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Natural gas is a well known energy carrier. It is often used for producing heat and power, but can also be applied as a fuel in the transport sector. The production of synthetic natural gas (SNG) from coal or biomass is an interesting opportunity for both exploiting coal and biomass, and for replacing oil products for transportation and other uses. SNG has many important advantages with respect to other synfuels: it can be transported efficiently and cheaply using existing natural gas pipelines and distributing networks, it is an easily convertible feedstock, both in natural-gas combined-cycle power plants and in petrochemical facilities, it can count on a high social acceptance with respect to coal, and it can be stored underground, enabling efficient operation throughout the year independently of a fluctuating demand. Unfortunately, the commercial deployment of technologies for the production of SNG is currently constrained by technical barriers, so that more research is required before extensive applications on the industrial scale can be achieved. An important issue to be addressed is the strong exothermicity of the methane formation reactions, so that conventional fixed-bed catalytic reactors cannot be safely used (Sudiro et al., 2009). Following the 1970s energy crisis much work has been initiated in the US on coal-to-SNG: SNG process technologies and catalysts were developed and tested extensively. But most have been cancelled in the 1980 because of the changing energy picture. One industrial plant has actually been realized in North Dakota, which began operating in July 1984 and today produces more than 54 billion standard cubic feet of synthetic natural gas annually (1.53 billion Nm3/yr). Coal consumption is about 6 million tons each year. The heart of this plant is a building containing 14 gasifiers (www.dakotagas.com). Nowadays, the rise of natural gas prices have created a strong interest in producing SNG from the cheaper and much more abundant coal. A renewed interest in basing more energy consumption on coal and petcoke has resulted in a revival of several older technologies that have been enhanced to improve efficiency and to lower investment cost. Methanation is used as the final syngas purification step in the production of ammonia, but methanation for SNG production is more complex. The main industrial application of methanation has been the removal of CO from H2-rich feed gases in ammonia plants. With 5

Synthetic Natural Gas (SNG) from Coal and Biomass: a Survey of Existing Process Technologies, Open Issues and Perspectives