What is GreatPoint Energy?
GreatPoint Energy is a technology-driven natural resources company converting widely abundant coal, petroleum coke and biomass resources into ultra-clean pipeline quality natural gas while capturing and sequestering CO₂.

GreatPoint Energy’s corporate headquarters are in Cambridge, Massachusetts and the company’s engineering labs and demonstration plant are located at the Gas Technology Institute in Des Plaines, Illinois.

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Who founded GreatPoint Energy?
GreatPoint Energy was founded by serial entrepreneurs Andrew Perlman, Avi Goldberg and Aaron Mandell.  Together, the founders have started over eight companies.

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How much energy experience does GreatPoint Energy have?
GreatPoint Energy consists of a world class team of experts with significant experience successfully scaling energy and chemical plants of all sizes — from demonstration to full-scale commercial facilities. The Company’s senior management has been involved in the design, construction, startup and operation of some of the largest gasification plants in operation worldwide. Rounding out the GreatPoint Energy team are senior energy industry professionals who lead the commercial development and finance activities.

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What is the Company’s business strategy?
GreatPoint Energy intends to become the premier low-cost provider of natural gas in the U.S. by building out production facilities in strategic areas where low-cost coal, petroleum coke and biomass and access to natural gas pipelines are available, such as Montana, Wyoming and Alberta, Canada and other markets. In addition, GreatPoint Energy is focused on sites where the CO₂ from its facilities can be captured and safely sequestered through sale to oil producers for enhanced oil recovery or pumped into saline aquifers.  Both options represent the only commercial CO₂ sequestration option available today.  To obtain its goals, the Company will utilize a multi-pronged approach:

• GreatPoint Energy will build, own and operate production facilities using its proprietary conversion and carbon capture technology to produce ultra-clean natural gas from widely abundant domestic resources.
• GreatPoint Energy will secure feedstock resources under long-term agreements for large reserves such as those in the Powder River Basin and North Dakota. The production facilities will also contract for petroleum coke in Alberta, Canada.  Biomass will be secured in select markets for scaled facilities designed to meet renewable energy mandates by using the natural gas for power generation.
• GreatPoint Energy will sell its natural gas under long term contract to power plants, industrial users and chemical manufacturers and use those contracts to finance plant construction.
• GreatPoint Energy will generally locate facilities at the minemouth or on large refinery and upgrading sites.
• GreatPoint Energy will transport natural gas to customers by conventional pipeline infrastructure.
• GreatPoint Energy will capture and sequester carbon by selling CO₂ to oil producers for use in enhanced oil recovery (EOR) and also to coal-bed methane producers for additional revenue and CO₂ tax credits.

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What is GreatPoint Energy’s commercialization timeline?
GreatPoint Energy will be bringing its first commercial plant online in 2012. The plant is expected to produce approximately 60 million cubic feet per day of natural gas, enough to power 400 MW of power generation and provide electricity for 16,000 homes.

How will GreatPoint Energy finance all this?
The Company has sufficient capital to demonstrate its conversion and carbon capture technology and will continue to raise capital as needed in order to grow its business. Individual projects will be financed using a traditional project finance model with long term contracts, creditworthy suppliers, and a secure construction contract.

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Who are GreatPoint Energy’s investors?
The Company is backed by the world’s leading venture capital firms: Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers ; Draper Fischer Jurvetson; Advanced Technology Ventures; and Vinod Khosla of Khosla Ventures.  In addition to these investors, GreatPoint Energy has received significant strategic investment from Sustainable Development Invesments (SDI), a unit of Citi Alternative Investments (a division of Citi), The Dow Chemical Company, AES Corporation, and Suncor Energy, Inc. Additional information on GreatPoint Energy’s investors can be found on the Investors page.

What is GreatPoint Energy’s Product?

GreatPoint Energy develops bluegas™ , the proprietary name given to its coal–derived natural gas. bluegas™ is 99.5 percent pure methane, and can be transported throughout North America utilizing existing natural gas pipeline infrastructure, providing an attractive, cost-effective alternative to drilled and imported natural gas. Its environmental profile is as clean as natural gas; it consists mostly of hydrogen and therefore, has very low carbon emissions. bluegas™ can be used in every application that natural gas is currently being used (i.e. power generation, residential and commercial heating, and in the production of chemicals).

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Who invented the bluegas™ process?
The bluegas™ process was invented by the GreatPoint Energy research and engineering team, which combines several decades of firsthand development experience on catalytic gasification. GreatPoint Energy’s team of experts brings together knowledge and research from leading institutions around the world.

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How does the bluegas™ process work?
The bluegas™ process uses a proprietary catalyst to lower the cost of standard gasification. By combining coal, steam, pressure and a catalyst in a standard reactor, the bluegas™ process eliminates the need for pure oxygen, raises the overall process efficiency, increases reliability, and lowers both the capital and operating costs of the plant. In addition, rather than producing a low BTU “syngas,” bluegas™ produces pure pipeline grade natural gas in a single step. Additional information is available on the Technology page.

