Tom, Tanja, Harrie, Larry, Ron,
I appreciate your comments and contributions. Gasification is hard to let go of once you have worked with it. I started working with gasifiers in 1976. After 38 years you would think that we would have some answers, especially at the small scale. Several industrial heat systems, like the ones that Ron developed, have had service lives of 15-20 years or more. Costs of those industrial gasifiers are similar to industrial boilers of a similar size. One of the selling points of gasification has always been the apparent potential to generate power at less than 15 MWe for a standalone plant or 5 MWe for a cogeneration facility. So why haven’t all of the district heating plants in Europe re-powered with gasifiers in the 250 kWe to 2 MWe scale? As Thomas points out nobody can afford a Gussing or a Babcock-Volund plant. Most recently Nexterra apparently failed to make clean enough gas to run a 2 MWe Jenbacher at the University of British Columbia. In 2012 when we looked at the feasibility of using a gasifier to generate 2 MWe in a town in Alaska we had difficulty getting budget quotes from suppliers. When we did they were 20% higher than an equivalent steam plant. Are small plants any better? They need to be affordable, simple, reliable and maintainable. There are encouraging signs. A project last year allowed me to take a close look at the evolution and development of the small Spanner gasification system. I read inspection reports of installations running in excess of 6,000 hours with some running 8,000 hours per year. Spanner seems to be one of the few companies in biomass that has carried over their habit from supplying another (automotive) industry. They supply wood heating appliances. They seem to have carried their product development and customer service habits to gasification. Burkhardt may be similar. As I think I illustrate correctly in a separate post, the circumstances in Germany seem to favor small scale gasification. You still need to have low cost fuel, low operating costs, and high availability with good technical support. I remember seeing an 85 kWe gasifier being assembled at DTU several years ago. We hope that the new owners of Stirling DK can develop an affordable model coupled with their boilers or a pyrolyzer/gasifier. For all their problems there are many Ankur plants (or clone) in operation. We had difficulty getting solid information on operating history and performance of Ankur units for a recent project in the South Pacific. Similar gasifiers in South Asia are subsidized for the purpose of rural electrification. Some are in seasonal plants like rice milling. Some clones in the 10 kWe range are used at the village level, probably for a few hours per day. Can we afford to use them in developed economies? We keep hoping. I’d like to see some more data from operationally and financially successful gasifiers. Thanks Tom From: Gasification [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Thomas Koch Sent: Thursday, September 18, 2014 6:56 AM To: Discussion of biomass pyrolysis and gasification Subject: Re: [Gasification] Cost and Performance of Small Scale Gasifiers Hi Tanja Thank you for this clarifiying comments. I am sure that some of the datas in the databases are closer to reality that the figures for small scale biomass CHP plants. On the other hand I am also sure that many people was fully aware of the realities in Stirling many years before it collapsed. I had at least 5 serious job applications from technical staff from Stirling in the period from 2009 to 2012 and all knew. But the management did not at all listen !!! Let us get some real data on the table from the palnts Harrie mentioned as potentially successfully. How many hours of operation does a heard in an Ankur gasifier last? What is the charloss? How much maintenance? I have visited at least 10 Ankur gasifiers. I have only seen one in operation. It was on an eco tourist lodge in Sri Lanka. They had to change the heard every 3 weeks. On the same trip I visited a 1 MW TERI gasifier on a teafactory – it had operated for 3 hours before before it exploded. It looked to like they had made very simple and stupid and dangerous mistakes. Mistakes you could MAYBE excuse if 2 years studet makes them om their first experimental gasifier and you really want to teach them think by litteraly exploding the knowledge in to their heads. Fra: Gasification [mailto:[email protected]] På vegne af Tanja Groth Sendt: 18. september 2014 15:17 Til: Discussion of biomass pyrolysis and gasification Emne: Re: [Gasification] Cost and Performance of Small Scale Gasifiers Hi Thomas, As a native Dane living abroad, allow me to respond. I worked for SDK for about 3.5 years, so although I am no engineer (please be gentle with me!) I am an economist with at least a working knowledge of how the Stirling engine/gasification/combined heat and power systems function. Based on other projects I have worked on (before and after SDK), the numbers on the PV system and onshore wind from the Danish energy agency are not that far off, although naturally they are generalized and therefore do not take into account site specifics like availability of qualified support staff to service the products. I have followed all the articles on Stirling on ing.dk, and read most of your commentary about our company. We had 3 plants in Denmark, 2 in Germany, 1 in Italy, 2 in the UK and two engines in Japan. 