Carbon Emissions | February 15, 2008 |
Coal's Future Might Lie in Gasification
While coal may be unpopular in the eyes of investors and regulators, the power industry is looking for cleaner ways to continue to use the ore that provides half of the power that keeps the lights on.
Gasifying coal and capturing the CO2 is seen as a cleaner alternative to today's coal burning process. While the DOE no longer wants to fund an uber "clean coal" power plant, researchers are hopeful that while costly, gasification would be viable in the upcoming era of carbon caps.
Scientists at the Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory say that based on their testing, coal gasification is a worthwhile technology. “Coal gasification offers one of the most versatile and clean ways to convert coal into electricity, hydrogen and other valuable energy products,” said PNNL staff scientist George Muntean, in a speech at the 2008 Annual Meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) today.
"If we plan to use our domestic supply of coal to produce energy, and do so in a way that does not intensify atmospheric CO2 concentrations, gasification is critical," he said.
GE, which signed a deal on a $100 million gasification plant with the
What to with that carbon once it is siphoned off remains a serious challenge. Sending it via pipeline to be used for commercial purposes or burying it underground are very expensive.
Another formidable challenge to gasification plants are the "refractories" that line the inside of gasifiers, according to PNNL.
&The relining of a gasifier costs approximately $1 million and requires three to six weeks of downtime.
Ouch, lose a few weeks of time nearly once a year? That's no way to run a plant.
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Comments By Readers
Not all gasifiers use a refractory design, and many gasification plants us many gasifiers in series, so maintainance can be rotated through without taking the plant down. Many gasification plants operate for many years at a time without a full shutdown.
Too bad that the DOE just canceled the Futuregen project because it did not site in Texas, and the Natural Resources Defense Council has essentiually declared open war on gasification-based synthetic fuels, thereby trying thier level best to kill our best hope of realistic large-scale reduced carbon footprint, or even carbon neutral, synthetic fuels production, as well as our most effective technical bridge away from coal to renewable biomass sources. (sounds kind of counter to the core mission of an "environmental group" doesnt it?)
Seems to be a well kept secret that
a company by the name of Bixby Energy Systems has a coal gasification technology that does not produce the CO2 and is truly
"clean"
Robert, I see you made this post in March 2008. It is now nearly August, so if Bixby truly "has a coal gasification technology that does not produce CO2 and is truly clean," then where is it? Why haven't any results been published in the last six months?
A message from Bob Walker
There have been many comments on a [blog] of late that have been less than flattering to me and, in fact, down right slanderous. You work all your life to build and maintain a good reputation and show it in your contribution to the community you live in, by the thousands of good jobs you create, and your real desire to make the world a better place to live and several "experts" cowardly sitting safely at their desks casually choose, without bothering to find out any facts, choose to anoint you a "scam artist".
When I founded Bixby Energy in July 0f 2001, it was only after spending a year and a half researching this young, undefined "new energy' industry trying to get a handle on what the future of this business was going to be about. I came back with two conclusions. First, the old energy industry we had been living with the last 100 years was going to change 180 degrees and second, the answers to all our energy problems had already been solved and we just had to find where they were in this great big world.
By changing 180, I mean that in the old days, when oil was plentiful, you drilled a well, tapped into 30 million barrels, attached it to a pipeline and that was it. Today, for every two barrels we consume, we only replace it with one. We are running out of oil. In the future, however, we will get our energy from 10,000 farms (farm waste), 10,000 municipal waste dumps (garbage) and 10,000 forests (clear cut residue). Loggers in Minnesota alone leave 1 million tons of wood waste a year in the forest after clear cutting. These materials, however, did not possess energy in the density that coal, oil or gas do, so transportation economics was going to play a huge role in the new energy industry of the future. Shipping light materials any distance is like shipping smoke and the freight costs would soon kill any advantage initially hoped for from cheap biomass materials. Having to pick the materials from remote locations, take it to a processing facility, convert it to a viable fuel, and then redeliver it to the end consumer was going to be a real challenge.
