TY - JOUR A1 - Nakaten, Natalie Christine A1 - Kempka, Thomas T1 - Techno-Economic Comparison of Onshore and Offshore Underground Coal Gasification End-Product Competitiveness JF - Energies N2 - Underground coal gasification (UCG) enables utilization of coal reserves, currently not economically exploitable due to complex geological boundary conditions. Hereby, UCG produces a high-calorific synthesis gas that can be used for generation of electricity, fuels, and chemical feedstock. The present study aims to identify economically-competitive, site-specific end-use options for onshore- and offshore-produced UCG synthesis gas, taking into account the capture and storage (CCS) and/or utilization (CCU) of produced CO2. Modeling results show that boundary conditions favoring electricity, methanol, and ammonia production expose low costs for air separation, low compression power requirements, and appropriate shares of H-2/N-2. Hereby, a gasification agent ratio of more than 30% oxygen by volume is not favorable from the economic and CO2 mitigation viewpoints. Compared to the costs of an offshore platform with its technical equipment, offshore drilling costs are marginal. Thus, uncertainties related to parameters influenced by drilling costs are negligible. In summary, techno-economic process modeling results reveal that air-blown gasification scenarios are the most cost-effective ones, while offshore UCG-CCS/CCU scenarios are up to 1.7 times more expensive than the related onshore processes. Hereby, all investigated onshore scenarios except from ammonia production under the assumed worst-case conditions are competitive on the European market. KW - underground coal gasification (UCG) KW - economics KW - cost of electricity (COE) KW - techno-economic model KW - methanol KW - ammonia KW - carbon capture and storage (CCS) KW - carbon capture and utilization (CCU) KW - electricity generation KW - process simulation Y1 - 2019 U6 - https://doi.org/10.3390/en12173252 SN - 1996-1073 VL - 12 IS - 17 PB - MDPI CY - Basel ER -