The federal agency explained its newest venture this way to the House Appropriations subcommittee in March 1974:
“The program for reactivation of facilities at Cresap, W. Va., will modify the existing pilot plant to produce clean low-sulfur fuel oil from coal for power generation and industrial use.”
That synthetic fuel venture fared no better than Project Gasoline, and by 1975 the Energy Research and Development Administration (ERDA) was using the elaborate Cresap facility, according to a report submitted to Congress, “to determine the reliability of conventional equipment such as valves, pumps, etc., all of which are equipment common to most liquefaction processes.”
A year later, in the spring of 1976, ERDA’s assistant administrator for fossil energy, Philip C. White, told a House Appropriations subcommittee that his office was continuing to test equipment at Cresap – where the federal government’s total investment had passed the $62 million mark.
White explained his office’s thinking on Cresap thusly:
“One of the things we are trying to do in this program is to do enough auxiliary work so that the reliability of these plants when we build them will be significantly high. . .This is sufficiently important, we feel, to be worth a pretty good part of our budget, and Cresap is aimed in that direction.”
White then had this exchange with Rep. Joseph M. McDade ®-Pa.):
McDade – “You are confident your continuing large investment in that plant is something you want to do; is that right?”
White – “Yes.”
McDade – “To try to show how to make these plants work in a reliable fashion?”
White – “It is a test location where we can do some of the testing of work done in other areas. We have a number of other contracts, small ones, on valves, on separate devices, and so forth, aimed at improving their performance. When we get the results of those contracts we will put them in an operating mode at Cresap and be darn sure they work.”
Asked by the subcommittee chairman, Rep. Sidney Yates (D-Ill.), what, after such large expenditures, the government would accomplish, White replied:
“Saved the country from going into catastrophic lack of energy, I hope. That is what we are trying to do.”
Today, the Cresap plant, located along the Ohio River about 19 miles south of Wheeling, is abandoned. The costly equipment for converting coal into synthetic fuels, spread over acres of land, sits idle. The buildings and laboratories are boarded up.
The plant that failed to develop the promised commercial process for turning coal into 13-cent-a-gallon gasoline also failed to develop the promised commercial process for converting coal to low-sulfur fuel oil, and gave up on conducting equipment tests once deemed essential to the successful operation of other synthetic fuel facilities.
In 1973, while the Cresap plant was resting between experiments, engineering design work was started for the construction of a process development unit – a miniature pilot plant – at the Battelle Memorial Institute’s engineering station at West Jefferson, Ohio, just outside of Columbus.
The pilot plant was designed to test the agglomerating burner gasification process, converting 25 tons of coal a day into 1 million cubic feet of synthetic natural gas.
In the spring of 1973, the Office of Coal Research told a House Appropriations subcommittee that the Battelle research work was “important to all other gasification projects.”
A year later, in another report on coal conversion research, the Interior Department described the Battelle project as “vital to coal gasification efforts,” saying its “potential contribution to technological and economic feasibility is critical.”
The plant started up in 1976, and in the spring of 1978 the Energy Department expressed satisfaction with experimental runs in a report to a Senate Appropriations subcommittee.
Shortly thereafter, the “vital” pilot plant was shut down. A spokeswoman for Battelle now says only that the Energy Department “decided to discontinue the plant.” The results of the tests, she said, are unknown.
An Energy Department official was more forthright. Asked why the plant, once described as “critical” to the government’s coal gasification efforts, had closed, he replied:
“It (the agglomerating burner process) just didn’t look commercially attractive. . .It didn’t look like it was competitive with other things, like the Lurgi or the Hygas.”
So how goes the government’s work on Hygas, yet another process for turning coal into synthetic natural gas?
During an appearance before a House Appropriations subcommittee in the spring of 1971, George Fumich Jr., director of the office of Coal Research, gave a cheerfully optimistic report on the government’s progress in coal gasification research in general, and the Hygas project in particular.
“If we could accelerate the Office of Coal Research program,” Fumich declared, “we believe that a realistic assumption is we could produce about 3 trillion cubic feet of gas from coal annually by 1980. . .”
Fumich pointed out that his office already had “one pilot program built in Chicago and the mission there is to make high-quality synthetic pipeline gas from coal.”
In an accompanying report to the House subcommittee, the Office of Coal Research noted that “plant operating runs may be completed in fiscal year 1973, and a commercial plant design is expected to be available by about fiscal year 1975 or shortly thereafter.”
