Anglo has plans to challenge Sasol

Johannesburg - Anglo American chief executive designate Cynthia Carroll's bullishness on coal and keenness to exploit energy opportunities fit in with Anglo's new pursuit of fuel from coal.Anglo is studying Sasol-type coal-to-liquids (CTL) joint venture with Shell, the global petroleum company. Current Anglo American chief Tony Trahar has already described Anglo's downstream CTL opportunities as "exciting".At Alcan, one of the world's biggest aluminium producers, Carroll, who takes over from Trahar on March 1, had to work hand-in-hand with energy generators, most of them coal based.Trahar said that Anglo's first step in CTL was to study the large $4 billion (R39 billion) to $5 billion Monash energy project in Australia, which required the moving of large volumes of coal and the very attractive environmental storage of carbon dioxide in empty oil wells offshore in the Bass Strait."This is a new fringe project for both us and Shell and we are going to take time developing it," said Trahar.He said new sources of energy were in growing demand the world over, with China indicating its intention to add value to its own vast coal resources and Anglo itself investigating a large coal-to-chemicals complex in that county's Xiwan province.These downstream energy-coal activities, though still a fledgling part of Anglo's coal business, presented "very exciting" coal mining opportunities around the world, though they would take time to come to fruition.

Anglo had entered the CTL business with energy major Shell Gas & Power and had formed an alliance in the field of conversion of coal to clean liquid energy dominated by petrochemicals group Sasol.Trahar said the alliance would explore technologies that produced liquid fuels from non-conventional sources, such as coal, and had incorporated the Monash project into the alliance.The burning of synthesis gas, generated by the gasification of coal, emitted significantly lower quantities of greenhouse gases and pollutants than traditional coal burning. It was seen by many as the cleanest way to harness the energy potential of coal, which was still the world's dominant fuel source.Anglo and Shell aimed to take selective equity positions in coal conversion projects to maximise the benefits from the emerging field of clean coal energy. These projects will use Anglo's coal reserves and combine its mining capabilities with Shell's technologies.The objective is to extract, gasify and convert coal into chemicals, hydrogen, power and liquid hydrocarbons.Shell Gas & Power executive director Linda Cook said that the alliance further advanced the progress that Shell had made in developing clean coal energy.She also described clean coal energy and the potential opportunities that it would unlock as exciting.
A full version of this article appears in the latest edition of Creamer Media's Mining Weekly