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What will bluegas™   cost?
GreatPoint Energy expects to produce bluegas™ for under $4.00/MMBtu versus ~$4.20+/MMBtu for conventional drilled natural gas based on estimates by consultants Wood Mackenzie - not only is this is a significant cost reduction, but it can be delivered to customers under long term stable supply agreements without price volatility.

What is different about GreatPoint Energy’s approach to coal-gasification?

The GreatPoint Energy gasification system is an optimized catalytic process for combining coal, steam and a catalyst in a pressurized reactor vessel to produce pipeline-grade methane instead of the low quality syngas produced by conventional gasification. The proprietary catalyst formulation is made up of abundant, low cost metal materials specifically designed to promote gasification at the low temperatures where water gas shift and methanation take place. The catalyst is continuously recycled and reused within the process.

This process is a classic example of process intensification, whereby several unit operations (in this case gasification, water gas shift and methanation) are combined into a single step to improve overall efficiency, reduce maintenance and equipment requirements, and lower capital costs. In comparison to conventional gasification for production of natural gas from coal, five specific advantages are realized:   

• This process requires no cryogenic oxygen plant, resulting in significant capital cost and power savings. 
• The overall conversion efficiency of coal to bluegas™ is significantly higher than oxygen blown processes, due to the direct “capture and utilization” of the exothermic heat of methanation inside the gasifier vessel. 
• Since all major reactions occur in the gasifier, downstream chemical plants for water gas shift and methanation are not required, saving major capital expense and complexity. 
• The catalytic gasification process occurs at much lower temperatures than conventional non-catalytic processes, eliminating slagging and resulting in maintenance and capital cost savings in the gasification vessel, gas cooling and heat recovery trains. 
• Unlike most other gasification and combustion technologies, the bluegas™ process produces a sequestration-ready stream of high purity CO₂ which can be transported by pipeline and sold for enhanced oil recovery operations.

In addition, unlike many conventional gasifiers, this process is ideally suited for lowest cost feedstocks such as Powder River Basin (“PRB”) coal and petroleum coke from the Canadian oil sands (a waste-product produced in the upgrading process). The result is a disruptive technology with dramatically improved economics and an environmental footprint equivalent to that of natural gas, the most environmentally-friendly fossil fuel. 

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What is the status of the technology development?
GreatPoint Energy has constructed and is operating a catalytic gasification demonstration plant located at the Gas Technology Institute outside Chicago, Illinois. The facility is one of the largest direct coal to natural gas demonstration plants, processing 3-5 tons of coal and producing approximately 30,000 cubic feet of natural gas, per day. The plant is fully automated, demonstrates the core bluegas™ process and allows the company to test many different coal types as well as other feedstocks.

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What proprietary intellectual property does the Company have?
GreatPoint Energy has a portfolio of pending patents and trade secrets on the core bluegas™ process, proprietary blue2 gasification catalyst, catalyst recovery processes and gas separation techniques for producing pure methane. 

Why has coal gasification become one of the focus areas for U.S. domestic energy sources?
Coal is a very inexpensive resource, but it’s extremely dirty when burned to produce electricity. Moreover, it’s tremendously expensive to adequately clean coal smokestack emissions from coal power plants.

Over the past 10 years, natural gas became the fuel of choice due to its clean environmental profile. Although the U.S. is the largest natural gas user in the world, it only holds three percent of global natural gas reserves. Demand caused prices to rise and it is now exorbitantly expensive ($6-8/MMBtu) and forecasts predict that prices will continue to increase. Furthermore, a tremendous amount of gas infrastructure (i.e. pipelines and power plants) was built in the U.S., but is underutilized due to high gas prices.

On the other hand, the U.S. has the largest coal holdings in the world — 25 percent of the world reserves. Therefore, coal gasification represents a clean and logical solution to the U.S.’s energy issues - it converts an essentially unlimited, low-cost and domestic feedstock into a clean burning gas fuel that can be easily transported and burned without polluting the environment.

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Are there any competitive technologies that are converting coal to natural gas?
Some companies are proposing using older thermal gasification technology to make synthetic natural gas, or “syngas,” and then converting the syngas to methane using additional processing units. However, to do this requires not only a gasification plant, but also a cryogenic air separation plant for oxygen, a shift reactor to generate hydrogen and a methanation plant to produce methane — each of these plants operates at different temperatures leading to significantly higher capital cost and lower efficiencies, making the overall process less attractive in today’s market. 

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Who are the other dominant players in the gasification space?
GE, ConocoPhillips, Shell and Siemens utilize standard gasification technologies. Their technologies gasify coal or other feedstocks, but the resulting product is syngas, a low-grade mixture of carbon monoxide and hydrogen. Syngas cannot be transported by a natural gas pipeline and it cannot be burned in standard natural gas power plants without modifications. Syngas is primarily used for power generation in so-called integrated gasification combined cycle (IGCC) facilities.

Standard gasification operates at extremely high temperatures (2,500 F versus GreatPoint Energy’s process which operates at 1,300 F) and requires the use of an oxygen plant to cryogenically separate oxygen from air. Therefore, standard gasification is more capital intensive and has a lower efficiency.