Coal-to-diesel Breakthrough Could Drastically Cut Oil Imports

Professor Alan Goldman and his Rutgers team in collaboration with researchers at the University of North Carolina  have invented a new catalytic process that could increase the yield of a clean form of diesel fuel made from coal.  The method uses a pair of catalysts to improve the yield of diesel fuel from Fischer-Tropsch (F-T) synthesis. 

The F-T process produces a mixture of hydrocarbons -- many of which are not useful as fuel. The low-weight and the high-weight Fischer-Tropsch products are useful – the light as gas and the medium-heavy as diesel fuel.  The medium-weight products are not useful for much of anything.

Their method uses a pair of catalysts to convert the undesirable hydrocarbons into diesel. The catalysts work by rearranging the carbon atoms, transforming six-carbon atom hydrocarbons, for example, into two- and ten-carbon atom hydrocarbons. The ten-carbon version can be used to power diesel engines. The first catalyst removes hydrogen atoms, which allows the second catalyst to rearrange the carbon atoms. Then the first catalyst restores the hydrogen, to form fuel.

“The problem – the greatest inefficiency of the process – is that you also wind up with a substantial quantity of medium-weight products that are not useful and you are stuck with them,” Goldman said. “What we are now able to do with our new catalysts is something no one else has done before. We take all these undesirable medium-weight substances and convert them to the useful higher- and lower-weight products.”

Diesel fuel produced in this way would have several advantages. Conventional diesel contains aromatics, that, when combusted produce particulates, but the diesel formed by the new catalysts does not include aromatics, so it burns much cleaner. This could lead to more vehicles using diesel engines, which are about 30 percent more efficient than gasoline engines.

The biggest advantage may be that the United States has huge amounts of coal, enough to last us the next hundred years or so. Thus, a more efficient, and so less expensive method of converting coal to diesel could significantly cut U.S. dependence on foreign oil, and do so for a long time. Diesel engines provide the power to move 94 percent of all freight in the U.S. and 95 percent of all transit buses and heavy construction machinery, consuming approximately 56 billion gallons of diesel fuel per year.

At this time, the method is still under development, and not ready for commercial use. The second catalyst tends to break down, but this problem should be solvable.

This method sounds like it has a great potential if it is needed. I have never heard of this limitation of Fischer-Tropsch diesel, I wonder if it is as big a deal as they make it out to be.  Maybe that is why F-T diesel hasn't been tried on a bigger scale.

Resource: Coal-to-diesel Breakthrough Could Drastically Cut Oil Imports, Rutgers Research Highlights

Technorati tags: diesel, Fischer-Tropsch, catalysts, energy, technology

Comments

[Fred Barker]

I wonder what the per barrel productions cost is. On the low end the Velcoys technology which is supposedly very efficinet and uses microchannel reactors can be $20,000+. Also can this technology be adapted to any type of feedstock? Im assuming it can be since it would just be using the syngas from whatever.

[Cervus]

The only thing about this process, whether it's used for coal or biomass, is:

Faster, please.

[Engineer-Poet]

We don't have enough biomass (captured carbon) to replace petroleum; at 7 lb/gallon, US diesel consumption is roughly 200 million tons/year by itself.  With losses in conversion we'd be lucky to make it with even a billion tons of feedstock.  Mostly, we need more efficient conversion and things which make better use of carbon (since carbon capture is the limiting step).

[Cervus]

Engineer:

What's your opinion of algae as an energy crop for a process like this? There are some fast-growing species out there that could probably be genetically engineered to improve matters.

[amazingdrx]

Any of these liquid fuel solutions will follow the price of gas from oil right up the exponential cost curve.

And they still involve combustion, which exacerbates global climate disaster.

By reducing the need for liquid fuel consumption to 10% of present needs through renewable electric powered transportation, solar cogeneration using algae can provide the liquid fuel that is needed by utilizing solar on rooftop and over parking lot and over highway installations.

This will do the job without destroying anymore of the natural carbon sink through fuel farming, coal mining, and other industrial greenhouse gas producing,refining, nightmare scenarios.

[Clint]

Coal is a stopgap between oil and renewables. This type of FT technology can make the stopgap cleaner.

It's pretty naive for people to talk about abruptly cutting fossil fuel use to 10% of current levels. Guaranteed to force people to shut them off and label them a kook. Maybe that's their thing. They don't want to make a difference, they like their ineffectual outlier status.

[Engineer-Poet]

All of the algae-crop proposals I've seen involve closed culture using the exhaust of a fossil-fired powerplant as a source of concentrated CO2 and other nutrients; nobody appears to be researching any scheme which would harvest carbon directly from the atmosphere (essential for sequestration).  This isn't bad, but it fails to address two major problems.

Clint, anybody who talks about cutting fossil use by 90% by changing transport fuels IS a kook; more than 10% goes into chemical synthesis and the like.  Cutting motor-gasoline demand by 80% using PHEV's appears to be feasible; however, motor gasoline is only about 45% of US petroleum consumption, so the net cut would only be 36%.

[amazingdrx]

There is an analysis of algae grown in ponds to replace all the current fuel use. It takes a huge area, but seems feasible economically. Provision was made for using salt water in the ponds built in desert areas.

It is an eco-disaster scenario, but the figures all worked out.

And even in solar collectors the CO 2 input can come from outside air pumped in. This dores not really provide sequestration as any fuel crop is eventually burned in one form or another.

Only saving land now destroyed by mining, industrial destruction,and chemical agriculture, and returning it to a natural carbon sink, prairie, jungle, forest,organic farmland, will increase the real amount of carbon sequestration.

[amazingdrx]

"cutting fossil fuel use to 10% of current levels"

I believe I specified liquid fuel use for transportation you all. But it is in fact possible to cut fossil fuel use to 10% of present use with renwable power. Will it take a few years?

