Project development has slowed because of rising capital costs, fewer financial lenders and a lack of technology to deal with potentially demanding CO2 laws that could require as much as a 90% capture rate. To get financing, a project developer has to have a sound carbon-management plan.

This prolonged delay in large-scale commercial deployment of first-generation, coal-gasification technologies has created an unexpected opportunity for advanced-gasification technology companies to emerge, get funded, demonstrate their technologies and commercialize them.

As with large-scale gasification plants, US developers of smaller advanced gasification systems (AGS) are focusing on producing substitute natural gas (SNG) to meet future natural-gas shortages.

AGS offers the promise of lower costs, greater efficiency, higher availability, greater modularity, and a wide range of commercial scales, as well as good carbon management, and rapid deployment. Advanced technologies are proving cheaper, more modular, efficient, and flexible as far as feedstock sourcing as development continues with more pilot projects under way. Biomass and waste are now playing a much larger role in the feedstock picture.

Coal gasification ensures reliable, cost-effective technology with good CO2 management that will eventually gain a huge market. Using gasification to make renewable transportation fuels is winning favor and innovative technologies are rapidly emerging to gasify non-edible agricultural parts of plants to make CO2-neutral biofuels.

Company management is less cautious about proceeding with AGS projects and continues to believe in the technology’s potential. Venture capitalists want too much to invest in a project and a developer cannot get a project financed if he requires any debt. Private equity is a big-money program that is very cautious about technology plays.

“Industrial giants such as GE, Siemens, and people form the oil and gas industry, are the companies you want backing you' ,Eric Redman, shareholder, Heller Ehrman LLP, told last year’s AGS conference delegates.

Additional scaled-up commercial projects are needed to prove the technology, unlike China where potential investors can actually see plants that are operating and under construction. 

In the US, LNG imports are not expected to meet future US natural-gas demand. Smaller, cheaper, modular gasification systems are needed to supply SNG to industrial customers that cannot compete with other global companies using cheaper feed stocks as well as make expansion plans based on volatile and high natural-gas prices.

AGS suppliers are now targeting US industrial markets with gasifiers that have much higher availability and fabricated reactors that can be bolted on at the site, cutting the project’s construction time significantly.

Join us at the third annual Advanced Gasification Systems: Coal, Petcoke, Biomass & Waste conference on Nov. 5 & 6, 2008 in Houston.