Intermediate Btu gas

SORAB R. VATCHA, Senior Research Engineer, Ashland Oil Co. How can methanol at 6 or 7.50 per million Btu compete with intermediate Btu gas at about half the price ... 

R. WOLK I think it s a question of how you deliver that intermediate Btu gas. We have a very small market in terms of Btu s for that service, and it has only been running maybe three to five-hundred hours a year at most. You can t afford to set up an intermediate gas plant for that kind of market. 

Let me also state that I said earlier this morning that as for the baseload market we think that medium-Btu gas plus combined cycles is very competitive. For the intermediate and peakload market, though, we think that storable liquids are important. We are also looking at some variations on the theme that you proposed of diverting part of that intermediate Btu gas into methanol and using that to meet the peaks. Those schemes are under investigation. 

Market Opportunities for Low and Intermediate Btu Gas from Coal in Selected Areas of Industrial Concentration, SRI International, Report No. HCP/T2441-02, June, 1978. 

Four flat, disc-shaped laminar flow flames were probed and analyzed using standard microprobing techniques. The flames were composed primarily of CO, H2, 02> and Ar with small amounts of CH4 or natural gas added to simulate intermediate Btu gas mixtures. Gas compositions used in the probings are presented in Table 1. Flames A and B contained excess air, air/fuel equivalence ratio = 1.13 Flames C and D were slightly fuel rich, air/fuel equivalence ratio = 0.93. Each of the mixtures had a CO/H2/X (X = methane or natural gas) mole ratio of 1/1/0.22. 

These are briefly reviewed, followed by summary economics for the production from wood of electricity, steam, and cogenerated products intermediate-Btu gas (IBG) and substitute natural gas (SNG) methanol ammonia fuel oil and pyrolytic oil and char. Several processing steps in these conversion schemes are conceptual or are at early stages of development by DOE, EPRI, GRI, and others (an exception would be wood steam/electric power plants, which are commercially used by the electric utility and wood products industries). Consequently, the economics presented here may generally tend to be optimistic. Additional details of the analyses can be found in Kohan and Barkhordar(1) Jones, Kohan and Semrau(2J and Kohan and Dickenson( 3). ... 

Table III presents the estimated investments for the production of high pressure (2100 kPa) intermediate Btu gas (IBG) and SNG from wood. Because of the low sulfur content of wood, no sulfur removal facilities are included in the IBG design. Since the methanation catalyst is sulfur-sensitive, sulfur in the synthesis gas in the SNG case is removed down to very low levels.

Principal Product High-Pressure Intermediate-Btu Gas(IBG) Substitute Natural Gas(SNG)... 

The substitution of natural gas, with its inherent impurities (some four percent of other hydrocarbons), for methane has no measurable influence on the burning behavior of the intermediate BTU fuel mixtures. 

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