Traditionally, producing natural gas from carbon feedstock has been an inefficient and capital intensive process. Conventional gasification technologies produce synthesis gas (or syngas), a combination of hydrogen and carbon monoxide which has a significantly lower energy value than natural gas. Syngas also cannot be transported in natural gas pipelines, and is not compatible with existing power facilities, industrial plants, and commercial/residential heating systems. Although syngas can be further upgraded into methane, it currently can only be done through the addition of multiple, complex, higher cost and lower efficiency processing plants. The result is a far more expensive end product.

In contrast, GreatPoint Energy has developed a proprietary process for directly producing natural gas utilizing a catalyst and a reactor design which together enable multiple chemical reactions to occur in a single vessel at relatively low temperatures.

The bluegas™ technology is a classic example of process intensification, where several operations are combined to improve overall efficiency, reduce maintenance and equipment requirements, and lower capital costs.

Hydromethanation has five key advantages over conventional gasification technologies, because of which GreatPoint Energy believes it has fundamentally shifted the economics of gasification:

			Product fungibility — Hydromethanation makes only high-quality, pipeline-ready natural gas that can be transported through existing infrastructure;
			Process simplicity — The need for downstream chemical processes is greatly reduced, eliminating major capital expenditure and complexity, since the hydromethanation process is designed to handle multiple major reactions within the bluegas™ reactor;
			Enhanced efficiency — Efficiency is significantly higher than conventional processes due to the direct capture and utilization of the heat generated inside the bluegas™ reactor. Competing processes lose significant amounts of heat through external downstream processing steps plants which cannot operate in heat balance;
			Reduced cost — Hydromethanation occurs at much lower temperatures than conventional non-catalytic processes, resulting in lower cost construction materials and reduced maintenance costs in the reactor, gas cooling and heat recovery systems; and
			Superior environmental profile — Unlike conventional gasification, for which carbon capture adds significant additional cost, energy loss, and complexity, hydromethanation intrinsically captures nearly all of the CO2 and other impurities found in coal and petroleum coke, and converts them into valuable chemical grade products and high purity CO2, which GreatPoint Energy plans to market for enhanced oil recovery (“EOR”) or provide for geological sequestration. Sulfur, nitrogen, mineral matter, mercury and trace metals are all removed using industry standard gas clean-up processes and either safely disposed of or sold as raw materials for other products.

Unlike many conventional processes, hydromethanation is well suited for some of the lowest cost feedstock such as Powder River Basin (“PRB”) coal at the minemouth and petroleum coke, a byproduct produced in the bitumen upgrading process from the Canadian oil sands. Biomass also represents an attractive feedstock as a co-feed with coal or petroleum coke, or on its own. The result is a technology which GreatPoint Energy believes will provide dramatically improved economics and an environmentally sound alternative to the use of coal and drilled or imported natural gas.