NICE’s Indirect Coal-to-Liquid Process for Producing Clean Transportation Fuels Using Fischer-Tropsch Synthesis

Abstract

China is currently the world’s top coal consumer and the largest oil importer to sustain its rising economy and meet the mounting demand for transportation fuels. However, the increasing emissions due to the huge fossil fuels consumption, coupled with oil market instability, could derail China’s economic growth and jeopardize its national energy security. To face such a hurdle, China has been aggressively supporting low-carbon businesses opportunuties over the past decade, has recently announced several plans to cap coal utilization, and is currently the biggest investor in clean energy technologies. Coal-to-Liquid (CTL) is one of the most promising clean coal technologies, offering an ideal solution that can meet China’s energy demands and environmental expectations. It is widely known that the Shenhua Group has pioneered and is currently leading the commercialization of the Direct Coal Liquefaction (DCL) process in China.

This paper highlights a part of the joint research effort undertaken by the National Institute of Clean-and-Low-Carbon Energy (NICE) and University of Pittsburgh in order to develop and commercialize the Indirect Coal Liquefaction (ICL) process. In this mission, NICE has built and operated an ICL plant including a large-scale (5.8-m ID and 30-m height) Slurry-Bubble-Column Reactor (SBCR) for Fischer-Tropsch synthesis using iron catalyst. The research, conducted at the University of Pittsburgh over the past few years, allowed building a user-friendly Simulator, based on a comprehensive SBCR model integrated with Aspen Plus and is validated using data from the NICE actual ICL plant. In this paper, the Simulator predictions of the performance of the NICE SBCR, operating with iron and cobalt catalysts under four different tail gas recycle strategies: (1) direct recycle; (2) using a Pressure Swing Adsorption (PSA) unit; (3) using a reformer; and (4) using a Chemical looping Combustion (CLC) process, are presented. It should be mentioned also that our joint research effort has laid the foundation for the design of a commercial-scale SBCR for producing one-million tons per annum of environmentally friendly and ultraclean (no sulfur, no nitrogen and virtually no aromatics) transportation fuels, which could greatly contribute to ensuring China’s national energy security while curbing its lingering emission problems.

Keywords

Fischer-Tropsch synthesis / tail gas recycle / simulations / process design

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The Author(s) 2016. Published by Higher Education Press. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/license/by/4.0)