Funding biomass fuels may be a hurdle
Published Saturday, July 19, 2008
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FAIRBANKS — Proponents of a plant that would make liquid fuels out of coal say such a facility could be the solution to high energy costs in Fairbanks and Interior villages.
However, a financial specialist warned that private-sector financing will be hard to find without some government assistance, either as cash, loan guarantees or off-take agreements.
The borough and Fairbanks Economic Development Corporation have proposed building a plant that would produce between 20,000 and 40,000 barrels of liquid fuel a day from coal and biomass — a plant that would probably cost at least several billion dollars.
High-ranking officials from the U.S. Department of Energy and the U.S. Air Force, as well as more local players, gathered Friday in Fairbanks to discuss how to fast-track a biomass and coal-to-liquids facility. They heard from seven speakers representing pieces of the project.
While the gasification and coal-to-liquids technologies are well-established, few companies have experience building and operating the facilities, said Radoslav Shipkoff, director of Greengate LLC, which provides financial advisory services in energy and infrastructure sectors worldwide. That increases financial risk for investors, who prefer supporting projects built by companies that can offer performance guarantees.
Project advocates are looking to the U.S. Air Force for some financial backing in the form of off-take agreements, or commitments to purchase fuel produced by the plant. General Howie Chandler, Commander of Pacific Air Forces, attended the summit.
“We are the largest user of energy in the Department of Defense,” Chandler said. The bill totaled $6 billion last year for jet fuel, $12.5 million of which was at Eielson. And that, he added, was at $2.20 a gallon.
“For that reason, we’re interested in conservation, and we’re interested in new ideas,” he explained.
Kevin Billings, the Air Force’s deputy assistant secretary for energy and the environment, said the Air Force has committed to certify its entire fleet to fly on a synthetic fuel blend — and, once that happens, to buy 400 million gallons of synfuel annually.
“The project here would be a huge part of making that happen, and in making us much more energy secure in the United States,” he said.
The military isn’t the only likely beneficiary of a coal-to-liquids plant, which would turn out the same fuel that much of Alaska already has the infrastructure to use — diesel.
Alaska Energy Authority Director Steve Haagenson said his primary goal is to quickly reduce the costs of energy in Alaska. He added that Fairbanks and Interior villages depend on each other economically and in energy issues.
In particular, he said Alaska needs to develop fuels that can be used in the existing infrastructure — most of which, in the Interior and in villages, is built to run on diesel.
“Alaska is kind of hooked on diesel fuel,” Haagenson said. “It used to be cheap, and it used to be convenient. Now, it’s just convenient.”
Liquid fuels are necessary in order to supply both population centers like Fairbanks and rural Interior villages with energy, advocates contend. That’s because cars, homes and other buildings are already set up to run on diesel. Developing liquid fuels is even more critical for rural villages, where the Denali Commission has made significant investments in improving infrastructure to handle and store diesel in the past 10 years, said George Cannelos, federal co-chair of the Denali Commission.
Summit attendees also heard from Dr. William Davey of Hatch LLC, the company retained by the Fairbanks Economic Development Corporation for a $500,000 study of the proposed facility.
He described the products that could be made at a coal-to-liquids facility and detailed coal and biomass gasification as well as Fischer-Tropsch processes.
One of the biggest caveats surrounding coal-to-liquids technology is how to dispose of carbon dioxide, a byproduct that was once vented into the atmosphere but is now accepted as a major cause of global warming.
No decisions have been made about what to do with the carbon dioxide the plant would produce.
Other presenters included Joe Usibelli Jr., president of Usibelli Coal Mine, which would provide coal to the plant, and Dr. Carol Lewis, Dean of the School of Natural Resources at University of Fairbanks. She talked about biomass in the Interior, a second raw material that could be transformed into energy.
Alaska Railroad CEO Patrick Gamble said his trains are ready to roll, although some new engines and coal cars may have to be purchased. He also discussed ways the railroad could provide financial support through its ability to sell tax-free revenue bonds.
Clarence “Bud” Albright is the Undersecretary of the U.S. Department of Energy. He attended the summit to show support for the project.
“I do think this project is very, very interesting, and probably has as much thought and effort and energy — no pun intended — put into it as any I’ve seen,” he said. “We are real excited.”