The pilot plant, designed to convert 75 tons of coal a day into synthetic natural gas using the Hygas technology, had been dedicated in October 1970. It was operated under a federal contract by the developer of the Hygas process, the Institute of Gas Technology, an affiliate of the Illinois Institute of Technology that conducts research for the American Gas Association, gas utilities and gas companies.
By May 1978, four years after the tests were to have been completed, three years after the project was to have yielded sufficient data for the design of a commercial plant, the Hygas pilot plant was still not fully operational.
Testifying before a Senate Appropriations subcommittee, Fumich, by then ERDA’s director for fossil energy, allowed that all was not going well at the Chicago plant, but insisted that “the Hygas project looks like it’s one of our more promising technologies.”
He continued:
“Much of the information is based on assumptions and we’ve had some problems trying to get that pilot plant into operation.”
“We had an analysis made not too long ago that stated that we’ll have to do some modification there and run that plant some more before we get the type of data that we need to really firm up an estimate.”
The Hygas pilot plant, which the Energy Department said offered a better option than the shuttered agglomerating burner process pilot plant in Ohio, was shut down last year, the tests on coal gasification ended.
But some modification work is now under way, and the pilot plant will begin a new round of gasification tests – this time using peat rather than coal.
When asked how much synthetic natural gas was produced by the 10-year-old Hygas pilot plant – in which the federal government poured more than $50 million – a spokesman for the Institute of Gas Technology told the Inquirer: “Oh, I don’t really know. It depends on how the plant is operated, and being an experimental plant, it’s operated in different modes from time to time.”
The institute official was, however, more certain about what happened to the synthetic natural gas produced by coal. Said he:
“The gas itself is all flared.”
Why wasn’t the gas put to some use, rather than burned off?
“We talked to the Peoples Gas Co. here in Chicago as to whether they’d be interested in taking the gas from the plant and putting it in the distribution system,” he said.
But the plan was dropped, he added, because “the problems that arose from that became so unwieldy that we decided it would probably be better to just go ahead and flare it.”
What is the future of the Hygas project that in 1971 federal officials had said would be one of the technologies producing 3 trillion cubic feet of gas by 1980?
An Inquirer reporter questioned an Energy Department official about possible plans for the construction of a Hygas demonstration plant – another stage in the testing process that generally precedes a commercial facility.
Said the federal energy official:
“We don’t know. You know, we don’t have any plans for any more demonstration plants. And whether any of these new technologies will be demonstrated is a good guess.”
“So there aren’t any plans at present (for a Hygas demonstration plant)?” the reporter asked.
“No, not for Hygas,” the federal energy official said.
The United States, of course, is not producing the 3 trillion cubic feet of synthetic natural gas from coal projected by federal energy officials back in 1971. Indeed, it is not producing any gas from coal.
And after the expenditure of more than $50 million in federal funds, not only is there no commercial Hygas plant, as had been promised for the late 1970s, but there are no plans for even a demonstration Hygas plant.
One final footnote on the now silent Hygas plant:
It sits alongside another abandoned pilot plant constructed and operated by the Institute of Gas Technology during the 1970s.
Built to test another technology called the steam iron process, the plant was designed to turn 24 tons of coal a day into synthetic natural gas.
“It’s currently mothballed and the future status of it is uncertain,” concluded an official of the Institute of Gas Technology.
“It’s one of the various alternatives which in the Department of Energy’s planning for the development (of synthetic fuel demonstration projects) hasn’t worked out,” he added.
The federal government’s investment in the twin pilot plants to date: more than $75 million.
At the same time the Office of Coal Research was financing construction of the Chicago pilot plants operated by the Institute of Gas Technology, it also was underwriting work on a synthetic fuel plant in Rapid City, S.D.
The project dated to June 1964, when the Office of Coal Research awarded another contract to Consolidation Coal Co., which was already building its government-funded coal-to-gasoline pilot plant at Cresap, W. Va., to develop another coal conversion technology.
The second Consolidation process, the “CO2 Acceptor Process,” was designed to turn lignite – a brown, wood-like sub-bituminous coal – into synthetic natural gas.
Consolidation subcontracted the building and operation of the Rapid City plant to Stearns-Roger Corp., a Denver-based engineering and construction company.
In the spring of 1972, eight years after the first contract had been awarded to Consolidation, the Office of Coal Research advised a House Appropriations subcommittee that “the CO2 Acceptor Process bench-scale research has been successfully completed and a pilot plant has been constructed. . . .” The report continued:
“The pilot plant completed in February 1972 is undergoing ‘shakedown’ operations. Technical information and data based on operations will begin to accumulate during 1972. Assuming successful operations, a commercial plant producing pipeline gas from lignite could be in operation early in the 1980s.”
