Small Footprint Dry Solids Pump for Low-Cost Power from Gasification

The dry solids pump (DSP) is a revolutionary feed system that promises to reduce plant costs and footprint. It has the potential to significantly improve the efficiency of feeding coal, petcoke, and/or biomass into high-pressure gasifiers, thereby enabling higher efficiency of gasification plants, while simultaneously reducing feed system capital, maintenance, and operating costs. Also, the ability to feed low rank coal into high-pressure gasifiers with neither the need to add water to form slurry, nor the use of lock hoppers, is expected to make these coals more commercially competitive.

By replacing the complicated sequencing required by lockhoppers with the continuous and accurate feed rate of the DSP technology, capital costs of a commercial scale unit are expected to be reduced by 20% compared to conventional systems. This is principally due to the associated reduction in system size and complexity. It also has the ability to inject a wide range of particle size distributions as well as multiple particle sizes for a given injection process.

Testing by GTI supported by the U.S. Department of Energy National Energy Technology Laboratory (DOE/NETL) has defined the commercial target for pump size, assess adequate safety factors, validate pump models, and provide data for a final benefits analysis. A techno-economic analysis has shown that a dry solids feeder offers significant economic benefits to integrated gasification combined cycle systems (IGCC) and coal-to-liquids process applications. In addition, GTI has proven technology, at commercial-scale, that allows coal flow at high-pressure to be split for accurate delivery into multiple points. The splitter system uses a GTI proprietary ultra-dense pneumatic conveying system that has been developed to minimize gas requirements for transport.

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