3 of these were 4-engine plants. All of them were either combined heat and power or combined cooling, heat and power; I believe general practice when calculating LCOE’s is to take the value of heating and cooling (or biochar) into account. All of them were first-of-a-kind commercial plants, each with a different configuration to test what would work best. Cheers from London, Tanja From: Gasification [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Thomas Koch Sent: 18 September 2014 13:31 To: Discussion of biomass pyrolysis and gasification Subject: Re: [Gasification] Cost and Performance of Small Scale Gasifiers Hi Tanja As a native dane i would like to qualify your data a bit. Concerning Stirling – look here – run it through Google translate – it is no where near exaggerated!! http://ing.dk/artikel/stirling-dk-om-vaekstfonden-solgte-et-ufaerdigt-produkt-158574 Concerning operation hours – Stirling had 12000 hours in total with 6 plants assuming average 30 kw = 360000 kWh produced – there was a total investment of approx. 200 mio DKK ~ 25 mio € = 70 € pr KWh Concerning your databases from DEA (ens) – they are political values and their connection to realities are hard to find. Best regards Thomas Koch Fra: Gasification [mailto:[email protected]] På vegne af Tanja Groth Sendt: 18. september 2014 13:32 Til: Discussion of biomass pyrolysis and gasification Emne: Re: [Gasification] Cost and Performance of Small Scale Gasifiers Hi all, Back when Stirling.DK was still running, I did the following comparison of one of our gasification CHP systems against a selection of other RE and natural gas technologies, as seen below; cid:[email protected] These were based on 2012 technical data (for our 200kW gasifier with a 35 kWe Stirling engine, we managed 60% availability a gross electricity efficiency of 15%, before we were forced to throw in the towel). The case was based on Denmark, with applicable subsidies for all the RE technologies, but no taxes on the natural gas (so an indirect subsidy for them as well). Most of the data used is freely available; Techno-economic data per plant here: http://www.ens.dk/en/info/facts-figures/scenarios-analyses-models/technology-data Fuel costs here: http://www.ens.dk/en/info/facts-figures/scenarios-analyses-models/socio-economic-method-analyses Cheers, Tanja Groth [email protected] From: Gasification [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Thomas Koch Sent: 17 September 2014 22:21 To: Discussion of biomass pyrolysis and gasification Subject: Re: [Gasification] Cost and Performance of Small Scale Gasifiers Dear Tom TK energi delivered a 50 KW biomass gasifier to a holiday hotel. It operated approx. 14000 hours in 5 years. The total cost of the electricity produced was in the order of 1,2-1,5 dollars pr. KWh which was approx. 20-30 times higher than the market price. 20 years ago a Martezo gasifier was inatalled in western Denmark. The real figures are not all that easy to get but the rumors told that the electrity price was in the order of 10 dollars pr. KWh. One of the reasons for the very high is that the gasifier only operated for less than 1000 hours before it was scrapped. At conference concerning small scale biomass gasification a young economist presented a study about how much investment support was needed for the Vølund 2 MWel updraft gasifier (that as far as I am aware is the best working small scale gasifier in the world!) . The study concluded that the gasifier needed 146 % of CAPEX in investment support?? Yes the project had to start with money in the bank to cover the losses. Best regards Thomas Koch [email protected] phone + 45 22611047 Fra: Gasification [mailto:[email protected]] På vegne af Tom Miles Sendt: 17. september 2014 22:58 Til: 'Discussion of biomass pyrolysis and gasification' Emne: [Gasification] Cost and Performance of Small Scale Gasifiers Has anyone done a recent analysis of the cost and performance of small scale (<100 kWe, <200 kWe) gasifiers? We have seen several gasifiers on the market in the last several years but it is not clear how long they actually operate during the year (hours/year), how much heat or power (kWh/yr) they produce, what their average load factor is (40% of nameplate?), or what it actually costs or own and operate them. Do we have any data for Borealis/Spanner Re2, Superior Gasification, All Power Labs, Ankur Scientific, Victory Gasworks, CarboConsult, Biosynergi, Community Power Corporation, Thompson Spaven, Planet Green, BETEL (India), 3i Energy Systems, Husk Power, Arbor Electrogen, Volter? What about the next scale of >200kWe<2000kWe? Cogebio, Xylowatt, Biogen, Advanced Gasification Technologies, Evergreen Energy, Guascor, Milena, Proton Power, PRMEnergy, Primenergy, Zeropoint Cleantech. Mothermik, Dall Energy, Babcock Volund, Biomass Engineering, BETEL (India), Diversified Renewable Technology, Synkraft,Xylogas, CleanSTGas, Gussing Renewable Energy,Weiss, Agnion, MEVA, Xylopower, Pyrofoce How many of these systems can document 2,000, 4,000, or 8,000 hours total or per year? What is a typical capacity factor for these systems. Are any of them run in commercial conditions? Thanks Tom T R Miles Technical Consultants Inc. [email protected] www.trmiles.com www.gasifiers.bioenergylists.org
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