Two years later, in March 1974, S. William Gouse Jr., acting director of the Office of Coal Research, told a House Appropriations subcommittee that the Rapid City pilot plant was “showing substantial progress towards operation, according to design. . .The whole plant is on stream.” He added:
“What these pilot plants are showing us now is that the chemical process is functioning as we thought it would, producing gas as we thought it would and producing the right amounts from the coal.”
Today, the multimillion-dollar gasification plant is closed, the equipment to convert lignite into synthetic natural gas in mothballs. A spokesman for the Department of Energy now says, “The test program was successfully completed.”
But the tests indicated, he said, that “it was not economically feasible to use that process to make gas.” There will be no CO2 Acceptor Process in the early 1980s – as federal officials had once predicted – or even the late 1980s.
The record of the federal government and the Consolidation Coal Co., which became a subsidiary of Continental Oil Co. in 1965, stands at 0-3 in the testing of synthetic fuel technologies at two different pilot plants built at a cost to taxpayers of about $100 million.
While the three processes worked technically, in that the plants turned lignite or coal into synthetic natural gas, gasoline or fuel oil, the development of the technologies has failed to lead to the construction of a full-scale commercial plant.
In 1962, two years before the federal government began picking up the tab for Consolidation’s CO2 Acceptor Process work, the Office of Coal Research awarded a contract to the FMC Corp. to develop another coal conversion technology.
Called “COED” for Char-Oil-Energy-Development, this process was designed to turn coal into liquid petroleum products, char and gases. Char is essentially pure carbon and can be burned to generate electricity.
In February 1972, 10 years after the initial contract to FMC, the Office of Coal Research gave a report to a House Appropriations subcommittee stating that a “25-ton-per-day pilot plant is completed” at Princeton, N.J. The report noted:
“The effort is directed to produce data and variable studies to establish design criteria for a commercial operation. The plant is operating fully.”
During a congressional hearing, Hollis M. Dole, an assistant secretary of the interior for mining resources, described the Princeton plant – built and operated at government expense – as “probably the most successful of our pilot programs.”
The following year, in March 1973, George R. Hill, director of the Office of Coal Research, told the same House subcommittee that the Princeton plant was “successful.” He declared:
“It has met all the design characteristics. The next phase of the program is now moving ahead with industry picking up the ball. Any company could have done it. A consortium of companies has decided to move ahead with the next phase at no expense to the government so it will get into the marketplace quite fast.”
Another report issued in 1974 by the Office of Coal Research called the technology then being used at the Princeton pilot plant the country’s “most advanced coal-to-clean liquid fuel conversion technique.”
Today, the Princeton pilot synthetic fuel plant does not exist. The equipment was long ago dismantled. An FMC spokesman says the project “was very successful in that we were able to convert coal into high-grade synthetic crude.” But, he added, “the economics did not looks too promising at that time.”
There will be no commercial plant using the COED process in the 1980s, notwithstanding the assurances of federal officials seven years ago that the process “will get into the marketplace quite fast.”
While operations at the pilot synthetic fuel plant in Princeton were winding down in 1975, the Energy Research and Development Administration was starting up another pilot plant, this one in Bruceton, Pa., to evaluate the Synthane process for converting coal to pipeline-quality synthetic natural gas.
The new pilot plant was designed to turn out 72 tons of coal a day into enough synthetic gas to heat 2,100 homes during an especially cold winter, using a process developed by government researchers in laboratory work that started in 1961.
Federal energy officials gave a promising account of Synthane technology to a House Appropriations subcommittee in the spring of 1975, noting that “the simplicity of the process. . . results in good operability and reliability characteristics.”
Three years later, in response to questions from a Senate Appropriations subcommittee in May 1978, the Energy Department said the Bruceton plant “was successfully operated in fiscal 1977 using Montana sub-bituminous coal. Sufficient data was obtained to establish economic competitiveness of the. . .process with the most currently available processes.”
Today the Bruceton pilot synthetic fuel plant is shut down, the equipment in mothballs. An Energy Department official says that “we decided, given the results of the testing, and what we could see in the future, and the cost of completing it, not to go ahead. We got some useful data out of it, but we didn’t think it was worth going any further.”
After a government investment approaching $100 million in the development of the coal gasification technology, the Energy Department now has abandoned the process. There will be no commercial synthetic fuel plant using the Synthane process in the 1980s.
