Southern Research Successfully Demonstrates Unique Coal and Biomass Mixture Feeder

PRNewswire.com

Could Reduce the Cost of Greenhouse Gas Emission Control on New Coal-Fired Power Plants

DURHAM, N.C., May 2, 2011 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Southern Research Institute today announced that its Clean Energy Technology Development Center in Durham, North Carolina has achieved an important milestone in the effort to find low-cost technologies that reduce greenhouse gas emissions from power plants. The technology development, a collaboration between Southern Research and TK Energi A/S of Denmark, successfully combined both coal and biomass feedstocks for use in coal-fired power stations of the future called Integrated Gasification Combined Cycle (IGCC) systems. Use of biomass—as a supplement to coal—could allow power stations to take credit for the carbon dioxide that plants and trees take out of the atmosphere as they grow and mature. The program was sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), with additional financial support from Southern Research and TK Energi.

In contrast to bulky and expensive lockhoppers, the prototype feeder creates a highly-compressed "plug" of coal and biomass, so dense that the high pressure inside commercial-scale gasifiers is held back as the material is pushed into the gasifier. A primary challenge related to biomass utilization in IGCC power plants has been the inability to reliably feed a variety of biomass feedstocks to the gasifier as biomass-coal mixtures. Southern Research and TK Energi have shown this challenge can be overcome.

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