Capital Projects

Boulder, Colorado

Power Ecalene Fuels is currently constructing a single tube reactor system in Boulder, CO. This single tube reactor will house a new and novel way of suspending the catalyst. It is anticipated that this system will be very efficient in converting syngas into Ecalene™and will be up and running in May 2008.

Raleigh, North Carolina

Proposed small manufacturing facility

PEFI intends to build a 100 to 500 gallon/day proposed small manufacturing facility in Raleigh, NC. This facility will be integrated with a four ton/day TRI gasifier with the intention to gather data for scale up to a commercial size facility.

Final design and construction of this small plant is expected to take nine to 12 months from funding. The plant will gasify MSW/RDF and is intended to branch out to numerous other types of feedstock during its operations. The overall objective of the facility is to gather data, build P&ID's and develop economics of the entire system.

The design of the proposed demonstration manufacturing facility is very similar to the Air Products/Eastman Chemical Liquid Phase Dimethyl Ether ("DME")/Methanol pilot plant (5,000 gallons/day) that was built at La Porte, Texas. Eastman later built a chemicals-from-coal plant at commercial scale in Kingsport, Tennessee (see Figure 2). This was an 80:1 scale-up in capacity. This plant has operated successfully for over 22 years and is still operating today.

The Air Products plant in La Porte, TX produced about 5,000 gal/day of methanol (89% by weight) and DME (7% by weight) from syngas in a slurry bubble column reactor (very similar to the PECI process) using a mixture of a commercial methanol catalyst and a commercial dehydration catalyst. Several demonstrations were completed from 1991 through 1999 (See Liquid Phase Dimethyl Ether Demonstration in the La Porte Alternative Fuels Development Unit, DOE Topical Report prepared by Air Products and Chemicals Inc., January 2001).

Following the initial pilot scale demonstrations, Air Products and Eastman Chemical collaborated with the U.S. Department of Energy ("DOE") to build a $213 million commercial scale plant in Tennessee to gasify coal and convert the syngas to methanol in a larger slurry reactor. The DOE contributed $92 million to the project. Operations began on April 2, 1997 and nameplate production capacity of 80,000 gallons per day was reached within four days. Production rates exceeding 115% of the design level were achieved within six days. During the 69-month demonstration program, the production unit had an overall availability of 97.5%. (See Commercial Scale Demonstration of the Liquid Phase Methanol Process, DOE Project Fact Sheet (http://www.netl.doe.gov/cctc/ ).