The Australian State of Victoria is home to 430 billion tonnes of brown coal, and at 28 percent of the Earth's brown coal reserves, is one of the largest deposits of brown coal in the world. Of this amount in Victoria, 40 billion tonnes is minable. Also known as lignite, Victoria's enormous world-class reserve of energy is also amongst the world's youngest and cleanest lignite, aged between 15 and 35 million years old. By comparison, the highest grade of coking coal is aged between 500 and 800 million years.
While technologies are already in place to process Victoria's energy resource deposits, Melbourne-based Ignite Energy Resources (IER), a merger between Ignite Energy and Victoria Coal Resources, has produced a cutting-edge patent-pending new technology to fundamentally change the way brown coal is conventionally processed. Baird Maritime was present at an exclusive interview with IER's Executive Director, John White, to learn about this new development.
As Dr White explained, Victoria's lignite is very young, pristine coal. Victoria's lignite is low in ash, sulphur, heavy metals or salt. It is also very high in water content. "It still has, in effect, some of the prehistoric swamp water when the forests laid down the trees and vegetation and animal material," explained Dr White.
Victoria's brown coal is some of the wettest in the world, containing between 50 to 65 percent water. This means that it burns inefficiently at power stations such as those in the LaTrobe Valley. The conventional means of processing lignite is also detrimental to the environment due to the large amount of carbon dioxide emitted during the burning process.
"Ignite Energy believes brown coal should not be used that way, and that you should find new technologies to process it to make high value products with low carbon dioxide emissions," said Dr White.
In the Gippsland Basin, IER has rights to Exploration Licence EL 4416 with around 18 billion tonnes of lignite resources measured, indicated and inferred; and IER's patent-pending technology is set to change the way brown coal is processed. IER currently has a pilot plant in Somersby, north of Sydney, the site of the creation of IER's unique thermal hydrolysis technology.
"We wished to find clean and new low-emission, low-polluting ways to convert the wet brown coal into high value products," explained Dr White, "We have identified two technologies which we think are world-leading and breakthrough."
"One of them is to convert it into bio-organic fertiliser. The second one is, through the Ignite technology, converting the coal into low sulphur oils and coking coal-equivalent high value, dry coal," said Dr White. This is done by utilising the high water content as the agent of change and transformation into oil and coking coal.
IER uses water at supercritical temperatures and pressures to selectively depolymerise lignite. And unlike other conventional technologies, this process does not result in the wholescale destruction of the polymers. Furthermore, this process emits only one-tenth the amount of carbon dioxide when compared with other conventional processes, is more economically viable and can process brown coal on a smaller scale, ensuring less capital cost of entry.
"We've industrialised nature's own process," said Dr White. "What we are doing is replicating [nature] with our brown coal in a pressure vessel that we heat in our process plant. And instead of it taking several hundred million years, as it does in nature, we do it in a few minutes."
IER plans to open a new processing plant in the Gippsland area in Victoria later this year. Each commercial processing unit, or "module", will have the potential to process 30,000 to 50,000 tonnes of coal per year. As IER raises more capital, more and more of these modules will be replicated, increasing the capacity and ability to process lignite. In terms of output, half a million tonnes of as-mined lignite produces half a million barrels of oil and a quarter of a tonne of coking-coal. Each barrel contains 44 gallons (170 litres) of oil, enough to fill up the average car three or four times. This roughly translates to half a million tonnes of lignite being capable of powering all the cars in Australia for a week or so.
IER's long term plans will see the export of liquid and solid products from Ignite Energy. The ports under consideration for this export activity are Barry Point in South Gippsland and the Port of Hastings in Western Port.
The Barry Point area has been used for many years as the marine supply base for the offshore Gippsland Basin oilrigs. Currently, the Barry Point terminal can handle ships up to 5,000 tonnes in capacity. IER plans to develop a larger marine terminal around Barry Point to handle much larger ships.
As for the deep water Port of Hastings, the Victorian Government is planning significant upgrades to its infrastructure to allow bulk material exports. However, the Victorian Government would need to develop appropriate rail infrastructure to allow transportation of the bulk products from the IER projects from South Gippsland to Hastings. Meanwhile, liquid exports would require pipeline infrastructure.
The other technology that IER plans to apply to brown coal recognises it for what it is—young, pristine, organic material. IER has teamed up with a farm services company which has been developing a granulated fertiliser over the past 15 years in which lignite is the main ingredient. Through Ignite Energy's collaboration with LawrieCo, it produces a bio-organic fertiliser to rebuild the natural carbon in the soil structure and reintroduce the necessary biology. This makes the soil come alive again and farm land using this fertiliser will experience no surface run off.
Chemical fertilisers, on the other hand, destroy the carbon and microbiology that occurs naturally in the soil. LawrieCo's bio-organic fertiliser is designed to increase soil carbon content, which in turn, will also encourage plants to process carbon dioxide through the natural process of photosynthesis. Through using a bio-organic, carbon-based fertiliser that puts carbon back where it naturally occurs, it only takes a one percent increase in soil carbon over the 500 million hectares of agricultural / grazing farmlands in Australia to remove around 50 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide. This represents around 100 years of Australia's total greenhouse emissions, the companies say.
With IER's cleaner technology and ability to utilise soil and plants in a "positive sequestration of carbon dioxide," Dr White said that the company would ensure Australia had a sort of "breathing space" in which to develop other types of technology, including clean coal via carbon dioxide geo-sequestration, renewable energy and perhaps even nuclear energy.
"It's a transitory mechanism," said Dr White. "I call it a carbon bridge."