White Energy Company Ltd. and Peabody Energy announced a joint venture to build a coal upgrading plant in Montana. The Peabody and White Energy coal upgrading facility will be built at an unnamed Peabody site in Montana.
Under the terms of the agreement, Peabody will have the right to purchase 15% of White Energy and has the first right to participate in future White Energy coal upgrading projects.
White Energy has a proprietary process for creating coal briquettes from high moisture lignite coal. The process increases the Btu value by 35%. The press release doesn’t describe the upgrading process, but it’s likely that the moisture content is reduced through a heating process and the lignite is formed into briquettes. An increased Btu value increases the value of the coal. The resulting coal briquettes are higher quality, more efficient and cleaner and can be interchanged with higher rank thermal coal in many applications.
Peabody and White Energy have begun engineering design and permitting activities for the first plant. The first plant is expected to take 24 months to construct. The plant is expected to produce more than 1 million tons of upgraded coal per year initially and the plant capacity will eventually be added to more than 20 million tons annually.
May 20th, 2009 at 8:06 am
I am currently doing an argumentative research paper for my college course on coal gasification and why we should build this plant in Kentucky….I was hoping you could answer a few questions for me……Why should this type of plant be built in Kentucky….How does it benefit Kentuckians economic status…..What air pollutants will we be exposed to……etc…..anything you can submit to me would be much appreciated….
Thank You,
Kelly Kessler
May 20th, 2009 at 9:16 pm
I would check out the Rand report on coal gasification. The Rand Corporation researches information for government use and recommends that the U.S. build a coal gasification industry:
http://www.rand.org/pubs/monographs/MG754/
Most experts agree that the emissions from a coal gasification plant are about the same as a refinery. The syngas can be cleaned up using common refinery processes. The NETL is a DOE lab that researches all types of energy technologies including coal gasification. For example, they state on page VII-59 of the report “Industrial Size Gasification for Syngas, Substitute Natural Gas and Power Production (Apr 2007) [ZIP-10MB]” below that mercury levels are undectectable in syngas:
http://seca.doe.gov/technologies/coalpower/gasification/pubs/systems_analyses.html
The controversial issue is CO2. The CO2 can be removed from the syngas, but it must be permanently stored (sequestered) in deep underground geological formations. Some folks aren’t comfortable with storing the CO2 in geological formations, because they fear leaks. However, the oil and natural gas has stayed underground for millions of years.
We’ll look for more information for you.
June 13th, 2009 at 4:03 am
Please give some details of the process and economics. Thanks.
July 22nd, 2009 at 10:00 pm
Does anyone have any idea? when this project will actually break ground?
Ed