Tuesday January 17, 2006

Clean energy from coal bed gas

peakoil.com -> www2.rnw.nl :

Coal contains methane gas, a combustible gas with a high caloric value that can be used in much the same way as natural gas. Many coal layers are simply too deep underground, or too thin to be exploited in the traditional way. Yet, they can hold large deposits of methane.

The Dutch research and development institute TNO has recently conducted a large-scale test in Poland of a new way of extracting this valuable gas. The new method that Henk Pagnier and his colleagues have been working on is called ECBM, 'Enhanced Coal Bed Methane'. It takes the old CBM method one step further: the methane gas is not simply released naturally by depressurising the coal, but pushed out by injecting another gas, preferably a gas we want to get rid of anyway, like greenhouse gas CO2.

Henk Pagnier says: "The beauty of the whole thing is that CO2 happens to bind to the coal when injected. Better still, it dissolves the methane gas from the coal in the same chemical process. Instead of the 40% of gas which can be extracted from the coal by using the old method, Enhanced Coal Bed Methane can extract up to 80%, and that makes the whole concept economically viable in many more cases ... if you use the methane on the spot for a local power plant, you can use the CO2 that the plant produces for extracting more methane from the coal bed. It's a closed circle. And completely clean."

(2006-01-17 00:08:36 SGT) [Energy] Permalink

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