The United States is the Middle East of coal. For companies looking to expand the use of this indigenous resource in more environmentally suitable ways through the use of advanced and emerging technologies, Exponent provides technical, economic, and market analysis skills and expertise.
We offer specialized consulting services to technology providers, project sponsors, project developers, and special-purpose project companies seeking to deploy clean coal technologies to develop coal resources in the United States, and in other countries such as India, China, and Australia. We also can assist Engineering & Construction (E&C) firms designing clean coal facilities, and the financial institutions and attorneys that support these projects.
The types of assistance that the energy experts at Exponent can offer include project cash-flow analysis, financing model development, techno-economic comparisons of available technologies, end-product market analysis, assistance with solutions for CO
2 issues, and project risk assessments.
Exponent consultants have conducted market study investigations of coal-to-liquid (CTL) and gas-to-liquid (GTL) products, and provided scoping and screening studies of petroleum coke and coal gasification projects. Our engineers have assessed available coal gasification technologies (both above ground and underground) and evaluated integrated gasification combined cycle (IGCC) and various co-production (polygeneration) schemes using coal, petcoke, and blended feedstocks. Exponent has expertise in performing reliability, availability, and maintainability (RAM) studies for particular clean coal project configurations. Our consultants have worked with the major power-block equipment suppliers and can recommend whether project sponsors should consider purchase or self-generation for a project’s electricity or fuel needs. We have experience with direct and indirect coal liquefaction processes, and the production of power, steam, and hydrogen in utility islands using gasification and steam reforming technologies for supply to host facilities such as oil refineries.
Once the synthesis gas is generated, we have evaluated the suitability of different cleanup technologies and the options for carbon capture and conversion of the syngas into marketable clean fuels, petrochemical intermediates, and end-use commodities. Among the processes that our consultants have considered are methanol, nitrogen fertilizers, synthetic natural gas (SNG), methanol to gasoline, and Fischer-Tropsch synthesis.