Clean and secure energy from coal, oil shale, and oil sands: Quarterly progress report: July 1, 2009 to September 30, 2009

The University of Utah Clean and Secure Energy (CASE) project is pursuing interdisciplinary, cradle-to-grave research and development of energy for electric power generation and for liquid transportation fuels from the abundant domestic resources of coal, oil sands, and oil shale. Its work is divided into three programs: the Clean Coal Program, the Oil Shale and Sands Program (OSSP), and the Policy Environment, and Economics Program (PEEP). Emphasis will be on minimizing the environmental impacts associated with the development of these resources, including reducing the carbon footprint through the use of CO2 capture for subsequent storage (sequestration). During this quarter, the CASE team responded to recommendations from the first External Advisory Board, and two students completed their NETL internships. In the Clean Coal Program, investigators are continuing to integrate the experimental work with the simulation efforts with an emphasis on the oxyfuel and gasification areas. Specifically, the Task 4 Team continues to work toward extracting manifolds from the dataset acquired from ODT (one dimensional turbulence) simulation data using principle variable analysis. The Oxy-coal Team completed the design and fabrication of the second-generation oxy-coal burner, which allows for the introduction of pure O2 and minimized flue-gas recycle. They also collected ash-partitioning data from two coals in the large-scale oxyfuel combustor, collected preliminary particle-size data from the drop-tube reactor, and conducted a test campaign of air vs. oxy-combustion in the circulating fluidized bed. The Advanced Diagnostics Team completed construction of the coal burner for testing of particle image velocimetry. The Gasification Team simulated two typical gasification flames using ODT; applied the ODT model to the simulation of a temporally evolving non-premixed CO/HCO/H2-air jet; tested CO as a fuel in the pressurized flat-flame burner; completed construction of the quench, cooling and syngas handling systems for the 1 ton/day gasifier; and tested the gasifier operation with diesel fuel. Progress continued on the chemical looping tasks with the analysis of nickel oxidation data, the testing of copper powder in the laboratory-scale reactor, which formed a solid in the reactor, and the development of a preliminary spreadsheet model incorporating the kinetics of char combustion and the kinetics of copper oxide in chemical looping. Finally, the Sequestration Team performed experiments with two additional rock samples. Several of the tasks in the Oil Shale and Sands Program and in the Policy, Environment, and Economics Program were highlighted in various chapters of an American Chemical Society publication that is currently in press entitled Oil Shale: Solutions to the Liquid Fuel Dilemma. In addition, technical progress has continued in each of the six tasks that are part of this program. The task 17.0 team continued their work with minimizing the volume of larger kerogen models consisting of up to 12 kerogen units. Their minimization strategy resulted in models whose density and pair distribution function plots correlated properly with experimental data. The Task 18.0 team focused on thermogravimetric analysis of oil shale samples coupled with mass spectrometry. In general, the release/generation of the aromatic and paraffinic components studied occurs at lower temperatures at the lower heating rate. The Task 19.0 team completed their CT characterization of pore network structure both on raw and pyrolyzed oil shale samples. They also parallelized a Lattice Boltzmann Model for simulating flow in porous structures such as pyrolyzed oil shale samples. The Task 20.0 team used statistical methods to understand dependencies among 2 variables such as chemical kinetics, fluid flow and heat transfer when modeling in situ production of oil shale. The most significant variables were the activation energy for the cracking of light oil to gas and the relative permeabilities. The Task 21.0 team began a dialogue with CANMET that will hopefully result in the information needed to perform a simulation of the 0.3 MWth down-fired vertical combustor. Additional information was gathered on other oxy-gas and flameless combustor datasets. The Task 22.0 team continued experiments but had no new data to report.