Putting Technology into Practice

In 2000, Commonwealth Edison Co., a Chicago-based electric utility, made a $25 million grant to SIUC to support clean-coal projects. The university established the Clean Coal Review Board (CCRB) to leverage additional funding and support innovative industry projects with the grant. The goal: getting the best cutting-edge clean-coal technologies in use in Illinois.

The CCRB bridges university research and industry practice. "We're involved in co-funding some stages of project feasibility and project engineering that are critical to commercialization," says SIUC Coal Research Center director John Mead.

The CCRB has to date invested about $13 million in several gasification projects around the state that will use Illinois coal. Companies are:

• Building a gasification facility adjacent to a new coal mine in Williamson County, for production of synthetic natural gas and syngas.
• Converting a fertilizer production plant in East Dubuque from natural gas to coal as a feedstock to produce both fertilizer and ultra-clean diesel fuel.
• Conducting a feasibility analysis for a new gasification power plant near Taylorville that would also produce chemicals such as sulfur and liquid fuels such as methanol.
• Developing a large-scale gasification plant in Fayette County to produce liquid fuels from coal.
• Demonstrating a small power-generating unit at SIUC's Illinois Coal Development Park that can gasify various carbon-based fuels, including "waste" coal and agricultural wastes (see Micro-Scale Power).

Other CCRB grants are funding advanced coal-combustion systems to reduce smokestack emissions, as well as advanced coal-mining and coal-processing techniques to recover more clean, usable coal.

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