Program Item Details
TITLE: Alan Johnson, Zero Emissions Coal Alliance, and Past President of the Coal Association of Canada
SUBJECT: #17 Zero Emission Coal
SYNOPSIS: It seems like a pipedream but coal could be used in such a way that it gave off no emissions to the atmosphere. A chance meeting between Alan Johnson and a carbon scientist from Los Alamos led to the founding of the Zero Emissions Coal Alliance. The Los Alamos team has developed the pathway in which energy could be extracted from coal without combustion. Instead, coal is mixed with water in a special fuel cell. It may take 20 years to work through the engineering process before the technology is commercialized, but Alan Johnson believes this new process will revolutionize the way we use energy. It will provide an economic source of hydrogen in large quantities, becoming the foundation of the future hydrogen economy.
AUDIO: Download Audio (mp3 format)
TRANSCRIPT:
Intro: Imagine getting double the energy from coal without burning it. That’s the dream of Alan Johnson and the Zero Emissions Coal Alliance.
Now here’s some thinking that goes outside the box. Instead of burning coal to get energy, why not mix it with water, put it in the right fuel cell and you’ll get double the energy with zero emissions and a whole new source of hydrogen for the future hydrogen based economy. That’s the concept that hooked Alan Johnson when he met two carbon scientists from Los Alamos. I spoke with Alan Johnson as he finished up his term as President of the Coal Association of Canada.
Alan Johnson
AJ: It’s difficult to explain it in simple terms but I guess the best way would be to say that they’ve developed a set of chemical equations that show that we can take coal and water into the first box, so to speak, and from that box get hydrogen and a pure stream of carbon dioxide out. So that within the box there are systems to remove all the sulphur and nitrogen, and mercury in particular, and so forth. So that the first step then is to have coal and water coming in, hydrogen and carbon dioxide coming out. The hydrogen, of course, can be then used to make electricity or to drive automobiles or anything that you want to use hydrogen for. But more importantly the carbon dioxide is in a pure stream. It’s in a pure form and it’s hot and under pressure so that it can be pumped into the ground, into coal bed formations or for enhanced oil recovery or just simply buried in saline aquifers or if you go to a more complete step, you can actually react that carbon dioxide with soapstone, that’s the very dark green soapstone which has the technical name of serpentine, and the serpentine and carbon dioxide will form a white powder called magnesite which some of your listeners might know as Rolaids or Tums or something. In other words, a very stable white powder that can be put back in the ground. So the overall system then is coal and water coming in, hydrogen coming out and finally the carbon being put back in the ground as a safe, stable white powder.
CC: ARE THERE ANY OTHER USES OR DO YOU ALWAYS HAVE TO HAVE THE HYDROGEN COMING OUT OR IS THERE SOME ROOM FOR RECYCLING WITHIN THIS PROCESS?
AJ: Oh no, of course the hydrogen can be used right in the process. It could be put through a solid oxide fuel cell and, of course, in a fuel cell it will react with oxygen to form water and that water can be the water that’s coming back into the system so we don’t, in fact, have to be putting coal and water in, we can be putting coal in and cycling the water around so that we don’t have to get make-up water for the processing.
CC: WELL HOW IS THIS PROCESS DIFFERENT FROM WHAT HAPPENS NOW WHEN COAL IS BURNED TO PRODUCE ELECTRICITY?
AJ: Well it’s fundamentally different because you don’t burn the coal. I mean that’s the key, the discovery, if you wish, was that you could get the energy from the coal without burning it. In the present systems, what we do is we take the coal, we burn it in air and nitrogen, that creates heat which we use to make steam and then we put the steam through great big turbines. The turbines, of course, spin at very high speed and make electricity and then we get the electricity but we have all the emissions from the burning of coal going out into the atmosphere. Of course, we try in many circumstances to put scrubbers and cleaners on to clean those emissions out but we don’t eliminate them. Whereas the process we’re talking about now, the zero emission coal process, the sort of the vision of the future has no emissions at all. Everything is kept within the system.
CC: SO IT LOOKS LIKE WHAT WE’RE GOING INTO HERE IS A WHOLE NEW FUEL CELL TECHNOLOGY. COULD YOU EXPLAIN A LITTLE BIT ABOUT THIS FUEL CELL--THIS NEW ONE THAT WOULD USE THE COAL.
AJ: Well, the main difference from existing fuel cells would be that this one must be able to handle fairly high levels of sulphur in the circulating gases that are going through it. Sulphur, also things like mercury and nitrogen and so on, so the process because it’s being kept in a box, inside the box is not clean. There are a number of cleaning circuits in it that are continuously removing material but the solid oxide fuel cell that needs to be designed does not exist today. The ceramic solid oxide fuel cells that do exist require very high purity hydrogen and cannot stand to work in high temperature environments like this with the things like the sulphur going around.
