, Carbon sequestration – technology roadmap and program plan.
Gale J 2004, Geological storage of CO2, Energy 29, 1329-38.
Coal21 publications.