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In the Face of Rising Natural Gas Demand, Gasification Technologies Can Help U.S. Meet Its Energy Needs

Posted on: Tuesday, 8 April 2008, 12:00 CDT

With opposition to coal-burning power plants threatening to put severe price and supply pressures on natural gas, gasification technologies can help the United States meet its energy needs in environmentally and economically sound ways, a Senate energy subcommittee will be told Wednesday by Gasification Technologies Council (GTC) Executive Director James Childress.

In testimony prepared for the Senate Commerce Subcommittee on Science, Technology and Innovation, GTC's Childress disputes the Energy Information Administration predictions that coal's use in power generation will increase while natural gas use declines. "The EIA forecast is clearly unrealistic -- coal use will not rise under current circumstances and gas certainly will not decline," he will tell lawmakers. The rise in natural gas demand, while U.S. production remains essentially flat, will have a severe impact on the chemical and fertilizer industries that depend on natural gas as a feedstock, on manufacturers who use natural gas as a fuel, and on homeowners.

"Industrial gasification offers a solution, through plants gasifying coal or petroleum coke to produce chemicals, fertilizers, plastice or substitute natural gas (SNG)," Childress states in his testimony. SNG can supplement the U.S. natural gas supply and help ease price and supply pressures, "but the public policy and political climate [surrounding gasification] is not reassuring."

Gasification is a commercially proven manufacturing process used on a global scale for 50 years. It converts low-value materials such as coal, petroleum coke, and biomass into high value products and electricity. The technologies offer significantly reduced environmental emissions, and the lowest cost option for capturing CO2 from fossil-fuel-based power plants.

Of the 140 gasification facilities operating in the world, 19 are in the United States. The most rapid growth in gasification is in China, which has a national policy to displace use of oil and gas in its chemical and fertilizer industries through increased use of coal gasification. China is also embarking on a program to use gasification to produce substitute natural gas from coal for use in its cities, which are suffering from air pollution from the use of coal for home heating and cooking.

Childress will outline three proposals for Congressional action:

A program to demonstrate on a commercial scale multiple gasification power plants with carbon capture and sequestration capability.

Policies that recognize and reward industrial gasification's ability to offer large scale, near term opportunities for carbon capture at lower costs.

A uniform national policy framework addressing regulation of CO2 emissions, including incentives and liability indemnification for early adopters.

Gasification Technologies Council member companies are involved in gasification projects-- as plant owners, technology suppliers, or equipment/service suppliers -- that account for more than 95 percent of world gasification capacity. For more information please see www.gasification.org.

Source: Business Wire

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