Clean Coal Fuels

The end result is an ultra-clean transportation fuel that is vastly superior to conventional diesel or aviation fuels, featuring almost zero sulfur content, a very high cetane rating, very low aromatics, very good cold-weather performance characteristics, and superior long-term storage characteristics (6 + year shelf life).

Once our feedstocks are gasified, there are a wide array of potential products that can be produced, ranging from synthetic fuels, to electricity, to fertilizers, to specialty chemicals. Since our goal is the production of diesel and jet transportation fuels, the clean syngas is sent to a process called Fischer Tropsch conversion. Fischer Tropsch is a core technology originally developed in the 1930s. Apart from its original implementation to fuel the German military during World War 2, FT conversion has since been used in four commercial facilities in South Africa, Malaysia, and Qatar, totaling approximately 232,000 Barrels Per Day of synthetic aviation and diesel fuels production.
In the FT process, the clean syngas is passed over a catalyst that re-arranges the molecules into a combination of liquids and waxes, which are then refined using conventional refinery technologies into ultra-clean diesel and jet fuels.

Gasification is an industrial process that is capable of taking a very wide array of carbon-based feedstocks such as biomass, coal, municipal solid waste, oils, and some others, and breaking them down to their molecular components (which are primarily hydrogen and carbon monoxide), which exit the process as a concentrated synthetic gas called syngas. That synthetic gas produced during gasification is then treated to remove any unwanted elements (sulfur, mercury, CO2, ETC), which are captured and sold as commercial byproducts.

Our flagship project in Oakland Illinois is an advanced synthetic fuels manufacturing facility that employs a process called Biomass and Coal To Liquids (BCTL) This process is based on two core technologies: Gasification, and Fischer Tropsch conversion.