The Shenhua coal direct liquefaction plant

Recent Advances in Direct Coal Liquefaction

“…Nevertheless, due to technical confidentiality, some operating data, especially for small-scale industrial installations are not available from the published literature. As shown in Table 1, China has built a commercial-scale DCL plant (3,000 t/d capacity) in Shenhua (Inner Mongolia, China), and it is the first commercial DCL plant built in the world since World War II [8,10]. The development of the Shenhua DCL process has undergone two stages, from a Bench Scale Unit (BSU) to a pilot-scale Process Development Unit (PDU).…”

“…The operating parameters and experiment results of four major DCL processes are shown in Table 2 [3][4][5][6][7][8][9]. These new DCL processes inherit the advantages of the old processes, but advance the technologies by new catalysts and reactors as well as operating conditions.…”

“…Coal can also be liquefied directly into liquid fuels through direct coal liquefaction (DCL) processes at around 450-500 °C under 15-30 MPa H 2 in a suitable solvent with appropriate catalysts [2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9]. In many processes, the solvent used can facilitate the heat and mass transfer during chemical reactions, and function as a hydrogen donor by shuttling hydrogen from the gas phase to the coal.…”

“…Based on the above mentioned two processes, i.e., the Bergius process and the Pott-Bioche solvent dissolving process, a large variety of new DCL processes, such as the SRC-I and SRC-II (Solvent Refined Coal) processes have been developed in many countries, as summarized in Table 1 [3][4][5][6][7][8][9]. The operating parameters and experiment results of four major DCL processes are shown in Table 2 [3][4][5][6][7][8][9].…”

Analysis and comparison of inertinite-derived adsorbent with conventional adsorbents

“…This is comparable to conversion rates reported for other coal-to-liquid processes in the literature. However, the UT Arlington process has several advantages over competitive processes, including (1) the use of lower-grade coal (lignite) as a feedstock, whereas many other processes require higher-grade feedstocks (subbituminous or bituminous coal) (Comolli et al, 1990(Comolli et al, , 1999Redlich et al, 1999;Sasaki et al, 2000;Valente and Cronauer, 2005), which are more expensive; (2) liquefaction process conditions that are milder than those reported for competitive processes (Billo et al, 2010). Although a pilot plant is still in the planning stages, the cost of crude oil produced via the UT Arlington process is anticipated to be about half that of conventional West Texas crude, based on cost estimates from laboratory data.…”