SECRETARY Sindh Coal Authority Aijaz Ali Khan said in Mithi last week that the first phase of underground coal gasification project to generate electricity from Thar coal which was scheduled to begin in March will now be launched next month.
In November, it was announced that the test-burn will take place earlier than March after Dr Samar Mubarakmand met President Zardari who showed interest in its early execution. However, nothing has happened so far.
On March 15, the managing director of the UCG project, Mohammad Bashir explained why the delay has occurred. He said that an order was placed to import compressors from Japan but the equipment has not arrived yet, perhaps because of the problems caused by recent massive quake and tsunami.
In 2005, an attempt to produce gas from coal was also made by Sui Northern Gas Pipelines Ltd. It sought proposals from international consultancy firms to carry out a pre-feasibility study for setting up a coal gasification plant at Bhakkar.
The SNGPL planned to use coal from nearby sources for gasification. It said since the gas reserves of Sui and other major fields were likely to be exhausted in the next five to 10 years, there was an urgent need to tap new avenues of gas availability. What happened next is not known.
Since 1992 when Thar coal deposits were discovered and presence of an extraordinarily huge quantity announced, many dates for the launch of the project that promised dramatic changes in the economy and in fact make Pakistan another Saudi Arabia have been set, bypassed and refixed.
Which body will control this God-given treasure was decided, cancelled and changed several times.
On December 27, Dr Mubarakmand, the renowned nuclear scientist, a member of the Planning Commission and now also head of UCG project, said that the deposit had the potential to transform Pakistan into a self-sufficient and energy-surplus country in a short span of eight to 10 years.
He said, Thar project can “produce 50,000MW of electricity for decades and 100 million barrels of oil for 500 years.” And on April 4, no less than Shahbaz Sharif’s son, Hamza, an MNA, said that the value of our coal reserves is around $30trillion, 185 times more than the GDP of Pakistan.
The worth of coal reserves, he said, is higher than combined oil reserves of Saudi Arabia and Iran. Experts from China and Germany, the world leaders in UCG technology, were reported to be “pessimistic about the chances of success in Thar.”
It appears that two main problems stand in the way of gasifying coal in Thar: the type of soil lying on top of the coal seam and the relative shallowness at which the seam is to be found.
The fear is that if the technology is put to use on an industrial scale, the land may implode as the coal is burnt away underneath, an obviously untenable situation. Nowhere in the world has a project on the scale between 10,000MW to 50,000MW of electricity per year ever been attempted. This is not to suggest that Dr Mubarakmand cannot deliver. Keeping in view the technical know-how he possesses and the kind of role he played in developing the nuclear programme, he can turn the Thar coal project into a harbinger of much-hoped self-sufficiency era.
Another but elder nuclear scientist, Dr Abdul Qadeer Khan disagrees with some of the indicators being repeatedly used to show the magnitude of the coal reserves in Tharparkar region. In an article on January 24, 2011, he said that there were claims that Thar has 185 billion tons of coal reserves, while reliable estimates put this figure at only “three billion tons” and that too of low grade.
He further noted, “I can say with authority that we do not have experienced and qualified engineers to handle such a complicated, giant project, to say nothing of my having had to cope with those who indulge in self-projection though they don’t have fundamental knowledge or qualifications in the required field.” Whether it is the Thar coal project or the Reko Diq project, he said that the country needs young, experienced, highly committed engineers with the proper educational background. The solution of the Thar project in his view is that it should be given to Shenhua group of China, who were earlier approached for this project but not given the contract because “no commission was involved”. The Chinese, he said, are our trusted friends and they will be more than accommodating. Thar is one of those projects that Pakistanis cannot handle.
Coal gasification is an old idea. Until half a century ago, Britain ran on coal gas produced at local gas works.
What is new is cutting out the coal mining stage and doing the gasification underground. Its history can be traced back to 1868, when Sir William Siemens published the first paper proposing underground coal gasification.
Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleyev further developed Siemens’ idea over the next couple of decades. In 1912 in Durham (UK), Nobel Prize winner Sir William Ramsay led the first experimental work on UCG. He was unable to complete it before the beginning of the World War I and was ultimately abandoned.
Soviet scientists pioneered the large-scale application of UCG under Lenin and Stalin, who both supported the technology for it eliminated hard mining labour. A national research and development programme began in 1928 and by the 1950s, the USSR had achieved commercial scale production of syngas (synthetic gas).
The UCG site at Angren, Uzbekistan was the most effective of these projects, and continues to produce up to 18 billion cubic feet of syngas per year.
From the early 19th century until the 1940s almost all fuel gas distributed for residential or commercial use in the United States was produced by the gasification process of coal or coke.
Later, the availability of low-cost natural gas reduced the market for UCG gas. There are no operating UCG facilities in the US at present, and no major company has committed to UCG research.
In recent times, UCG projects have been carried out in China, Australia and South Africa. China has completed 16 projects since 1991, making it the largest UCG programme in the world.