World economy makes a great affect on our industry. As we know the demand for natural gas and oil rises. This point means that industrial plants and factories will be in need of basic recourses and this is a help for US economy. But under peculiar conditions of the modern market, the companies to meet needs can place relevant goods there.
It is very difficult to balance in such conditions where the USA with five percent of the world population but uses about 30 percent of the energy. Besides, every day the population of the Earth increases and that is why people will need more world natural gas and oil. Such giants as China and India also seek similar to the U.S. resources that are why these goods’ cost will increase.
There are some variants of the solving of this problem, for example, we can use as feed stock – coal. And in comparison with oil it is not so expensive, but while burning coal produces a lot of pollutions such as nitrogen oxide and dioxide. Another variant how to make the dependence of global market on natural gas and oil smaller is the turning of waste into power and heat. But nevertheless the role of coal on the global market will be significant, but its form will be changing. For example, people have used gasification technology in chemical industry for many years. Tampa Electric nearly ten years ago discovered a power plant. It gave possibility to turn coal into a comparatively clean gas. Nevertheless since that plant opened there you can find a lot of gasification plants, but there is no other plant like first one from the United States, because of the price for such type of plants.
Nowadays there we can find some executives utility (that support the gasification), because they undertake a world with carbon to be unavoidable. A document of purpose to study the practicability of constructing a complex gasification of combined cycle was signed by General Electric Company, Bechtel, and Duke/PSI. It was the first plant with such characteristics. In the complex gasification of combined cycle process, coal can be converted to syngas, which is composed most of all from hydrogen and carbon monoxide, which is cleaned, fired and cooled in a gas turbine. After this the gas turbine produces hot discharge.
It should pass through a gas generator to generate exhaust steam to inspire a steam turbine. There by gas and steam turbine-generators the electricity can be produced. The synthesis gas that is made up from smaller quantities of methane and carbon dioxide, hydrogen by volume and about 85% carbon monoxide is produced by it. The proponents of the technology believe that half of coal’s pollutants can be chemically stripped out before combustion.
Nowadays coal gasification and IGCC is one of the hottest topics in the industry. There is the fact that the total cost of the building an IGCC facility is around $1 billion or a little bit more. So some industry experts consider that this technology costs 20% more than a pulverized coal plant. That is why the future of IGCC technology is considered to be dim.