The Gasification Technologies Council (GTC) Thursday blasted the recent findings of Carnegie Mellon University researchers that say liquefied natural gas (LNG) might not be competitive with advanced coal technologies on an emissions basis when regasified LNG is used to fuel power plants.

GTC said it strongly challenges the findings of the paper published by Carnegie Mellon regarding life-cycle air emissions from state-of-the-art fossil-fueled energy technologies for power generation.

In the Sept. 1 edition of the journal “Environmental Science and Technology,” Carnegie Mellon researchers Paulina Jaramillo, W. Michael Griffin and H. Scott Matthews purport to show that LNG imported from foreign countries and used for electricity generation could have 35% higher life-cycle greenhouse gas emissions than coal used in advanced power plant technologies (see Daily GPI, Aug 23). The paper, which reviewed gasification technologies along with others, did not take current or future industry practices into account, GTC said.

“The Carnegie Mellon paper cobbled together averaged and generic data from a variety of sources and made incorrect assumptions about substitute natural gas (SNG) and integrated gasification combined cycle (IGCC),” said GTC Executive Director Jim Childress. “As a result, its findings are nothing more than hypothesis and conjecture, and sadly miss the true benefits of gasification-based technologies.”

GTC said the Carnegie Mellon study had “many flaws.” Among them:

“The paper reveals a complete lack of understanding of gasification technologies and of the energy marketplace in which these processes operate,” said Childress. “You can’t use outdated figures, generic data, or bad information and then say you’ve got a report that accurately studies the life cycle emissions of SNG, IGCC or any other fuel. To suggest that SNG and IGCC plants would be dirtier than pulverized coal plants is to deny the reality of sound science and solid technology.”

For more than 50 years, gasification has been used around the world by a range of industries to create a variety of high-value products, GTC said. SNG has been produced in the United States via gasification since the mid-1980s in North Dakota at a large-scale plant that has been capturing CO2 for enhanced oil recovery since 2000. IGCC plants are operating successfully in the U.S., Europe and Japan. Since 2004, China alone has started up 29 gasification facilities as one element of a national policy to reduce its dependence on imported petroleum for the production of chemicals and fertilizers.

GTC represents companies involved in the development and use of gasification technologies as well as engineering, construction, manufacture of equipment and production of synthesis gas by gasification. The organization’s website is www.gasification.org.

The Carnegie Mellon research was funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation, the Teresa Heinz Fellows for Environmental Research, the Pennsylvania Infrastructure Technology Alliance and the Blue Moon Fund. The “Environmental Science and Technology” article on the research — “Comparative Life-Cycle Air Emissions of Coal, Domestic Natural Gas, LNG, and SNG for Electricity Generation” — is available from the publication’s website, www.pubs.acs.org/journals/esthag/. Click on “current issue” or use the site’s search function.

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