No, probably a few decades. Go ahead and throw those labels around, it makes you sound really smart. Hehehey.

[amazingdrx]

"motor gasoline is only about 45% of US petroleum consumption"

What does that have to do with liquid fuel consumption for transportation? did you forget diesel?

[Robert]

All of the algae-crop proposals I've seen involve closed culture using the exhaust of a fossil-fired powerplant as a source of concentrated CO2 and other nutrients; nobody appears to be researching any scheme which would harvest carbon directly from the atmosphere (essential for sequestration). This isn't bad, but it fails to address two major problems.

The reason for that is that you can't get the enormous photosynthetic effiencies (like 8%) these proposals rely on without a concentrated CO2 source. With air you need more area, more equipment to aerate the ponds, and at the end of the day, the economics of the design fall apart.

But algae grown on fossil fuel exhaust do let you burn the same carbon twice, which is a non-negligible improvement at a time when any improvement would be welcome.

[Engineer-Poet]

The thing that worries me about schemes like that is that it represents a huge investment in continued carbon emissions.  Sure, it's an improvement, but it's a very limited one.  If we went to e.g. zinc-air cells, we could go to zero or even negative carbon emissions without ripping up all our previous work.

[MIKE MORGAN]

Important to remember is that, as useage of coal increases, the useful time remaining decreases in inverse logarathmic proportion to the rate of growth of demand. The 100 year useful time remaining assumes that consumption is constant at todays rates. When a growth factor is thrown in of 8% per year we will use as much in the next ten years as in all previous history. See fuelsupply.blogspot.com for more on this.

[Harvey D.]

Sooner or latter we will have to get off our current historical addiction to fossil fuel and carbon based fuel addiction. Fortunately there are many more sustainable energy sources available to us. Why always attempt the double and triple energy conversion (ex: hydrogen + fuel cell etc) while we could very well manage with clean single conversion electrical energy from the sun (solar power direct conversion) and/or indirectly energy conversion from Wind, Waves, Hydro etc. The electrical energy storage problem can be solved with multiple storage devices (batteries and ultra-caps) and very large hydro water reservoirs + other means to come. Why not take the easy way out of the current energy crisis? i.e electricity for most applications with liquid energy restricted to special applications only, such as aircraft etc. With less than half the $$ billions spent on hydrogen and fuel cell research we could already have very efficient light weight electrical storage devices. Let's face it, a fuel cell is nothing more than a rather (too) complex inefficient electricity generator requiring costly difficult to handle inputs. A high efficency solar panel is a far simpler way to get clean suistainable energy for our every day use. There is enough solar energy over the USA territory to satisfy at least 4 to 10 energy guzzler vehicles per house and more. Most of the industries could easily be converted to electricity. There is no need for oil, liquid fuel and natural gas in a home.

[Rod Adams]

This improved catalyst is intriguing, however, there is another part of the F-T process that has also limited its use.

The first few stages of the process are endothermic and require the input of a large amount of heat. Normally this has been provided by burning coal, thus reducing the yield of the plants considerably.

There are companies, notably Liquid Coal, that are researching the economics of using high temperature gas cooled nuclear reactors as the heat source for F-T processing plants. Combine that with better catalysts and we might have a path that will help to reduce the economic and political power of the oil exporters.

[amazingdrx]

It's a good thing no energy company exec would ever take nuclear cogeneration seriously as a source for liquid fuel processing.

It would reduce the cost and make this global climate disaster worse.

20% of petroleum is burned to provide refining process heat. What is wrong with energy policy? Look to that figure for the answer.

Trading the blood of US soldiers for refining process heat that could be obtained from various domestic sources, many that actually fight global climate disaster, like wind and solar. That's some smart "strategery".

[C.L.Stadler]

I have enjoyed all of your comments. This is a very interesting subject for me not so much for the environmental stand point as much as the investment potential. "Kook" is a term that I have learned to accept with much affection. Though I am a "kook" of the "global warming is a load of crap", school of thought. The earth corrects its climate, it has ever since the first volcano coughed.

I think that we need to face the facts. Fossil fuels are the thing right now. Until there is a serious crisis, like ten dollar per gallon gasoline, there will be no drastic change to green energy. Until then F-T process fuel might be helpful and profitable.

In the future what we will end up seeing is, as the price of fuel increases the more green products and processes we will see in use. That will be the motive to cleaner energy, not global warming. What we won't see is our deserts converted to algea farms and wind powered airplanes. A 10% reduction is much more realistic and palatable for our economy than a reduction to 10%.

Fuel cell and hydrogen won't go anywhere but wind and solar will. I think that storing the electrical energy of lightning is more cost-effective and realistic than hydrogen (Bush is a knuckle-head). I feel F-T fuel and bio fuel technologies could be cleaner than what we have now, are good for our economy and are worthy investments. Finding the most efficient means of using the F-T process is worthwhile, so let's dump some money into it and see where it takes us.

Maybe, oil companies will post grants and invest, then buy up the whole enchilada.

[h. Smith]

South Africa has been making petrol from coal for decades called SASOL although that does not pay all the spin offs do so now there are 3 or 4 big plants so how can this be called new

[Lots in Costa Rica]

The electrical energy storage problem can be solved with multiple storage devices (batteries and ultra-caps) and very large hydro water reservoirs + other means to come. Why not take the easy way out of the current energy crisis? i.e electricity for most applications with liquid energy restricted to special applications only, such as aircraft etc.

[Travis B. Moore]

The Kerric process or want for lack of a better name may be cheaper it uses the coal to make steam to make oil form coal while making electricity from the process to sell to the grid. The coke made would keep the plant going, and the hydrocarbons and be distilled in an all in one process.

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