Opportunity Fuels | Niksa Energy Associates

Overview

Modern solid fuel utilization technologies are fed by literally hundreds of different forms of solid fuels. Utility power plants across Asia operate on world traded coals that can come from any of the major coal producing regions worldwide. European power plants supplement their primary sources in Eastern Europe with coals from the USA, South Africa, and South America. Indian power plants supplement native sources with coals from Southeast Asia. Utilities in China, India, and Eastern Europe have widely adopted CFBC technologies that process low-grade fuels and fuel residues that often have more mineral matter than combustibles. Brown coals from Australia, Eastern Europe, and North America have long been burned at their local sources, but are now being seriously evaluated for export into Asian markets. Pet cokes are widely used across the USA, both in co-firing with coal and as a primary gasifier feedstock. And all the industrialized nations and many developing economies are ramping up their mandates to utilize biomass; the fact that native forms are almost exclusively utilized doesn’t simplify the challenges to technology developers who must manage a multitude of diverse forms of raw biomass and sludges.

NEA is the undisputed world leader in the analysis and simulation of fuel quality impacts in solid fuel utilization. NEA’s expertise is based on published model validations in tests with over 300 fuels plus consulting work with over 2000 coals from all geographical regions worldwide, any form of biomass (woods, grasses, agricultural residues, paper), various black liquors, residual petroleum fractions, and any petroleum coke. Various wastes and sewage sludges can usually be assessed. In all of our reaction mechanisms, the proximate and ultimate analyses are the only required sample-specific information, expanded by the fuel concentrations of all trace species of interest (As, B, Br, Cl, Hg, K, Na, P, Se) and a conventional ash chemistry analysis.

Examples of Recent Applications

A Japanese fuel supplier distributes a $500,000 software package that manages all aspects of coal transport, handling, combustion, and emissions for coal-burning utilities. Lab testing had been used to characterize their customers’ coal quality impacts, which is expensive and slow. They replaced two of the five most expensive tests with NEA’s PC Coal Lab^®, which provides the same information in only a few seconds on a PC.

PC Coal Lab^® has already been licensed by companies and universities in the USA, Canada, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, India, the UK, France, Germany, Hungary, and South Africa, and utilized extensively by NEA’s licensees with numerous local solid fuels and world-traded fuels. Learn More.

A Japanese government agency hired NEA to accurately estimate drying times for brown coals in a fluidized steam drying technology. NEA’s drying model explicitly accounts for the three moisture forms – monolayer, multilayer, and bulk – as a basis to predict the distinctive drying behavior and energy requirements of individual low rank coal samples. The mass loadings of the moisture forms are estimated from a database of equilibrium moisture contents that we correlated to parameters derived from a coal’s proximate and ultimate analyses. In accord with data, the predicted drying time is not solely a function of the total moisture content of the coal. One key aspect is whether or not the target moisture level requires removal of any monolayer moisture at all. Coals with little bulk moisture and relatively abundant monolayer moisture will require relatively long drying times simply because monolayer moisture is always released much more slowly than multilayer moisture. Learn More.

An American utility company hired NEA to use detailed chemistry in simulations of their 1.0 MW_t test flame facility to determine the optimal injection configuration for diverse fuels in biomass cofiring. Predicted NO_X emissions were within 30 ppm of the measured values for two biomass forms co-fired at three loadings on four diverse coals with no parameter adjustments whatsoever. Learn More.

A Japanese energy company hired NEA to adapt its FLASHCHAIN^{^®} mechanism for solid fuel devolatilization for applications with petroleum resids. The primary application incorporates the FLASHCHAIN^®-based mechanism for resid thermal cracking with established mechanisms for catalytic hydrothermal treatment, hydrodemetallization, and hydrodesulfurization to predict the impact of resid quality on catalyst deactivation during resid hydrotreatment.