Brown Coal Research and Development

Victorian Brown Coal I Snapshot of Brown Coal R&D in Victoria I Grants Program I Projects I Victorian Brown Coal Generators

Victorian Government’s Role in Facilitating Innovation

The Victorian Government’s 2002 Innovation Statement “Victorians. Bright Ideas. Brilliant Future.” highlights the importance of science, technology and innovation to Victoria’s future and sets out the Government’s commitment to positioning Victoria as a leading innovation economy.

Victoria enjoys an international reputation for leadership in scientific research and development. The knowledge generated by Victorian R&D – and the conversion of R&D into commercial products, processes and services – is vital for boosting the competitiveness of the State’s economy and delivering significant economic and social benefits to Victorians .

The Victorian Government has adopted the role of ‘strategic investor’ in innovation, developing and funding projects where there is obvious market failure or unknown market opportunity and where there is a significant gap in private sector investment. In addition to funding key industry and research stakeholders, resources have been allocated to improve collaboration where unique strategic opportunities exist. Generally, this investment has occurred at the early stages of the research-to-market ‘continuum’, where technical and market risk remains high.

At the national level, the Commonwealth Government provided $5.4 billion for science and innovation programs in 2003/04. Of this, approximately 80% is allocated to universities and organisations, such as the CSIRO, where the primary focus of the funding is on knowledge generation. A significant proportion of Commonwealth funding underpins the research effort of Victoria’s publicly funded research institutions.

Victorian Brown Coal

Brown coal resources in the Latrobe Valley are amongst the largest in the world, representing 20 per cent of the world’s reserves. They have provided most of the fuel for Victoria's electricity generation industry since the 1920s and are the basis for much of the State's industrial development.

Brown coal is used to produce around 85% of the electricity used by Victoria each year. The low-cost electricity produced using brown coal is a major component of the competitive advantage that has seen Victoria established as Australia’s leading manufacturing state. It is, however, also a major contributor to greenhouse gas emissions.

To ensure supply security, continued competitiveness of Victorian industry, employment growth and greenhouse abatement, Victoria’s next major tranche of base load needs to be generated from plants that guarantee lower emissions from new generation.

The Latrobe Valley coal seams are up to 330 m thick and are made up of 4 main seams, separated by thin sand and clay beds.

The total brown coal resource in the Latrobe Valley is estimated to be 394,000 million tonnes, with an estimated useable brown coal reserve of 50,000 million tonnes.

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Brown Coal Research and Development – a Snapshot in Victoria

The overwhelming majority of Research and Development (R&D) into Victoria's major energy resource has been towards power generation and, in recent years, towards efficient water removal technologies.Other R&D on brown coal has resulted in low-volume, high-value commercialised applications for brown coal.

• Low-Volume applications
• High-Volume applications
• Other Brown-Coal products

• Briquettes represent the second-largest application, currently, for brown coal around the world. They are produced by drying of the as-mined coal and then forming of the dried brown coal into individual briquettes that are compacted under pressure to form a dense product that has energy content comparable to many higher rank coals.

• Carbonised products (or chars) are made from briquettes for uses ranging from the production of char briquettes to metallurgical reductants to a feedstock for fabrication of activated carbons. These products are all high-value applications of brown coal, but their volumes are low (a few hundred thousand tonnes per year, worldwide). Of these products, that with perhaps the highest growth potential world-wide, is activated carbons and absorbents for use in environmental industries for the treatment/clean-up of liquids and gases.

• Organic agricultural/horticultural products are another small-scale, high value application of as-mined brown coal. Here it is being increasingly viewed as a valuable raw material to produce a range of products such as soil conditioners, liquid humic acid for hydroponic farming and a range of organic fertilisers.

• Coal-to-liquids - a major investment by a consortium of Japanese companies in the 1980s demonstrated that hydrogenation of Latrobe Valley brown coal was technically feasible.

• Syngas-based products - brown coals are particularly suited to gasification because of their high reactivity and have the potential to be used to produce methanol, urea, ammonia, propylene or transport fuels.

• Minerals processing - the high reactivity of brown coal makes it attractive as a reductant in minerals processing operations, and brown coal is currently utilised in the form of char for this purpose.

• Export-quality brown coal - historically brown coal has not been exported because of transport costs per unit of energy and the safety issues around the fuel (i.e., spontaneous combustion concerns). The low-cost production of a dense, easily-handled and safe form of dry brown coal will open up specialist export opportunities

• Combustion by-products such as waste heat and fly-ash
• Water extracted during drying processes

• $12 million Brown Coal Research Program for Latrobe Valley

• $2.06m to Cooperative Research Centre for Greenhouse Gas Technologies (CO2CRC) to test pre-combustion carbon dioxide (CO2) capture technologies in power generation. The grant is part of a project to reduce the cost of current pre-combustion CO2 capture technologies and look at other techniques likely to prove cheaper in the long term. The research will involve CO2CRC, HRL Developments, Process Group, Innovative Carbon Technologies and Monash and Melbourne universities.

• $2.5m to Loy Yang Power and CO2CRC to research technology options in post-combustion capture of CO2 from Loy Yang A and Hazelwood power stations. Post-combustion capture is potentially the most practical and a cheaper option for existing and future brown coal power stations. The research will be undertaken by Loy Yang Power, CO2CRC, CSIRO, International Power’s Hazelwood Power Station, Process Group, Innovative Carbon Technologies and Melbourne and Monash universities.

• $1.3m to Monash University to look at oxy-fuel combustion, which has the potential to reduce brown coal fired power stations to near-zero emissions and capture emissions for underground storage. The research involves International Power Hazelwood and Loy Yang B, Loy Yang Power, TRUenergy and HRL and has the potential to convert water in brown coal to a quality suitable for use in power generation.

• $550,000 to CSIRO Minerals to model dried brown coal power furnaces that will help assess the future operational requirements of brown coal fired power stations. The research involves International Power Hazelwood and Loy Yang B, Loy Yang Power and Monash University.

• $390,000 to HRL Technology to develop a boiler optimisation package to improve combustion efficiency and reduce CO2 emissions from the combustion of brown coal. The research involves TRUenergy, International Power Hazelwood and Loy Yang B, Loy Yang Power and Swinburne University.

• $550,000 to Monash University to investigate the use of lignite to increase the effectiveness of separation of sludge solid from municipal water treatment plants, pulp and paper mills using conventional separation equipment. The research involves Keith Engineering (Sales), Australian Pump and Paper Institute, Gippsland Water, KCA Millicent and GHD.

• $300,000 to Monash University to investigate the technical feasibility of conceptual advanced gasification technology. The research involves International Power Hazelwood and Loy Yang B, Loy Yang Power and TRUenergy.

• $525,000 to HRL Technology to improve the knowledge of advanced materials for power plants, thus avoiding risks to plant or personnel. The research involves TRUenergy, International Power Hazelwood and Loy Yang B, Loy Yang Power and Monash University.

• $450,000 to HRL Technology to look at advanced flaw detection in welds, pitting in tubes and turbine blades in the Latrobe Valley. The research involves TRUenergy, International Power Hazelwood and Loy Yang B, Loy Yang Power and Monash University.

• $800,000 to AquEx to look at dewatering brown coal under pressure and to assist in developing a commercial dewatering method. The research involves International Power and the Australian Sustainable Industry Research Centre.

• Clean Coal Grants Help Shape Latrobe Valley Future (external link)