Stevens and borough Mayor Jim Whitaker are hosting the Interior Alaska Strategic Energy Summit, which continues today at Chena Hot Springs Resort. Fairbanks Economic Development Corporation is assisting.
Community Discussion
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And someone will explain why all of this is better than simply building the gas pipeline? The gas line ROW goes right behind Eielson AFB.
Natural gas can be converted to a very pure synthetic jet fuel- or fuel oil- without trains, mines, and the large cabon footprint of coal.
I bet DThunder could tell us that his HDPE pipeline from the North Slope could be built for billions of dollars less than this risky, and expensive, biomass idea.
I think it would be hard to say a recycling junk yard would be good anywhere biomass is waste the only place i can see it use full is in a volcano wait that where nuclear waste should go.... I can see it now no need for yucka mountain just drop it from helicoper straight into the volcano solved one problem but couldn't come up with the biomass sorry....
If you think about it the nuclear would be taken to it's most basic elements when turned in lava, but three head fish wouldn't be likely to be to appetizing except to the Chinese which might be worshiped as a god then double triple the price / pound. Then fishing would finally be profitable even with fuel prices. (beyond sarcastic)
I still think we need the legislature to prioritize their projects. This biomass testing and coal gassification gets more expensive and complexed daily. $100 million to engineer a plant. Is it using alien technology??? That money could be spent to retrofit the HCCP and get it online by December. Why do we need to engineer a plant that reportedly is so widely used in Africa? The arctic environmental construction problems get addressed by UAF and the plant designs are done and there are companies that know how to build these so... OK!! I'm sorry for questioning the motives of our esteemed Government Officials. Take the 10 billion dollars in surplus money. Spend it, all of it, so we can go back to waiting for the PFD announcement. We don't need energy relief now because oil is back below $130 per barrel and fuel only went up 5 cents this last week and GVEA is raising rates only a little bit.
We can not burn wood in Fairbanks during certain days in the winter due to emissions, but this type of plant is being considered. Oh I forgot Whitaker gave the University money to study emissions during the summer, why not the winter. The IM program which has been shown ineffective still cost people how much to have car inspections done. If this was such a great idea for the military, there would have been a lot of places in the lower 48 trying to build it. Whitaker couldn't get a pipeline built at the government's expense, now this. I won't go into Mitsubishi this time.
I guess Stevens didn't get his bridge to no where so now he is trying to get coal to the middle of no where. Can not wait to see what the lower 48 does with this idea. I wonder if McCain has heard of this one, he gets alot of mileage out of the bridge.
Yup, to build a small HDPE-gasline for shipping propane-LPG from Prudhoe to Fairbanks will cost a little less than $100million. That's 10million pounds of ASTM-D2513 SDR7 4" gasline. The pipe itself will cost under $40million. This gasline can be laid out at a rate of 35,000feet per day with 6crews of 5fatgirls operating FastFusion pipe-machines and small-dozers. Each pump-station weighs 25,000lbs and comes self-propelled on wheels in a stretched-insulated Grumman P30 StepVan.
...Thanx 4 th' plug SamBam
These dorks dunno whutt to do with CO2?
""One of the biggest caveats surrounding coal-to-liquids technology is how to dispose of carbon dioxide, a byproduct that was once vented into the atmosphere but is now accepted as a major cause of global warming.""
.....I guess they only learned how to spell CATALYST last week.
[and they're still trying to warm up to the idea that you can actually use HDPE-gasline to pump the CO2 back to the NorthSlope for oilfield-pressurization]
p a t h e t i c
Carbon Dioxide ??
Listen really carefully about what this guy has to say about what to do with Carbon Dioxide.
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/craig...
Duh... whutt happens when you goog this --->
Coal to Liquid carbon-dioxide catalyst
http://www.google.com/search?num=100&...
I wonder if these guys would deposit a million in cash into the account for my favorite charity if I told them how to turn their tons of CO2 into C6-C8 parraffins and mono-olefins by using pickled-copper MOCVDD-foils in micro-channel as an electro-catalyst.
http://www.springerlink.com/content/1308...
These guys are parading around in front of cameras telling us we should be thankful that they're gonna take $2billion and make a sin-fuel plant that David Loring and Frank Pringle [and our motley crew] could build for $40million, only better.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPe2rXTte...
------
http://www.globalresourcecorp.com/Engine...
