[Gasification] What happened at Choren

Sat Jul 9 12:53:40 CDT 2011

It is a very interesting question you raise.

What can be learned from Range Fuels and from CHOREN

I have visited both companies trying to help them feeding biomass into their reactors and spend quit a lot of brain work on both.

One common thing is that both did not answer simpel normal questions. 

I did not understand the energy balance on Range and the Mass balance on CHOREN. 

And questions was ansvered by business development people. 

I remember a meeting at CHOREN where I asked about the low melting ash components - where did they go and how did it work? 
The business development manager started a long specialtive explanation about how they washed it out of the char - after it had been taken out of the pressurised enclosure - and then the char was put back into the process with out these troublesome ash components. 
My business development manager had $$$ in his eyes - imagine all the feeders we could sell - (we counted 7 pressurised in and outlet on each gasifier!!!!)  if we could just focus on this problem instead of discussing ash and other irrelevant issues. 
At the site visit 2 of their engineers told me that they had tried to draw the attention of the management to this problem with little succes. 
My imagination tells my that you can identify 50 similar issues at CHOREN.

Similar I had a discussion with a manager at RANGE - he had realised that the complexity could potentially be a problem. He was a former succesfull business man from Apple. 
I tried to explain him the consequenses of thermal transient in a startup situation when you have square hot geometries. He then explained me that at Range they had invented a refractory steel that could stand 100 degree higher temperatures than the most expensive Haynes cobalt/steel alloy. I congratulated him with this invention and predicted that he would be come a VERY rich man just by this singel invention.
I dont think he understood one word of what I said to him.  

The lesson I have learned is that all projects my full fill 5 rules.
1 First law of thermodynamics - Mass will not be made from nothing and can not dissapear
2 Second law of thermodynamics - No matter what you do you make a loss :-) 
3 First law of money - Money will not be made from nothing but can disappear
4 Common sense mut be applied to all elements in the process.
5 You can fool your selves but only others if you pay them their salary. 

And making projects by consultants - FORGET IT!!

Best regards

Thomas Koch 

______________________________________
Fra: gasification-bounces at lists.bioenergylists.org [gasification-bounces at lists.bioenergylists.org] på vegne af linvent at aol.com [linvent at aol.com]
Sendt: 9. juli 2011 17:32
Til: gasification at lists.bioenergylists.org
Emne: Re: [Gasification] What happened at Choren

Dear Tom Miles and the list:
      One thing that should be learned is that when there is a lot of
money around, the tendency is to hire a lot of folks and then the
pressure is on to burn money fast. I also see "financing issues with
start up of commercial plant" to read, too expensive, has technical
issues, vis a vis Range Fuels and others. This is a repeat of even the
Downdraft system from Grabowski under Syngas co. This was even
partially funded in the 80's by a group which had provided funding to
Thermogenics and the lead financier called me several years after
funding Syngas to say that i was right, it would fail. They decided to
not fund Thermogenics because of the lack of PhD's who could argue that
their process was better. Not having a degree made my arguments not
listened to.
      The question arises as to what to do with a large staff which
initially does engineering work, and then when the design is completed,
what are they doing next until the design is completed and operational?
This is why to some extent, this work being done by consultants may be
better of a business structure.
      Unfortunately, the financial world relies on degrees for results
which paves the way downhill. A multiple PhD in mathematics who was
Sandia National Laboratories' lead mathematician, with Stanford and
Caltech on his CV, had a saying on his door "A thermometer is not the
only thing with degrees and no brains".
      The more of these large operations to hit the walls, the more
difficult the field will be to get serious project financing and move
forward. There are others slated to fail in near term from what I have
been hearing, high profile supposedly "successful commercial
operations".
Sincerely,
Leland T. "Tom" Taylor
President
Thermogenics Inc.
-----Original Message-----
From: Dl <d0xunt at gmail.com>
To: Discussion of biomass pyrolysis and gasification
<gasification at lists.bioenergylists.org>
Sent: Fri, Jul 8, 2011 4:43 pm
Subject: Re: [Gasification] What happened at Choren

http://www.choren.com/en/information-and-press/press-releases/

Going into bankruptcy in Germany.

Dan Lacy

The best way to compile inaccurate information that no one wants is to
make it up.
Scott Adams

On Jul 8, 2011, at 3:25 PM, "Tom Miles" <tmiles at trmiles.com>
wrote:

This Google alert abut Choren should be on interest to anyone who has
follwoed biomass pyrolysis an dgiasification to syngas. See the Google
Alert link below.  Tom     News1 new result for gasifier What Happened
at Choren?
Consumer Energy Report
The gasifier would be scaled up from the pilot plant scale of 1 MW th
to 45 MW th . Shell's Fischer-Tropsch technology was being used in the
plant, ...

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