By the answers already being here, I mean that in back yard garages, in small companies, and in labs in small colleges all over the country, there are very talented people working on these solutions. They may be a back yard mechanic, an engineer, or a scientist who has created a viable solution but because they lack the ability to raise money, develop commercially viable products, set up manufacturing, and have the ability to start, develop, and eventually take a company public, their idea has no hope of flourishing. As an inventor with more than 27 patents who was also blessed with the other capabilities and having successfully proven that, I decided to start a company that would seek out, find, and put these talented people in a position to turn their ideas into successful products. If they succeeded, we succeeded both as a company and as a world with better energy solutions. So, that was and is still the promise of Bixby.
This new energy industry was in its infancy and no one could tell you what products were going to be winners and if they were, for how long. We realized that no matter what happened in this new industry, it was still going to be driven by energy products that were still primarily solid fuel, liquid, or gas. Despite all the hoopla about wind and solar, we felt then and still feel today that they are promising technologies but still in their infancy and too undependable (wind systems provides energy only 31% of the time in the best of conditions and solar works best only in the sunniest of climates and it still gets dark every night) to replace our old fossil fuel technologies any time soon.
Look at the ethanol-from-corn industry for example. Ten years ago, everybody thought it was the wave of the future. Now, there isn't an investment firm in the country who would stick a dime in that business. Well, we weren't immune to some stumbles either. We reasoned that with 36,000 kinds of biomass growing out there every year that engineered fuel pellets had a bright future. So, that's where we placed our initial focus. And we created a system that allowed us to create engineered fuel pellets from all that biomass, and even acquired a company that had a unique delivery system to efficiently deliver in to our end consumers. We also developed and manufactured a biomass stove that was the state-of-the-art in the industry and is today still considered the best of the best out there. It was to be the precursor to our entire line of biomass furnaces that would heat your home, your hot water, and generate your electricity.
But you know what? Things happen sometimes beyond your control. The Solid Fuel industry was about to take a hit. Our primary fuel was corn because it was so plentiful, was the most compact biomass energy fuel, and was cheap. However, in four short years, thanks to ethanol, corn became too expensive as a fuel. At the same time, so did wood pellets. The final death knell occurred when, after 3 solid years of you-can't-make-them-fast-enough, we had an unusually warm winter and every stove maker in the industry, who made wood stoves, gas stoves, wood pellet stoves, and biomass stoves found themselves with dealers with shelves full of inventory and factory warehouses full of new product. Most of the major people in the industry did not survive, having as many as 26,000 stoves on hand and no place to sell them to pay the banks they borrowed from to build them. Bixby had taken a conservative approach and was left with about 3000 stoves but that represented more than $6 million in debt. If stoves aren't selling, the new hearth pads we developed weren't going to sell either.
We were also working simultaneously on Liquid Fuel Technology. We were working on a pyrolisis system with the U of M and it still holds a lot of promise but University scientists don't work with the same sense of urgency that the business world does. We also realized that Transportation Economics was going to get in the way of its initial development and it would be limited primarily to biomass and would create bio crude that was having its own problems and would require further refinement.
We had been looking at Gasification Technology since the day the company started in 2001 and had looked at thirteen different concepts over our seven years of existence that were essentially old wine in a new bottle, so, imagine our surprise when we came upon a gasification technology that was radically different from anything else we had ever seen before and offered the promise of being a technology that made our most plentiful energy source on the planet, coal, a clean energy product. It made a gas that was of natural gas quality (1000+ btu's as opposed to everything else today that makes 350 – 400 btu's from coal) and was two thirds cleaner when burned. The down side was that it produced a waste product, activated carbon that represented 60% of its content and there was no visible market of a size and profitability that would make the whole concept viable.
