Red, Green, and Blue

Last night I had the opportunity to talk with Bonne Posma, a serial entrepreneur whose most recent company is called Liquid Coal, Inc. He sees a great opportunity for making the world a safer and cleaner place by developing a process that will use heat from high temperature nuclear reactors as part of a process of converting coal into a liquid hydrocarbon.

Bonne is standing on the shoulders of many other engineers and scientists in his efforts. The chemistry required to convert coal, which is mostly carbon and hydrogen, into a liquid hydrocarbon was developed in the 1920s by a German team of Franz Fischer and Hans Tropsch. The Fisher-Tropsch process has a rather uncomfortable history - it’s most prominent use has been by Germany during WWII and by South Africa during the apartheid era.

However, one should not dismiss a technology just because it has been used by evil or misguided people. The current South African government, one that is far more friendly to the interests of all of its people, has continued using the process. As a country with a large, accessible and inexpensive coal resource, it has found it profitable to keep making diesel fuel from a combination of coal and hydrogen. The company running the existing plant - Sasol - produces about 150,000 barrels of fuel per day at an estimated internal cost of about $35 per barrel. With today’s fuel prices, Sasol is extremely profitable and has plan to expand.

One major problem with Fischer-Tropsch as traditionally implemented, however, is that it uses coal combustion to produce the heat required to make the process work. This has two problems - it means that about half of the coal supplied to a liquid coal refinery is consumed by the process and not made into a marketable product and the combustion process releases huge quantities of all of the traditional pollutants associated with burning coal, including fly ash, mercury, NOx, SOx and CO2.

Bonne’s idea is to replace the part of the process that burns coal for heat production with a nuclear reactor designed to produce high temperature process heat along with some electricity. The hydrogen will come from splitting water and will be combined with the coal under elevated temperature and pressure. He has developed a few refinements of the chemistry and has begun testing the process using heat from burning natural gas as a way to kick start the process while waiting for the HTR’s that he needs to become available.

There are two main projects in accessible parts of the world that are developing just such reactors. One is the Pebble Bed Modular Reactor (PBMR) in South Africa and one is the US DOE’s Very High Temperature Reactor (VHTR).

If you want to find out more about Bonne’s plans, you can listen to our conversation on Atomic Show #096.

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