Inside: Wyoming competes for 'clean' coal -- A??

GILLETTE -- With a 37 percent share of the U.S. coal market, Wyoming is too large to ignore.

GE Energy Gasification, one of the world's leading makers of coal gasification units, said it is developing the process to work with Wyoming coal.

The gasification process works well with bituminous coals in the eastern United States, but it needs some tweaking to make Wyoming's higher-moisture sub-bituminous coals an economic feedstock, according to the company.

"We, and others, are working on making the economics of IGCC (integrated gasification combined cycle) more competitive with the use of these lower-rank coals -- i.e., non-bituminous coals, which is Powder River Basin," said Edward Lowe, general manager of GE Energy Gasification.

That doesn't put an IGCC plant in Wyoming, but it is an important first step toward efforts to bring the technology here.

"Coal is our most abundant fossil fuel," Lowe said. "(GE's) development efforts are to just end up making the plants more competitive on an economic basis by using these other coals."

Wyoming exports nearly 400 million tons of coal annually.

GE owns the patent on a coal gasification process it acquired from Chevron Texaco in 2004. The process is in use, or planned to be in use, at more than 65 coal gasification plants around the world.

Rather than burn coal to release the energy, gasification is a process that places coal under high pressure, and with a chemical catalyst, extracts gas from the coal. The gas is then burned to generate electricity, which produces far fewer emissions.