That's when our original concept of mentoring and funding new technologies really came full circle. Four months earlier, we had two other inventors who had come to us with a radical technology for making high grade oil, primarily diesel or jet fuel but they needed a lot of activated carbon. By putting the two concepts together we had the potential of taking coal, or any other carbon based material and turning it first into high quality natural gas and then the residue into high quality diesel fuel. With margins 4 to 6 times what we were expecting from the stove and engineered fuel pellet industry and a world increasingly concerned about global warming and carbon emissions, it didn't take a rocket scientist to determine the direction that we were going to go in the future. Given what happened to the stove business, would you have stayed there, chewing up the hard earned money that your investors had invested and hoped would someday pay them a profitable return or would you stubbornly go down with the stove ship as some of you seem to suggest we continue with?
Serendipity or blind luck? If we hadn't created a haven for inventors with great technologies we wouldn't have had two separate groups come to us with technologies that together became greater than their individual parts. They came to us because of my reputation, a reputation that several of you seem to find to so easily condemn because you don't know the facts and choose to destroy a reputation rather than take the time or lack the courage to simply call Bixby and talk to me. You will find, as my shareholders and almost anybody who calls me knows that I am very accessible and will answer any question you ask me. It was easier for you to make a negative predetermination about me as judge and jury.
At Bixby, we feel this new technology is going to change the way people think about energy. One of you made the comment that if it's so great, why haven't we made the "big" announcement, comparing me to some guy named Nick Guarino, and stating that "all you have to do is entice Brian Williams of NBC to do a story and "offers would literally flood in". Boy, are you naïve! If only that were true! If you ever do that, make sure you have all your ducks in a row first. You only get to light that fire once. We have a tremendous technology, and were not going to screw up its success by making knee jerk moves.
The technology has now been developed; working units are producing gas and oil in the quality we had anticipated. Independent Consultants have been engaged and are currently half way through very comprehensive Mass Energy Balance Testing and Fatal Flaw Analysis. We have done financial projection analysis ad nauseum doing every possible cost scenario that anyone will challenge us with. We know that once we introduce this technology that it represents a technology that is going to render the existing coal-fired boiler technology industry obsolete. And guess what? They aren't going to take that lying down. We will need to have the answers to the questions before the questions are asked. Even though it will mean a cleaner environment, energy independence, and create hundreds of thousand of new well paying jobs in the U.S., it means that the "dinosaurs" will be out of a job.
We have also conducted the most comprehensive patent audit I have ever done in my life to make sure that what we have is unique, is ours, and cannot be challenged. We expect to announce this revolutionary technology only when we have all our collective "ducks in a row" and that appears to be sometime in late September.
Someone commented on what ever happened to the Vertical Wind Turbines. Well, when we realized the potential of our Gasification Liquefaction technology, we chose to focus on that. We were going to spend our money on what we felt had the greatest potential. By the way, the Vertical Wind System, despite raising additional money and now almost two years later, has failed to gain traction. Did we choose the right one? Think about it.
Someone made the comment that we haven't made a profit in 6 years. Select Comfort didn't make a profit until its 9th year. Did you forget that we are a research and development company, and only now are in a position of becoming a profitable company? This is a new industry where virtually 90% of the companies in the arena are yet to be profitable. The "Clean Coal" technology that the government is working on has so far cost them $5.2 billion and they now state that it is still 12 to 15 years away. Our competing technology is here, now, it's ready, it works and it is significantly cheaper than what the government estimates their technology will be.
It never ceases to amaze me how someone who has never walked in my shoes, has never put in 80 hours a week for years in a row because you have the awesome responsibility of using other peoples hard earned invested money who believe in you to fulfill the goals of the company that you indicated to them you would deliver, can so casually sit at their computers and make such shallow judgments about what is going on inside a company without even making the slightest move to "get the facts". It makes me wonder who is scamming who here.
I would suggest that you hold your slanderous uninformed comments until the end of September, and then get ready to apologize.
Sincerely,
Robert A. Walker
President/CEO
Bixby Energy
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