Sindicatum has a specialized, international coal mining engineering team that works with project owners to enhance gas drainage performance and mine safety.
Remote performance and CDM monitoring systems enable Sindicatum’s engineers to detect and forestall problems to ensure optimum project delivery. Sindicatum has co-developed the “Formac” remote monitoring and CDM data management and archiving system which is an integral part of Sindicatum’s project operation and management function. It is also fundamental to compliance monitoring under the respective projects’ monitoring plan. Included within the Formac system are the algorithms required to calculate emission reduction values from the raw data. Data from the gas recovery and utilization and abatement equipment sensors, such as gas composition, pressure, temperature and flow, flare temperature and power generation are recorded and logged at predefined intervals typically of 30 or 60 seconds. The outputs and visual display are available remotely to management and engineers showing real time performance and operational conditions. The system can be adapted to trigger alarms to staff in the event of equipment shutdown, malfunction, or under-performance.
Through the application of innovative technologies alongside more conventional approaches, Sindicatum has developed a strategy which we believe can lead to significantly greater reductions. We believe our holistic approach of combining coal mine methane capture and use, along with abatement of Ventilation Air Methane (“VAM”) will ultimately facilitate coal mining with near-zero methane emissions.
We believe that we are unique in having a specialized, international coal mining engineering team that works with project owners to enhance gas drainage performance and mine safety. In addition, remote performance and CDM monitoring systems enable our engineers to detect and forestall problems to ensure optimum project delivery. Technical support is continued during project implementation and for the full duration of the project. Training and technology transfer is provided as part of the support programme.
We identify and introduce new technology where existing equipment and practices are limiting gas capture performance. By doing so, we assist operational underground coal mines to optimize energy recovery and minimize emissions through a 4-pronged approach:
- Maximizing gas drainage capture – assisting coal mines to enhance methane drainage capture, flow and quality which raises safety standards in the underground environment while increasing the opportunity for increased energy utilization;
- Optimizing utilization of the drained gas – including usage of waste heat from power generation which can be used for space and mine air heating in winter;
- Thermal destruction of surplus drained methane by flaring – we have taken the lead in developing and introducing integrated methane utilization and abatement technology to China (i.e. in pioneering the combination of methane destruction through both flaring and power generation);
Abatement of the low concentration methane from exhausted ventilation air – using a catalytic or a thermal oxidation process. While VAM projects are at a nascent stage of market development and constitute a new and very unconventional application for the mining industry, VAM emissions account for 70-80% of the methane emitted by coal mining. Sindicatum has therefore acquired the global rights (excluding Japan) until 2019 to use the “CH4MIN” catalytic oxidation technology that has been developed by CANMET, a Canadian government energy research organization that is part of Natural Resources Canada (“NRCan”). We undertook full-scale testing of this technology during 2008 and 2009 at a location in the US to facilitate the design of a commercial regenerative catalytic oxidizer the first one of which will be installed at Duerping coal mine, Shanxi province, China.