Underground coal thermal treatment - Task 6 topical report, Utah Clean Coal Program

The long-term objective of this task is to develop a transformational energy production technology by in situ thermal treatment of a coal seam for the production of substitute natural gas and/or liquid transportation fuels while leaving much of the coal's carbon in the ground. This process converts coal to a high-efficiency, low-greenhouse gas (GHG) emitting fuel. It holds the potential of providing environmentally acceptable access to previously unusable coal resources. This task focused on three areas: • Experimental. The Underground Coal Thermal Treatment (UCTT) team focused on experiments at two scales, bench-top and slightly larger, to develop data to understand the feasibility of a UCTT process as well as to develop validation/uncertainty quantification (V/UQ) data for the simulation team. • Simulation. The investigators completed development of High Performance Computing (HPC) simulations of UCTT. This built on our simulation developments over the course of the task and included the application of Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD)- based tools to perform HPC simulations of a realistically sized domain representative of an actual coal field located in Utah. • CO2 storage. In order to help determine the amount of CO2 that can be sequestered in a coal formation that has undergone UCTT, adsorption isotherms were performed on coals treated to 325, 450, and 600°C with slow heating rates. Raw material was sourced from the Sufco (Utah), Carlinville (Illinois), and North Antelope (Wyoming) mines. The study indicated that adsorptive capacity for the coals increased with treatment temperature and that coals treated to 325°C showed less or similar capacity to the untreated coals.