syngas article

It is many decades since king coal offered the solution to Britain’s energy needs. Its prevalence as a fuel began to wane in the smog-filled 1950s with the dying embers of a once mighty industry extinguished in the 1980s.
However, today, three decades after the closure of the pits, it is being offered up as a solution to the nation’s looming energy crisis.

'The United Kingdom is well placed within Europe in having large reserves of indigenous coal both onshore and offshore in the southern North Sea,' points out the UK’s Coal Authority, now part of the Department of Energy and Climate Change.

'These reserves have the potential to provide security of future energy supplies long after oil and natural gas are exhausted.'
The key to commercialising the nation’s vast beds of fossil fuel is a process called underground coal gasification (UCG) – a discrete, environmentally friendly method of liberating the energy content of the coal. What’s created is a synthesis gas, or Syngas.

The process uses directional drilling techniques that are commonplace in the oil and gas sector to follow the coal seam. But crucially it doesn’t involve deploying the fracking technology that has been vilified despite transforming the US gas industry.
The UK resource suitable for deep seam UCG is estimated at 17billion tonnes, or 300 years' supply at current consumption, according to a Department of Trade & Industry report.

Linc Energy in Australia and AIM-listed Wildhorse Energy, with its Mecsek Hills Project in southern Hungary, are two quoted firms blazing a trail in this specialist sector of the hydrocarbons industry.
One facility in Uzbekistan has been supplying syngas to a power plant for over 40 years. But it is the development of new drilling techniques that has made the exploitation of UCG possible.

Here in the UK, Cluff Natural Resources is exploring the potential of UCG. On January 14 it announced it had been awarded two licences covering 111 hectares of Carmarthenshire and the Dee Estuary, on the North Wales/Merseyside border.
It is fitting the company, led by the serial entrepreneur Algy Cluff, is at the forefront of this new energy revolution, for he was one of the first to recognise the enormous potential of the North Sea in the early days – and this was reflected by the success of his company Cluff Oil.

Those who thought the great British investing public might struggle to comprehend the potential of UCG will be surprised at the market’s reaction to January’s licence awards.

The stock has advanced more than 40 per cent in one week.

'We think we are in a really exciting space at the moment,' said Obolenskaya.

'What we hadn’t realised before we made the announcement is how receptive the investors would be about UCG.'

The short term plan is to carry out a scoping study on the licences and identify an area for test production.This will allow the group to hone the techniques and understand the technologies required to efficiently get the gas out of the ground. And of course there is the permitting process to negotiate.

One of the other challenges will be managing the perception of UCG – ensuring that people realise that it very definitely does not involve fracking.
In fact this in-situ gasification of coal, which is done hundreds of feet underground, will have minimal impact on the local landscape. On the surface will be a small injection well and one extracting the syngas.

http://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/markets/article-2276970/SMALL-CAPS-FOCUS-Synthetic-gas-potential-transform-Britains-energy-needs-underground-coal-gasification-UCG.html#axzz2KdlipEDR