"two US based trials at Carbon County and Hoe Creek in Wyoming demonstrated that expensive clean up was required." ............ Although this happened only in a very small minority of the trials and was the result of obvious mistakes in site selection and operation.
"Whereas CXY had access to teh ONLY successful UCG technology when viewed from the successful management of contamination" ............. The largest UCG trial of the program — Rocky Mountain — was conducted in 1987–1988. This trial was subject to scrupulous monitoring specifically designed to test the environmental and technological performance of UCG and was completed with excellent results.
One has to be careful of the biased information generated from specific companies plugging their own technology/process but this also came from Len Walker: "Rocky Mountain test program (RMI) in Wyoming, which was conducted during 1987 and 1988. The longer of these tests ran for over three months, and gasified over 10,000 tonnes of coal. The test program used a new method of oxidant injection involving a retracting injection well (the CRIP system) and also focussed on an assessment of environmental impacts with particular reference to groundwater.
The success of this test led to efforts to develop a commercial project to produce value added chemical products
from the recovered gas, but the project was terminated some years ago due to a combination of economic and geologic factors". http://www.australiancoal.csiro.au/pdfs/walker.pdf
I also read that the rocky mountain ucg program was also terminated due to cheaper alternatives of gas at the time(in the USA). Advances in the technology are seeing it a more attractive option(world wide).
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