drunk on oxygen?

A quote from Len's 1999 paper (thanks to eieio for the recent post containing the link) ...

"Typical product gases with air injection may have calorific values in the range 4.0 to 5.5 Mj/m3, depending on specific site conditions, with approximately twice these values being achieved with oxygen injection."

Methinks there has been a little misinformation peddled here recently on the relative merits of UCG using air or oxygen injection.

Turbines can be designed/tuned to run just fine on syngas having a calorific value of about 5 Mj/m3 ... this can be achieved with the much cheaper air injection ... I am sure the right syngas quality/consistency can be achieved by blending output from a series of gasifiers and by removing particulates and liquids from the raw syngas feed with gas clean up equipment (Cougar has installed the latter for the current pre-production burn).

As I understand, most other syngas applications like LNC's GTL technology, CNX's original fertiliser production plans and most likely CXY's own methanation plans at Wandoan require a higher calorific content syngas as a raw feed that probably can only be achieved using the more expensive oxygen injection. I think these applications would be targeting something like 10 Mj/m3.

In CNX's Blodwood Creek trial, liquid oxygen would have to have been trucked in to use for short periods during the 100 day trial. I think LNC are going to do likewise during their current gasifier 4 trial ... an expensive process in a small, short lived trial but no doubt a prohibitive cost for long term scaled production unless expensive oxygen separation equipment is designed, installed and operated in future scaled production facilities.

Making UCG work simply and commercially with powergen by using air injection is sooooo Cougar imo ... good to see "kis" principles are flourishing at Kingaroy.

Cheers
Dex