Dr Dermot Roddy’s enthusiasm for his company’s ambitious plans in the North East is compelling. His answers have the competence and patience of someone who has not only run oil refineries and chemical plants, but also been Professor of Energy at Newcastle University. 

Now, as chief technology officer for Five-Quarter, a start-up that promises to revolutionise the energy market and change the way we live, he needs to be bulletproof.

Five-Quarter plans to tap into vast resources of coal under the North Sea to produce gas for electricity and chemicals for industry. The spin-out from Newcastle University plans to do this by drilling down onshore and then horizontally out into coal seams under the sea bed. It will then use its proprietary underground coal gasification (UCG) process, “Deep Gas Winning”, to gasify the coal in-situ several kilometres underground. The syngas will be collected and processed, the carbon dioxide removed and the feedstock and fuel sold to nearby chemical plants and power stations. 

The company has been awarded a licence to operate in a 400 sq km area initally, from the mouth of the River Tyne up to the Scottish border. Earlier this year Five-Quarter won support from the Treasury’s infrastructure guarantee fund to help build the £1.2bn processing plant for the syngas. Drilling for the first well is planned to start before the end of this year, confirms Roddy, heralding the start of a “pre-commercial phase” for the company. This isn’t a North Sea pipe dream, this will be happening.

According to Five-Quarter, the first stretch of licensed area near to the coast of Northumberland could hold up to 2bn tonnes of coal. The first project aims to gasify 3 million tonnes of that coal a year, enough to produce about 90PJ of energy annually, equivalent to a 1.5GW power station, or 3 million tonnes of chemical feedstock that could be used, for example to produce transport fuels.

However, that is just a “small part” of the potential coal resources, says Roddy. Studies by Five-Quarter show there could be between 3 and 23 trillion tonnes of coal under the North Sea. “You can do the sums,” he says. “You might not be able to convert 100% of the coal, but even with a pessimistic assumption it’s enough to provide power for centuries.”

The first Deep Gas Winning drilling installations will be onshore. A single production well and several injection wells placed in series, hundreds of metres apart along the coastline. The wells will move along the shore to gasify different parts of coal seams near the shore.

The UCG process Five-Quarter proposes using is essentially the same process first carried out in 1912 by Sir William Ramsay in County Durham. Oxygen and steam are injected into narrow boreholes and react with coal deep underground. The gasification process takes place under high temperatures and pressures underground to produce a syngas that varies in composition according to location and depth, but is predominantly made up of hydrogen, carbon monoxide, methane and carbon dioxide. 

UCG has been developed and demonstrated around the world many times in the last hundred years, but has never been used at commercial scale, mainly for cost and reliability reasons. Easier and cheaper fossil fuel resources have been available. However, these are nearly exhausted and monitoring and drilling technology has been developed by the oil and gas industry to exploit harder to reach resources.

Five-Quarter’s Deep Gas Winning technique is at the heart of its proposal - a new underground coal gasification process that uses these monitoring and drilling technologies to make UCG affordable and effective for the first time. Roddy is protective of the details but it involves using “very precise” horizontal drilling to create multiple narrow channels in the coal seams to create an “underground architecture” similar to that used in traditional coal mining.

“There’s a strong element of innovation with Deep Gas Winning. We have an affordable way of doing it.” says Roddy. “Using multiple injection wells to one production well and multiple channels minimises drilling. We won’t have to rebuild everything every time and it can be scaled up easier. The technique would make money on its own anywhere it’s used for UCG. ”

UCG has never been done in the UK, and never at sea. However, Roddy is bullish that the reasons for this are economic and the technical challenges are surmountable. “It makes precious little difference that there is 50 metres of water on top of thousands of metres of rock for our purposes,” he says.

“What really tips the balance in our favour is that we know how to liberate methane from shale deposits without fracking. That is alongside the methane we already have from the cracks within the coal bed and from chemically changing the coal. We can scale up to a point where power stations and chemical plants are interested in what we produce. That’s what made us realise the interesting government-funded trial we were thinking about doing could be a privately funded industry project.”

As well as the drilling rigs, there will be an onshore gas processing plant. This could be housed on as little as 30 hectares of land and will take three to four years to build, says Roddy. Within the gas processing is where a further difference from previous experimental UCG endeavours arises. Five-Quarter’s business plans include producing hydrogen, carbon monoxide and methane to sell to local chemical plants at Teesside, an extra revenue stream alongside energy generation.

Aside from the UCG process, the other major engineering challenge is carbon capture. The liberation of trillions of tonnes of fossil fuels from under the sea bed may light the fire of North Eastern industrialists, but it’s not going to win any fans among environmentalists and legislators who want to reduce CO₂ emissions to stop climate change. Five-Quarter is therefore adamantly committed to ensuring the gas processing plant has “full carbon capture from day one of operation”.

However, similarly to UCG, carbon capture and storage (CCS) is far from a well-established industrial process. An integration of both - a UCG-CCS facility, seems a brave undertaking indeed. “There is nothing above ground which hasn’t been built somewhere else before, it’s home territory for me.” says Roddy. “Pre-combustion carbon capture technology is the closest analogue. It won’t be identical, our process will produce more methane, but the design won’t be radically different and our plant will develop as the process matures.

“The first plant will be over engineered to work, but the second, third and fourth will be cheaper. When it comes to storage, the Sleipner project has been storing CO₂ under the sea for years. Then, with UCG there is a plant running in Uzbekistan. The Chinchilla UCG project in Australia ran for eight years. The US spent billions in the 1970s and 1980s developing the technology.”

Where Roddy draws the line is CO₂ storage. Theoretically, it would be possible for Five-Quarter to pump the extracted CO₂ back into the voids it has created under the sea bed during the gasification process. But this is considered a step too far for investors. The company has decided to use the CO₂ transport and storage arrangements that other industrial operators and power generators in the region will eventually use.

However, the prospect of creating a closed loop of injection, extraction then reinjection, is tantalising. It fits with future plans the company has to move the drilling operations offshore. “Otherwise you could only use coal close to depleted oil and gas fields or existing aquifers. A self-contained solution is a more compelling and flexible proposition that could be used the world over,” says Roddy.

It’s a cruel lesson that if something is too good to be true, it usually is. Equally, optimism-bias for large projects is a well-recognised psychological failing. At this stage, Five-Quarter’s plans are just that, exciting and different plans. But they are not outrageously different. Rather they are the kind of iterative innovations you would expect from the grounded engineers, academics and business people that have founded the company.

Nevertheless, convincing academics and journalists the risks can be mitigated is one thing, but convincing investors and producing results to time and budget is an entirely different pressure. Drilling before the end of this year for the company’s “pre-commercial phase” will go a way to convincing people it means business. But at the moment the brave task remains to turn a lot of academic theory into a commercially viable industrial reality. The extent to which that is achievable remains to be seen.