ABOUT US
About Us
MacArthur Energy was formed in 2009 to develop and commercialize cleaner fuels for the presently existing fleet of coal burning plants, which includes about 1,500 separate commercial, industrial, and utility boilers in the US and an estimated 7,000 units worldwide. Together, these plants consume over 6 billion tons of coal per year and provide about 40% of global power.
These plants have been built to combust a relatively inexpensive, abundant, reliable source of heat generating fossil fuel. However, many raw coal fuels contain varying amounts of materials and moisture that either sap the combustion efficiency or, when combusted, emit hazardous substances into the air in both particulate and gaseous form that require post combustion treatment. In addition, the combustion of hydrocarbons generates a huge volume of gases from the combination of carbon and hydrogen with oxygen with the result that for every ton of fuel that could be treated pre-combustion, about 10 tons of off gases must be treated post combustion, thus increasing the size and cost of post combustion treatment facilities.
MacArthur Energy subscribes to the fundamental tenets of engineering that strongly recommend that all materials be cleaned or purified before they are processed and utilized, as is the practice in other hydrocarbon fuel sources. Natural gas must be cleaned up to remove moisture, hydrogen sulfide, carbon dioxide, condensate, and other impurities prior to delivery to a pipeline. Other fuels such as petroleum and uranium are similarly cleaned, upgraded and set to standard fuel values prior to end use.
With coal and biomass, the historic practice has been for the buyer configure a boiler to the fuel to be delivered. The raw fuel is often coal as mined or biomass as gathered and original fuel for which the boiler was designed may have been efficient. However, when original fuel is no longer available or regulations change, there has been little ability to upgrade the fuel for optimum efficiency in the new combustion or emission environment. Consequently, many boilers burning raw coal and biomass have a quantity of unwanted emissions and may be inefficient in converting the energy fuel to power.
MacArthur Energy offers a range of proprietary technologies to enable coal plants to treat the fuel pre-combustion to configure fuel sources that:
- burn efficiently in the present fleet of coal fired boilers;
- better meet local and federal environmental emissions requirements;
- can include biomass to meet renewable source standards; and
- enhance power output efficiencies.
These are the Engineered Coal Fuel Technologies can aid in efficiency and emission management.
MacArthur Energy works to create cleaner, more efficient fuels to better meet emission regulations with lower cost or parasitic loss of energy.
MacArthur Energy works to turn raw biomass from crop residue, sawmill waste, forest thinning, and other vegetable waste into clean solid fuels to produce low cost power.
MacArthur Energy works to redeploy animal waste and excess CO2 in the controlled growth of algae to make clean solid, renewable fuels.