Clean Coal Innovators

National Communications Director Steve Gates recently visited the 2009 Gasification Technologies Conference as part of the America’s Power℠ Factuality Tour. The following is his final dispatch from the event.

It’s been written many times on this blog that we’re confident the continued development and deployment of advanced clean coal technologies will help usher our country into a clean energy future. One reason we’re so confident of that is because we meet people all the time who are working on innovative projects to generate electricity from coal in increasingly clean ways.

Of course, the Factuality Tour has been a great way to get to know a lot of these innovators – especially this stop at the Gasification Technologies Conference in Colorado Springs. It’s literally stuffed full of people thinking outside the box.

One of those people is Don Montgomery of the Nanomaterials Discovery Corporation. Check out our video interview to hear Don explain how we can use coal and fuel cells to generate electricity with no CO2 emissions.

He showed us a unique generation process that involves turning coal into alcohol and then running that alcohol through a fuel cell to create electricity. In addition, the process creates vinegar as a byproduct that can be bought and sold as a commodity.

That’s all well and good, but this technology has an even bigger upside: it generates electricity using coal without producing any CO2.

Comments

[Robert Steinhaus]

I viewed with interest the video of Don Montgomery of Nanomaterials Discovery Corporation. I do not have sufficient familiarity with the alcohol from coal fuel cell that Don describes (and as a result I will not directly comment on it). I would however like to quickly comment on a significantly cleaner Direct Carbon Fuel Cell technology developed at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory by Dr. John Cooper which is extraordinary in its efficiency of production of electricity from coal.
There is a "NO HYPE" clean coal technology called Direct Carbon Fuel Cells (DCFC) that cuts in half the amount of CO2 generated while using coal and does not require burning the coal to make the energy. DCFC fuel cells directly convert the chemical energy in the coal and turn it into electricity without having to burn it. The demonstrated energy efficiency of the conversion of coal into electricity is 80% (the best modern coal fired power plants have efficiency of conversion of coal chemical energy into electricity of less than 40%). DCFC fuel cells have been successfully demonstrated in the laboratory but have not been commercialized. Government could do a great service in bringing to practicality industrial sized direct carbon fuel cells by funding through a small portion of the 1 billion allocated by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 the construction and testing of a few industrial scale cells.
Dr. John Cooper of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory designed an attractive gravity fed DCFC that could permit efficient use of coal without many of the normal drawbacks of coal use (release of particulates and contaminants, including uranium and radioactive elements, into the air).

Meyer Steinberg and John F. Cooper
HIGH EFFICIENCY DIRECT CARBON FUEL CELL
FOR CO2 EMISSION AND SEQUESTRATION
http://www.anl.gov/PCS/acsfuel/preprint%20archive/Files/47_1_Orlando_03 02_0087.pdf

[Monica]

Robert: Thanks for your comment. Actually, the link doesn’t work – would you be able to send us another link? We have written about direct carbon before (check it out here: http://behindtheplug.americaspower.org/2009/09/direct-carbon-cleans-coal-without-burning-it-.html) and we’re always interested in hearing more about new technologies like this. If you have any other direct carbon resources you think we should know about, let us know!

[Jessica Mitchell]

I've been working with Dr. Montgomery on the Eos technology. An illustrative example is a 1000 tpd coal feedstock, which drives a 128 MW power plant and produces the following value-add chemicals:

957 tpd Formic Acid
447 tpd Acetic Acid
52 tpd other acids

Therefore, 1 ton of low BTU Wyoming coal ($12)is converted to
0.96 T Formic Acid ($900-$1400)
0.45 T Acetic Acid ($250-$450)
3.3MWh power ($100-$250)

Only 1.08 T CO2 is emitted, comparing favorably to combustion processes which emit ~3.6T, a 60% reduction. The high efficiency of the fuel cells nets more power than combustion processes, despite the difference in final oxidation states.

To comment on the core Fuel Cell technology: The direct alcohol fuel cell operates at the low temp of 80C (That's right, eighty) and can convert feedstocks comprising any primary alcohols, even ethylene glycol. It can, therefore, function in a down-stream capacity with most gasifiers--biomass, coal, chem processing plants, etc.

The system has no moving parts and is instant-on, so it responds to a load with only microsecond delay. This feature makes it a very attractive solution to peak demand.
Questions: jessicam@ndcpower.com