It is a very interesting question you raise. What can be learned from Range Fuels and from CHOREN
I have visited both companies trying to help them feeding biomass into their reactors and spend quit a lot of brain work on both. One common thing is that both did not answer simpel normal questions. I did not understand the energy balance on Range and the Mass balance on CHOREN. And questions was ansvered by business development people. I remember a meeting at CHOREN where I asked about the low melting ash components - where did they go and how did it work? The business development manager started a long specialtive explanation about how they washed it out of the char - after it had been taken out of the pressurised enclosure - and then the char was put back into the process with out these troublesome ash components. My business development manager had $$$ in his eyes - imagine all the feeders we could sell - (we counted 7 pressurised in and outlet on each gasifier!!!!) if we could just focus on this problem instead of discussing ash and other irrelevant issues. At the site visit 2 of their engineers told me that they had tried to draw the attention of the management to this problem with little succes. My imagination tells my that you can identify 50 similar issues at CHOREN. Similar I had a discussion with a manager at RANGE - he had realised that the complexity could potentially be a problem. He was a former succesfull business man from Apple. I tried to explain him the consequenses of thermal transient in a startup situation when you have square hot geometries. He then explained me that at Range they had invented a refractory steel that could stand 100 degree higher temperatures than the most expensive Haynes cobalt/steel alloy. I congratulated him with this invention and predicted that he would be come a VERY rich man just by this singel invention. I dont think he understood one word of what I said to him. The lesson I have learned is that all projects my full fill 5 rules. 1 First law of thermodynamics - Mass will not be made from nothing and can not dissapear 2 Second law of thermodynamics - No matter what you do you make a loss :-) 3 First law of money - Money will not be made from nothing but can disappear 4 Common sense mut be applied to all elements in the process. 5 You can fool your selves but only others if you pay them their salary. And making projects by consultants - FORGET IT!! Best regards Thomas Koch ______________________________________ Fra: [email protected] [[email protected]] på vegne af [email protected] [[email protected]] Sendt: 9. juli 2011 17:32 Til: [email protected] Emne: Re: [Gasification] What happened at Choren Dear Tom Miles and the list: One thing that should be learned is that when there is a lot of money around, the tendency is to hire a lot of folks and then the pressure is on to burn money fast. I also see "financing issues with start up of commercial plant" to read, too expensive, has technical issues, vis a vis Range Fuels and others. This is a repeat of even the Downdraft system from Grabowski under Syngas co. This was even partially funded in the 80's by a group which had provided funding to Thermogenics and the lead financier called me several years after funding Syngas to say that i was right, it would fail. They decided to not fund Thermogenics because of the lack of PhD's who could argue that their process was better. Not having a degree made my arguments not listened to. The question arises as to what to do with a large staff which initially does engineering work, and then when the design is completed, what are they doing next until the design is completed and operational? This is why to some extent, this work being done by consultants may be better of a business structure. Unfortunately, the financial world relies on degrees for results which paves the way downhill. A multiple PhD in mathematics who was Sandia National Laboratories' lead mathematician, with Stanford and Caltech on his CV, had a saying on his door "A thermometer is not the only thing with degrees and no brains". The more of these large operations to hit the walls, the more difficult the field will be to get serious project financing and move forward. There are others slated to fail in near term from what I have been hearing, high profile supposedly "successful commercial operations". Sincerely, Leland T. "Tom" Taylor President Thermogenics Inc. -----Original Message----- From: Dl <[email protected]> To: Discussion of biomass pyrolysis and gasification <[email protected]> Sent: Fri, Jul 8, 2011 4:43 pm Subject: Re: [Gasification] What happened at Choren http://www.choren.com/en/information-and-press/press-releases/ Going into bankruptcy in Germany. Dan Lacy The best way to compile inaccurate information that no one wants is to make it up. Scott Adams On Jul 8, 2011, at 3:25 PM, "Tom Miles" <[email protected]> wrote: This Google alert abut Choren should be on interest to anyone who has follwoed biomass pyrolysis an dgiasification to syngas. See the Google Alert link below. Tom News1 new result for gasifier What Happened at Choren? Consumer Energy Report The gasifier would be scaled up from the pilot plant scale of 1 MW th to 45 MW th . Shell's Fischer-Tropsch technology was being used in the plant, ... _______________________________________________ Gasification mailing list to Send a Message to the list, use the email address [email protected] to UNSUBSCRIBE or Change your List Settings use the web page http://lists.bioenergylists.org/mailman/listinfo/gasification_lists.bioenergylists.org for more Gasifiers, News and Information see our web site: http://gasifiers.bioenergylists.org/_______________________________________________ Gasification mailing list to Send a Message to the list, use the email address [email protected] to UNSUBSCRIBE or Change your List Settings use the web page http://lists.bioenergylists.org/mailman/listinfo/gasification_lists.bioenergylists.org for more Gasifiers, News and Information see our web site: http://gasifiers.bioenergylists.org/ _______________________________________________ Gasification mailing list to Send a Message to the list, use the email address [email protected] to UNSUBSCRIBE or Change your List Settings use the web page http://lists.bioenergylists.org/mailman/listinfo/gasification_lists.bioenergylists.org for more Gasifiers, News and Information see our web site: http://gasifiers.bioenergylists.org/ _______________________________________________ Gasification mailing list to Send a Message to the list, use the email address [email protected] to UNSUBSCRIBE or Change your List Settings use the web page http://lists.bioenergylists.org/mailman/listinfo/gasification_lists.bioenergylists.org for more Gasifiers, News and Information see our web site: http://gasifiers.bioenergylists.org/
