Cutting carbon through gasification
Almost 200 energy experts will head to The Netherlands later this year for the 10th European gasification Conference: Cutting carbon through gasification. Keynote speakers at the 3-day event, organised by IChemE, include Mike Gibbons OBE, commercial director at Powerfuel Power, the UK company which is installing a 900MW IGCC with carbon capture at the Hatfield pit in South Yorkshire, and Michiel Mak, vice president of gasification and clean coal energy at Shell gas and Power N.V.
IChemE Fellow and chair of the event organising committee, John Griffiths says that the conference will tackle the big energy security issues: “We all want a secure future – governments no less. But as the global economy stabilises, renewed growth will expose an even greater threat to security – the inability of governments to determine how to provide power without risk to the environment.
“There has been so much prolonged dithering that fossil fuels will remain with us for a long time yet. But the open combustion power stations of the past (and mainly of the present) cannot easily satisfy new environmental requirements and new technologies for converting coal to electricity must be used. There are two options – retrofit technologies for existing fleets of power stations or new build technologies using novel concepts. The problem with retrofitting is the 25 to 30% fall in power station output that this procedure will typically cause.
“New build has the freedom to use new technologies like gasification and oxyburn and that’s what we’ll be discussing. The conference will explore the continuation that could be made by biomass resources and will assess the very latest developments in gasification technology, not only for power but also in the refinery and chemical industries. The event will also provide a forum to debate the exciting commercial and political opportunities,” said Griffiths.
The gasification conference takes place in Amsterdam on 4-6 October and the series was first instigated by IChemE’s Energy Conversion Technology Subject Group in 1995. The ECT group was formed to explore the role that chemical engineering can play in energy conversion processes.
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