CC: SO IF YOU’RE LOOKING AT THESE FUEL CELLS, IF WE CAN JUST SPECULATE WHAT IT MIGHT BE LIKE IN THE FUTURE, I’M THINKING OF WIND POWER WHERE YOU’VE GOT BANKS OF WINDMILLS ALL OVER THE PLACE IN ORDER TO CAPTURE ENOUGH POWER TO DEVELOP THE ELECTRICITY THAT’S NEEDED ON A LARGE SCALE. HOW THEN WOULD THE FUEL CELLS BE SET UP? WOULD THEY BE LIKE BANKS OF FUEL CELLS EVERYWHERE OR WOULD IT BE SOMETHING SMALL ENOUGH THAT, YOU KNOW, YOU COULD KEEP ON A SMALLER SCALE OR HOW WOULD THAT WORK?
AJ: Well, I guess if you drove by one of these plants compared to an existing coal fired plant, the only thing that you would notice different is that there would be no smoke stack. They would be essentially the same size. The fuel cells would take the place of the steam turbines. And, so the space requirement would be essentially the same as it is today.
CC: WITH THIS NEW TECHNOLOGY WHAT OTHER CHANGES ARE INVOLVED? DOES IT CHANGE THE WAY COAL WILL BE MINED FOR EXAMPLE?
AJ: Yes, it changes virtually everything about coal. It changes the way it’s mined, the way it’s transported, the way it’s used. For example in mining, we might be mining coal with water sheds and then crushing it in the mine mixing it with water, putting it into a pipeline as a coal water slurry or sludge and just, instead of transporting it by truck or rail, just pipelining it into big tanks where it’s held until it’s used. We could be shipping coal over to Japan without having coal piles or coal dust or any of those things. It changes everything about coal and on the other side of the equation, after you use the coal and you make the hydrogen, then coal becomes the foundation of hydrogen economy. We no longer look to windmills and solar panels and things like that to be making our hydrogen to run the hydrogen economy but we can look to coal with zero emissions to produce the cheapest form of hydrogen in large quantities and quantities that are large enough to run our massive economies and have no emissions.
CC: HOW IS IT THAT YOU GOT CONNECTED WITH THE SCIENTISTS FROM LOS ALAMOS?
AJ: This is one of the most interesting parts of the story actually. Just after I was appointed President of the Coal Association, about two weeks after that, there was a meeting being held in Calgary that I wasn’t invited to. It was held by the Federal Government and Natural Resources Canada and they didn’t mean not to invite me, I didn’t exist just before that. So, when they found out that I hadn’t been invited, they invited me to the meeting but when I arrived there, there was no seat for me but there was a space at the table beside Dr. Zearc, who was the invited guest from Los Alamos and the purpose of this meeting was to look fifty years out and discuss in very broad terms what the world would look like and how technologies would change in fifty years.
And one of the surprising things was that everyone at the table, all these senior people from major oil and gas companies and so on, were all talking about things like changing the amount of flaring, or improving this technology, or improving that technology. And when we got around to Dr. Zearc he started talking about grandiose schemes about anaerobic gasification of coal to produce hydrogen and frankly nobody understood what he talking about.
So, during the coffee breaks, because I was sitting beside him, I turned to him and said, ‘can you explain to me in sort of simple terms what you’re saying, like what this means.’ So he explained it to me. And I thought, ‘gee, that sounds really interesting.’ And, after the meeting, I sent him a one sentence e-mail saying ‘Dear Hans, it was really nice to meet you and I’d like to phone and talk to you some more about this.’ So the next thing you know I was invited down to Los Alamos and they gave me a complete dog and pony show of all their carbon management programs and at the end of the meeting Dr. Cheryl Berger said to me, ‘well, what do you think?’ And I said ‘well it looks great but I can’t do anything about it.’ And she said ‘well what do we need to do.’ And I said ‘well you need $1 million dollars and you need a program. You need a business plan and a technical plan.’ And so she just looked at me and said ‘well, can you help us do that.’ And so we just came back to Canada and visited the power companies and the federal government and the Alberta government and so on and told the story and asked everyone for a small contribution and they all said ‘yes’.
So we just started it up just out of a serendipity happenstance meeting that I had with Dr. Zearc. Just one thing lead to another and the idea once it was explained and a simple person like me could understand it, the idea was so compelling that we found it really was very, very easy to get very significant companies and government entities to work with us to make it happen. And, so it’s on its way now.
CC: THANK YOU VERY MUCH
AJ: Okay, you’re welcome Cheryl.
Alan Johnson is formerly of the Coal Association of Canada and is a founding member of the Zero Emissions Coal Alliance.