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The Gasification Systems program and its forerunners played an important role in development of efficient power technologies in the United States. Notably, these included highly efficient and low-polluting integrated gasification combined cycle power plants, among the best-performing fossil fuel-based plants of their era when they were commissioned in the late 20th century. In the past 25 years, the program continued with development of multiple syngas technologies for efficiency and operational improvements in gasification-based process systems. Notable examples include the now industry-standard Aurex® 95P gasifier refractory, the highly efficient commercially ready warm syngas cleanup technology, the TRIG™ Transport Integrated Gasification technology for low-rank fuel utilization, and NETL’s MFiX modeling software successfully used in varied fossil energy, bio, nuclear, solar energy processing, and nuclear waste treatment simulations of solid/liquids/gas flow reactors including syngas-producing gasifiers.
The chief limitations or barriers to conventional gasification tend not to be technical in nature, but market-based, as was made clear through later experiences with implementing large gasification plants. A good example to consider is the Edwardsport Station in Knox County, Indiana, where a 618-MW IGCC plant began operations in 2013. Cost overruns at this plant resulted in excessively high capital investment liability. Several factors worked against this plant, including unexpectedly high materials costs, schedule delays, etc.; but fundamentally, the plant needed to be large in order to take advantage of economy of scale factors that apply to most of the major plant systems. Large turbines, large gasifiers, large oxygen plant, etc., are needed for acceptable performance and unit cost efficiencies. This directly translates into the huge cost and investment risk, impracticable to justify to utilities, customers, and financial institutions. DOE NETL have realized that smaller/distributed gasification systems that would limit cost and risk are advantageous, and currently have endorsed development of gasification systems of more tractable size range of perhaps 70-200 MWth equivalent. Systems sized in this range may also more realistically take advantage of local sources of biomass and wastes as fuel, conveying synergistic benefits of waste dispositioning and sustainability.
Syngas versatility is a strong advantage of the gasification technological approach, enabling syngas-based plants to be configured with flexibility to produce the most valuable product given market opportunities. As opposed to the past where integrated gasification combined cycle power generation was market-viable, future applications may well hinge on the decarbonization potential of gasification systems utilizing low-carbon footprint biomass and alternative feedstocks such as wastes, integrated with lowest-cost carbon capture afforded by oxygen-blown gasification systems, yielding decarbonized or clean hydrogen. Clean hydrogen could be used as turbine fuel, as a fuel in difficult to decarbonize industrial sectors such as the steel industry, or as feedstock for production of decarbonized fuels (e.g. sustainable aviation fuel) and chemicals. This will be an important element aiding the overall decarbonization of the United States economy sought after in the DOE’s Hydrogen Energy Earthshot
