OREANDA-NEWS. October 31, 2014. SinoCoking Coal & Coke Chemical Industries Inc., Pingdingshan, China, has started up a plant in Henan Province, China, that produces synthesis gas from carbon dioxide produced from coke.

The aboveground facility has capacity to produce 25,000 cu m/hr of syngas. The plant was recently operating at 60% of capacity, delivering syngas for use as fuel by industrial and residential customers in and around Pingdingshan.

Jianhua Lv, chairman and chief executive officer, said the company is in discussions about doubling plant capacity through gas-compression technology.

Separately, SinoCoking is building an underground gasification and carbon capture and storage facility in Henan Province under an agreement with the Institute of Process Engineering of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the North China Institute of Science and Technology.

The plant, scheduled to start in March 2015, is designed to produce 60,000 cu m/hr of syngas. It’s part of a project to gasify 21 million tons of coal in four underground mines owned by SinoCoking that have been idle more than 3 years due to mine-consolidation guidelines of the Chinese government.

Subsequent phases of the project could push output to 880,000 cu m/hr of syngas.