South coal gasification

In 1984, the Ube Ammonia Industry Co. began operating the largest Texaco coal gasification complex to date. This faciUty is located in Ube City, Japan, and has a rated gasification capacity of 1500 t/day of coal, and production capacity of 1000 t/day of ammonia. The plant has successfully gasified coals from Canada, AustraUa, South Africa, and China. At the present time the plant uses a mixture of petroleum coke and coal (43). 

The high cost of coal handling and preparation and treatment of effluents, compounded by continuing low prices for cmde oil and natural gas, has precluded significant exploitation of coal as a feedstock for methanol. A small amount of methanol is made from coal in South Africa for local strategic reasons. Tennessee Eastman operates a 195,000-t/yr methanol plant in Tennessee based on the Texaco coal gasification process to make the methyl acetate intermediate for acetic anhydride production (15). 

Conventional Transportation Fuels. Synthesis gas produced from coal gasification or from natural gas by partial oxidation or steam reforming can be converted into a variety of transportation fuels, such as gasoline, aviation turbine fuel (see Aviation and other gas turbine fuels), and diesel fuel. A widely known process used for this appHcation is the Eischer-Tropsch process which converts synthesis gas into largely aHphatic hydrocarbons over an iron or cobalt catalyst. The process was operated successfully in Germany during World War II and is being used commercially at the Sasol plants in South Africa. 

SASOL [Suid-Afrikaans Sintetiese Olie] Not a process but a large coal gasification complex in South Africa, operated by the South African Oil and Gas Corporation. It first operated in 1955 but took several years to be fully commissioned. A Lurgi fixed-bed gasification unit is used for the primary process. Downstream processes include the following ones, described under their respective names Aige, Fischer-Tropsch, Rectisol, Sulfohn, Synthol. 

Stoic Also called Foster Wheeler-Stoic and FW-Stoic. A two-stage, nonslagging coal gasification process, operated under atmospheric pressure and using air as the oxidant. Initially developed by Stoic Combustion Limited Pty, South Africa licensed and further developed by Foster Wheeler Corporation, United States. First used in South Africa in 1950 now widely used in Europe, the United States, and South Africa. 

In South Africa, large-scale coal gasification and FT plants have been operated by Sasol since 1955, mainly producing gasoline. 

The system considered here is the Lurgi dry ash coal gasification process as used at SASOL in the Republic of South Africa and proposed for use at the Great Plains gasification project in North Dakota (2). The important steps in the process as far as... 

Countries with large domestic coal reserves, such as China and South Africa, rely primarily on coal gasification to produce synthesis gas. This synthesis gas is hydrogen deficient (M < 2) and must undergo a further water-gas shift (WGS) step to yield a C02-rich mixture [2]. Methanol synthesis from C02 and C02-rich mixtures provides special catalyst and reactor design challenges, which will be further discussed in more detail. 

Sasol (Suid-Afrikaans Sintetiese Olie) in South Africa has one of the largest coal gasification production operations in the world with the three plants.1 One plant produces only chemicals and the other plants produce both liquid fuels and chemical feedstocks from coal. In 1994, Sasol s total ammonia capacity was over 500,000 tons per year.54... 

ACGP [Advanced Coal Gasification Process] A coal gasification process developed in South Africa by Kynoch Fertilizer and Babcock Wilcox as a replacement for the KBW process. Unlike the KBW process, it operates under atmospheric pressure. ACGP had not been commercialized by 2006. 

In such cases, the synthesis gas reactor is then equipped with an increased number of quench gas controllers in order to maintain the higher temperature rise in the individual catalyst layers to be expected due to the weaker dilution in limits. The pressure drop across the overall loop is 6 10bar. The largest plants in operation have methanol reactors with an individual capacity up to 2500tpd. Since 1976, a plant with a capacity of 50tpd has been in operation in South Africa which is fed with synthesis gas from a coal gasification unit operating to the Koppers process. 

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