SinoCoking Coal and Coke Chemical Industries, Inc. announced new developments in the construction and financing of its underground facility for the production of clean-burning syngas. First, SinoCoking confirmed that the initial phase of construction on the project will commence this month and, when completed in March of next year, produce 60,000 cubic meters of syngas per hour. At this facility, to be constructed near the company's four mines in Henan Province, SinoCoking will employ the patented underground coal gasification (UCG) and carbon capture and storage (CCS) processes developed and jointly owned by its two technology partners -- the Institute of Process Engineering of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the North China Institute of Science and Technology -- both of which on September 9 granted SCOK the exclusive right to commercialize both processes.

In the UCG phase of the process, said Dr. Li, two wells will be drilled into the mine's coal seam, with one well being used for injection of agents to ignite and gasify the coal in the seam, and the other well used to bring the resulting gases to the surface. These gases include carbon monoxide, hydrogen, methane, carbon dioxide and steam, the latter two of which are subsequently removed, leaving a syngas of carbon monoxide, hydrogen and methane usable as a clean-burning fuel or as an intermediary product that may be converted to fertilizers, solvents and assorted synthetic materials.