Published: March 18, 2016 |

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It’s possible, even likely, that some of the clean coal technologies being developed at the South Park National Energy Technology Laboratory — a federally funded fossil fuel lab — will be tested in China. 

The reason is simple: China is building new coal plants. The United States is not.

When Grace Bochenek, NETL’s director, and Geo Richards, a senior research fellow with the lab, visited China in November, they understood this dynamic well.

“As you develop or innovate new technology, sometimes you have to reach out internationally,” Ms. Bochenek said in an interview last week. “It’s a very important part of accelerating things.”

Coal companies in the U.S. are dominoing into bankruptcy while coal loses market share to cheap natural gas. The coal equipment and technology companies that had been nurtured in places like Appalachia are now being starved. Increasingly, they’re looking abroad, and specifically, to China to use their current technology and pioneer new inventions. Technology developed at NETL is often licensed by companies in the U.S. and abroad.

China hasn’t just surpassed the U.S. in coal production and consumption, it has a more diverse portfolio of coal uses than the U.S., where 90 percent of coal is used for electric generation.

During their visit, Ms. Bochenek and Mr. Richards toured a recently constructed coal power plant built in the middle of a growing city that also supplied steam to a district heating system.

“The net efficiencies are just stunning when you combine power generation with heat,” Mr. Richards said. But the concept of plopping a sizable coal plant in the middle of a city is “pretty foreign in the U.S.”

Here, large coal plants are sited in rural areas and connected to the grid through miles of transmission lines. It’s impractical to pump steam that far to a population center.

China’s rapid urbanization allows the country to approach certain things more “holistically,” Ms. Bochenek said.

“They plan the city at the same time as they plan energy requirements,” she said.

The two also visited a factory where coal was being converted into chemicals. Ms. Bochenek and Mr. Richards were told the facility was built within a short period of time, a relative metric that underscores to contrast the extensive timeline for such projects in the U.S.

The plant is considering buying technology developed in the U.S. to convert the coal into a synthetic gas, the first step in the process of chemical making.

NETL, too, is exploring how to incorporate chemical production into coal-powered generation in the U.S.

In a coal patch in the western part of China, Ms. Bochenek and Mr. Richards saw mining operations across the road from oilfields — an ideal setting to hone and adopt carbon capture and utilization technologies which would trap carbon dioxide from coal and inject it into oil wells to enhance recovery.

In the U.S., projects to commercialize this on a large scale have stalled given the expense of capturing the carbon and the low price of oil which dampens companies’ willingness to increase their well costs.

Ms. Bochenek said there were no discussions about intellectual property protection during their visit — a touchy area for companies doing business in China because of its reputation as a place where IP is less than sacrosanct.

Thus far, NETL hasn’t shared any intellectual property with China, she said.

“We’ve not taken a piece of our hardware or software over there,” she said. “We’ve worked with companies that then made that decision, but we wouldn’t be involved in that part.”

Source: (March 15, 2016) Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

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