ENLARGE DIAGRAM

Blue Fuel™ production

Blue Fuel™ can be produced using a variety of feedstocks and processes, as the flowchart below illustrates.

Today, world production of Blue Fuel™ is primarily by means of the gasification of coal or natural gas to produce synthesis gas (syngas, composed of hydrogen and carbon monoxide), followed by methanol dehydration, a two-step process (indirect synthesis) that starts with methanol synthesis and ends with Blue Fuel™ synthesis. This is the conventional approach.

The same process can be conducted using organic waste or biomass (such as black liquor, a waste product in pulp and paper production) as feedstocks, both of which are starting to be used because of their environmental attributes. Alternatively, from syngas derived from either of these four feedstocks, Blue Fuel™ can be produced through direct synthesis, a procedure that, by eliminating the intermediate methanol synthesis stage, promises efficiency advantages and cost benefits, but which has yet to be implemented on a large scale. Efforts to commercialize direct synthesis are ongoing.

As mentioned on the homepage, Blue Fuel™ Energy will produce Blue Fuel™ using electricity generated with the best sources of renewable raw energy available, be it wind, hydro, geothermal, solar, tidal or wave, or from renewable biomass and organic waste. In the near future, hydro and wind will be the obvious sources of energy for generating the electricity required to produce hydrogen, the key element of Blue Fuel™. BC has enviable hydro and wind resources, and the technology for converting hydro and wind into electricity is off-the-shelf. What's more, these resources are virtually side-by-side in northern BC, an extraordinary convergence—energy synergy at its finest. Hydro and wind are highly complementary: hydro can firm up the wind when the wind is light, and wind can firm up the hydro when water levels are down, or simply to conserve water. BC Hydro's Bennett Dam and its giant reservoir, Williston Lake, BC's largest lake, can function as a giant battery, regularly charged by the wind.

Electrolysis

At the heart of Blue Fuel™ Energy's production process is electrolysis, for which electricity and water are required.The graphic below illustrates the electrolysis process: the decomposition of water (H2O) into oxygen (O2) and hydrogen gas (H2) by passing an electric current through it.

Blue Fuel™ Energy will use an extensive arrays of electrolyzers, provided by StatoilHydro in Norway, to conduct electrolysis. A project in Iceland to generate electricity from geothermal energy to produce Blue Fuel™ will also use StatoilHydro electrolyzers.

As the Blue Fuel™ production flowchart above indicates, the hydrogen produced through electrolysis is then combined, at an adjacent plant, with waste carbon dioxide from natural gas processing facilities or other industrial operations, to produce methanol. Natural gas processing facilities, for example, purify natural gas by removing from it various substances, including the acid gases hydrogen sulfide (H2S) and carbon dioxide. Up to now natural gas processors and other industrial plant operators have considered CO2 a waste by-product and simply released it into the atmosphere, contributing to global warming. The alternatives are to sequester it underground or, as Blue Fuel™ Energy will do, to recycle it. At a natural gas processing plant, this starts with its extraction, along with H2S, from natural gas (sour gas) using amine solutions. The CO2 and H2S solution is regenerated and the liberated CO2 and H2S is treated in the Claus process to produce solid sulfur. The gas generated in the process contains CO2 and traces of H2S and sulfur dioxide (SO2). Since H2S is very toxic, this gas mixture is burned in air to convert the residual H2S to SO2. The vented gas contains air, CO2 (~10%), and traces of SO2. In order to capture pure CO2, the gas from the Claus process is treated to remove the sulfur-based impurities.

Extraction of CO2 from flue gases at a natural gas processing plant

At a plant in the same compound as the electrolysis plant and the methanol plant, Blue Fuel™ will be created from methanol by passing it through a copper-coated zeolite catalyst. This process has an energy efficiency rating of over 95%, a rating matched at the methanol plant during the conversion of hydrogen and CO2 into methanol. The efficiency of the electrolysis process is somewhat lower at around 70%.