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Clean Coal: Eureka! Coal-fired elation in Bells Corners

Neil Reynolds
Friday, May 11, 2007

OTTAWA — In mid-January, Natural Resources Minister Gary Lunn, with Environment Minister John Baird at his side, spoke - discreetly - of an imminent scientific breakthrough in clean-coal technology.

In comments at the federal government's secluded Canmet (Canada Centre for Mineral and Energy Technology) research compound in Ottawa's suburban Bells Corners, Mr. Lunn said scientists had discovered, right there in the nation's enclave of world-class laboratories, "exciting promise in clean coal."

He spoke of zero pollution. He spoke of the capture and storage of greenhouse gases. He spoke of breakthroughs. Without naming it, he spoke of an advanced clean-coal technology code-named TIPS - for Thermo-energy Integrated Power System. It's a technology that promises to turn coal, the most abundant fossil fuel in the world, from pure black to pure green.

Invented and patented by Alex Fassbender, a U.S. chemical engineer, TIPS makes coal behave itself - by keeping it under extreme, constant pressure. It strips coal of virtually 100 per cent of pollutants. It emits nothing into the atmosphere. It captures coal's heavier-than-air greenhouse gas emissions essentially for free. It uses off-the-shelf turbines to produce electricity, reducing capital costs and delivering power at a bargain price. And it does all this in plants one-tenth the size of conventional coal-fired plants - now gargantuan structures that rival high-rise apartment buildings in scale.

Says Bruce Clements, the Canmet research scientist who has spent months evaluating the TIPS technology: "This is huge. This is a step change."

It was Mr. Fassbender who discovered and patented the technology - but it was Mr. Clements who discovered Mr. Fassbender. Five years ago, intrigued by the technology but skeptical of it, Mr. Clements began - independently, on his own initiative - to check out the science. He tried first to disprove the technological advances asserted by Mr. Fassbender. He couldn't. A year ago, the Canadian scientist and the American inventor formally joined forces. Mr. Clements had found an intellectual challenge. Mr. Fassbender had found one of the few labs in the world capable of doing the precise testing that his technology needed. Following the model for public-private research that Natural Resources Canada favours, they became partners.

Mr. Clements and his small team (engineers Richard Pomalis and Ligang Zheng) finished their test of TIPS just before Christmas last year. As they approached the end, they found themselves growing more and more confident of the technology.

"[The TIPS capabilities] had never been quantified before," Mr. Clements says. "Therefore, the significance had been underestimated." The researchers identified advances that Mr. Fassbender himself had never claimed - nor imagined.

"We started to get excited," Mr. Clements says. "We hadn't realized what we were sitting on." It was only at the very last moment that they realized that a TIPS furnace could be physically downsized - making it fit industrial sites in large cities.

Piling into a car, the three men drove to Boston - taking eight hours but saving travel money - where they joined Mr. Fassbender for a day-long "final exam" of their research conclusions. The examiners were scientists with international reputations; one of them - Gregory McRae, a professor of chemical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology - was a member of the MIT science panel that published in February a definitive study of the use of coal in the 21st century. ("Coal use will increase under any foreseeable scenario," the panel determined, "because it is cheap and it is abundant.") The scientists interrogated the TIPS researchers for a day - then gave them a thumbs-up pass.

Mr. Clements' report on TIPS technology runs 200 pages. He and his partner are ready to start the next phase - the construction in Bells Corners of a prototype TIPS furnace. If approved, the model plant will cost $12-million, a pittance in alternative-energy research; final judgment will take four years. But it's the only way to prove or disprove the technology.

The entire process takes place under extreme pressure - as much as 3,700 pounds per square inch. (Pressure in a car tire is 30 psi.) It's this pressure that produces, as Mr. Fassbender calls it, "the magic." Think of a CO{-2} cartridge for an air gun, Mr. Fassbender says. Then think of a garbage can. The cartridge holds the same volume of gas as the garbage can. Call this process the micro-management of coal.

Mr. Clements is a native of Ottawa who used to play piano and sax in his own band. Mr. Fassbender is a chemical engineer who began his career at a U.S. national research lab near Seattle. He is now executive vice-president of ThermoEnergy Corp., based in the Massachusetts town of Hudson.

The two men await Mr. Lunn's funding decision - whether to confirm TIPS as a Canadian-based technology or to let "the magic," its potential to change the world now technically confirmed, slip away.

Wednesday: The technology of TIPS

Full Story:
http://globeinvestor.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20070511.wrreynolds11/GIStory/

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