EARLY ENTRANCE CO-PRODUCTION PLANT--DECENTRALIZED GASIFICATION COGENERATION TRANSPORTATION FUELS AND STEAM FROM AVAILABLE FEEDSTOCKS

Waste Processors Management, Inc. (WMPI), along with its subcontractors Texaco Power & Gasification (now ChevronTexaco), SASOL Technology Ltd., and Nexant Inc. entered into a Cooperative Agreement DE-FC26-00NT40693 with the U. S. Department of Energy (DOE), National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL) to assess the technoeconomic viability of building an Early Entrance Co-Production Plant (EECP) in the United States to produce ultra clean Fischer-Tropsch (FT) transportation fuels with either power or steam as the major co-product. The EECP design includes recovery and gasification of low-cost coal waste (culm) from physical coal cleaning operations and will assess blends of the culm with coal or petroleum coke. The project has three phases. Phase I is the concept definition and engineering feasibility study to identify areas of technical, environmental and financial risk. Phase II is an experimental testing program designed to validate the coal waste mixture gasification performance. Phase III updates the original EECP design based on results from Phase II, to prepare a preliminary engineering design package and financial plan for obtaining private funding to build a 5,000 barrel per day (BPD) coal gasification/liquefaction plant next to an existing co-generation plant in Gilberton, Schuylkill County, Pennsylvania. The current report covers the period performance from January 1, 2003 through March 31, 2003. Phase I Task 6 activities of Preliminary Site Analysis were documented and reported as a separate Topical Report on February 2003. Most of the other technical activities were on hold pending on DOE's announcement of the Clean Coal Power Initiative (CCPI) awards. WMPI was awarded one of the CCPI projects in late January 2003 to engineer, construct and operate a first-of-kind gasification/liquefaction facility in the U.S. as a continued effort for the current WMPI EECP engineering feasibility study. Since then, project technical activities were focused on: (1) planning/revising the existing EECP work scope for transition into CCPI, and (2) ''jump starting'' all environmentally related work in pursue of NEPA and PA DEP permitting approval