Alaskans have become such big suckers in the past 30years.
Who paid for this conference and to have all these people brought to Fairbanks? Does Whitaker believe that the people in Fairbanks are so desperate and so uniformed that they can not see this plan is filled to the brim with uncertainty.
How involved is Palin in this? Has she, her energy czar, and the mayor been planning behind closed doors. The Governor needs to come out regarding her involvement in this plan. We are already beginning to see the other side of the Governor in the news. Sarah tells us you are not part of this.
Why are they worried about CO2 when there's 4bcfd lost-orphan methane evaporating needlessly off the NorthSlope??
2bcfd of this lost methane can be readily collected in a big network of HDPE-gas-gathering-pipes.
Methane is 23times more active as an infrared-trap than CO2.
------------------------------------------------------
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B36EoEuKj...
------------------------------------------------------
petrotheism or scientology ??
http://www.ukrainegenocide.org/
...one of my cousins was an atheist farmer who starved and froze in the winter of 1932 in the Ukraine.
How many Alaskans are gonna freeze to death, or flee, before the clowns waste the billions..??
Why not take the same $2billion and make several small GTL plants on the Koyukuk? Use as much as the lost-orphan methane as possible, shippit south in HDPE-CNG gaslines through all of the Brooks passes. Return the CO2 to Prudhoe in HDPE-gaslines. Ship the DME-dimethylester synfuel south to fuel the fishermen.
Catalyst? The next scam we'll see, the project will die after the money is spent because they couldn't manage an unspecified mysterious catalyst problem too complicated for the average-joe to understand...mothballed.
....funny thing is, there's more ruthenium, rhodium, iridium, and cobalt tossed into the driveways leading to old miners cabins than you'll imagine.
Anybody wanna buy a portable spectroscope?
....check the 2000-2008 chart for rhodium...(;-P)
Coal is a dirty fuel. Its only being considered because the politicians are bought and paid for by a rich coal miner. The word is RENEWABLE, guys! Coal is not renewable and its dirty. Keep it in the ground.
Build it quickly and start pumping that evil carbon dioxide out so maybe we can have a decent summer yet. Oh yeah and warmer winters also. Save on fuel all year long.
You've heard of fool's gold, Fairbanks now will have fool's coal. The borough assembly gave the Mayor unlimited power, they need to end this and beginning oversight of his doings. Or are they also involved in this little scheme. Exactly who are these people representing?
Mayor Whittaker has pen in hand to pay for this circus using our property taxes. Why are we paying for all this executive corporate research and what will we get for our tax dollars, another proposal to spend more tax dollars on a boondogle? In a few weeks we will start hearing how the borrough is broke and can't pay their bills due to high fuel prices. Assembly members take note this is your last hitch! No more blank checks to waste our money! Buy some storage tanks and start stocking up on the fuel you need to run the borrough. It's gonna be a long cold winter!
Distant Thunder:
What kind of volume (in MCF/D) would your 4" pipe deliver per day to Fairbanks? How about volume for slightly larger pipes- say 6" 8"?
Roughly 550 miles is a lot of distance for a 4" pipe. How many compressor stations do you propose?
SamBam...
Doing pipe calcs over long distances is more complex than you'd first expect...
...but the fun part is there's lots of room for fudge-factor.
LPG has a similar viscosity to water, so with enough pumps in the gasline you could expect to see at the discharge end a delivered volume similar to a 4" HDPE water-line with 250' of head-pressure, enough to run a pelton-wheel nicely.
[this would be a hose that would take a team of firemen to hang onto]
The nice thing about doing 4" LPG plumbing is all of the components don't cost an arm and a leg. I can get all of the parts as standard stock items from global suppliers. And I can even make some of the stainless-steel precision castings myself [this is the expensive part made of unobtainium, ha ha]
The most sophisticated part of the gasline is the SCADA fiberoptic system.
The pumps are small and much cheaper by the dozen, and easy to install.
It's much cheaper to buy a couple dozen little pumpstations than to buy a handful of big ones.
Smaller low-pressure pipelines require pumps to be placed more frequently, so I expect to be placing pumps every 5-30miles depending on the lay of the land, if using a pipe that is rated for 260psi.
The electric-pumps will be driven by 5kw to 25kw lpg-powered gensets.
