Emerson’s Larry Irving, vice president for the oil and gas industry, presented a briefing on the future of the oil and gas sector. Early in the briefing, he noted that the use of coal is projected to go down in favor of the increased use of natural gas. His comment caused me to have a thought fugue. In my past, I worked on the design of a recycling system, the central component of which was a gasifier. Gasification technology is simple, easy to build, easy to operate and extremely well understood. It is also fairly cheap when used on a homogenous feedstock, and produces high BTU gas from coal.
The question is, of course, will coal gasification ever approach the cost of producing natural gas from wells. Well, sooner than the expected heat death of the universe, that is.
The answer might be that it depends on the success of fracking technology and the associated environmental mitigations that are being required to be used. If anti-fracking activism increases (and it may well do so) to the point that it becomes both economically and politically unpalatable, we may have a fall-back position in coal gasification, which is clean, does not do anything more to the environment than coal mining already does, and can be built anywhere a substantial supply of coal can be delivered.
Interesting thought, no?
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