Company Interview Excerpt Synthesis Energy Systems, Inc. - Robert Rigdon
Full article published: 11/01/2010
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TWST: Please begin with a brief overview of the company, including some key highlights from your history and a summary of your three primary projects. Mr. Rigdon: Just in terms of a brief overview of the company, Synthesis Energy is a company that has leading-edge coal and biomass gasification technology that has the potential to unlock value particularly in the very low-rank, low-quality and therefore low-cost coals that exist in many of the regions around the world. We have launched our company in China and have built our first commercial plant there that has now been operating for almost three years. In addition, about a little over a year ago, we initiated our investment in our second, much larger project in China, in Henan Province, called our YIMA project. Thirdly, we have been working on projects, very large opportunities in the Mongolia region of China, where we can bring our technology to actually access lignite coals, which are indigenous to that area of China, and unlock the value in those coals by processing them and creating synthetic natural gas. These are very large-scale projects that require very clean and very efficient technology because of the shear size and scale of the projects. So that is just a very brief overview of what we have done and how we launched our company in China. Since we launched the company in China, we have also begun to grow our global footprint, both in the U.S. as well as in some of the developing countries, such as India and some areas in Eurasia, Indonesia and Australia, as well as we have a lot of opportunities there that have approached - other companies and partners have approached us to also benefit from our technology. TWST: What is the product output of each of the three projects? Mr. Rigdon: Actually, it varies. We take the coal, and we convert it to a very clean synthetic gas called syngas. Syngas is a mixture of carbon monoxide, hydrogen and methane. We convert that with downstream processes into many other different types of products. In our first three projects, for example, our very first project, we sell the syngas to our next-door neighbor, Hai Hua, who converts the syngas to methanol. In our second project, we are partners with YIMA in a project much, much larger than the first one, where we actually own 25% of the share of the project that actually completes the conversion of our syngas to methanol. This project is also considering the possibility of converting the syngas to glycol as well, which is a very heavily used commodity. We are invested there to make methanol, and we're also working with them to consider the prospect of making glycol as well, which, as I was saying, is a commodity chemical heavily used in the textile industry there in China. In Inner Mongolia, part of China, what we are focused on today is actually converting our syngas that we manufacture from the lignite coals into synthetic natural gas, and that's called SNG in our industry. Those are three different projects that we have in China, but gasification technology - and ours is a gasification technology that makes syngas, and syngas can be used to make a variety of products from fuels, such as diesel and gasoline, to power, electricity, synthetic natural gas, ammonia, fertilizers and as fuels in the steel industry - so it is a very versatile product.
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