On steep inclines multiple electric pumps can be spaced out over a distance and run by one generator.
A pumpstation can be moved from one spot on the line to another very quickly [usually within 48hrs.]
A total of 4500 horsepower driving the 4" LPG-gasline from Prudhoe to Fairbanks should develop final delivery volume of very-roughly 500gpm [720,000gpd] into a 100psi backpressure railcar volumetank.
[just a wild "educated" guess]
it will take a few months of fiddling to get the pipeline tunedup so it's running at even pressures for max-flow because the pipe and LPG have fairly narrow psi-windows to keep matched up along the distance.
But it will pump enough LPG to pay for itself in the first year.
Honestly, I haven't taken the time to count every nail and screw to build this house with...
I'm a working-stiff, stiff from too much work like most everybody else, and just blog this issue for fun.
If somebody want's me to email them a complete detailed working plan for this it'll take me a month of worry and phone-calls to several suppliers to get their detailed specs on their pumps, motors, generators,etc. [and I can't do this for free, wish I could, next year maybe?]
This is an easy project for a real pipeline company, and if they charged me more than $100k for a blueprint for this little gasline I'd think they were a ripoff.[most of them are] [I'd have to charge at least $85k, but I'd be going at this from a cold start, most expensive part is re-walking areas that I walked 30+ years ago, I'd fly over most of it in a slow-low aircraft with my laptop fitted with digicams and GPS. A lot of the ROW is already on file online in Juneau.]
Safety is the main thing, and it's very-manageable to ramp-up the thru-put of the gasline while tuning the pumpstations.
Even if for the first month the gasline only pumped 5,000gallons per day, that's 1000 5gal jugs per day, which should be enough to keep almost everybody's house in the interior from freezing their plumbing if the gas is used carefully.
This one of the reasons I suggest building the "shortline" of 820,000feet to the south side of Atigun first..
[in the slideshow]
..this will make a profitable gasline the first season that will make designing and buiding all of the other ones much easier...
...the toothpick in the logjam.
sambam & distant thunder, you guys sure are experts on all this stuff;
How come your not in the business & getting paid big bucks?
I forgot; armchair experts to get paid exactly what there advice is worth. That is nothing!!
DT.
Thanks. Have you had any conversations with GVEA? They could potentially do this.
Also, with the new energy Czar, Steven Hagenson? If so, what responses, if any, did you get?
The harder part of this is securing a ROW, and doing the permits, EIS- that could cost significantly more than the pipe. Then there are needed access roads...
Not trying to shoot you down... you offer intelligent conversation- am trying to pck your brain.
Even though my slideshow has received nearly 12,000 views from different ip-addresses...
it seems all but a handful are standing there like a moose in my headlights.
Don't worry 'bout pickin' my brain, if you can find it..
just leave me a note where you left it just in case somebody thinks I should be reunited with it before I go out in public again.
I've already sent emails to many of the folks who you'd think would be interested...
maybe their spamfilters reject everything that is not from a dot-gov or dot-mil...
possibly kind of a narrow-minded group.??
So, I decided to take the issue to the blogs in the NoseMiner.
If somebody put a burr under my saddle I might get kooky and have some "real fun" with this..
..maybe get some wacky celebrities investing in this and make a smash-movie out of it.
A friend of mine who's had a couple of his screenplays made into smash-hit movies tells me I should let him have the script....(;-P)
He want's to sell it to the Tougher in Alaska show with Geo Beach, that cracks me up!
If it's a really good idea, sometimes it's better to seek forgiveness than to ask for permission...
Basically, it's one heck of a great investment for somebody to toss $10mil at, the numbers and odds are better than building a cruiseliner.
But it's a project that is chartered in the practical merits of a community in need, so I'd be tempted to strangle anybody who wanted to monetize it beyond my comfort zone, which is pretty damn thin.
This is why I'm urging everybody in town to consider making this a new independent CoOp.
....it CAN be done !!!!
....flash/rumble
If the consultant hired for this study is affiliated with the company in this link http://seekingalpha.com/article/55367-no... , then I'm concerned that the study outcome may be worthless.
Here's a quote from the article in the link "While there appears to be a fair amount of good old fashioned under-estimating of project development costs by Hatch Group, the mining and engineering consulting firm that prepared the construction estimate last year..."
if it is the same company, then there is good reason for concern.
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