What fuels can a microturbine use?

The Ingersoll Rand Microturbine Accepts a Broad Range of Gaseous Fuels

Although pipeline quality natural gas is widely used as a fuel, our microturbine accepts gaseous fuels from a diverse range of sources.  The versatility of the microturbine's fuel combustion technology allows us to offer microturbine models that cleanly and efficiently consume fuels within a broad spectrum of caloric values, including those with too low an energy content for other technologies to accept!

For example, our newest 250SV model will run with very low caloric value fuels such as methane/inert gases mixtures with as little as 30% methane by volume.

Acceptable fuel sources can span many different kinds of processes.  For example, the methane gas produced from anaerobic digestion can be produced by landfills, solids reduction processes at waste water treatment plants, waste reduction digesters in food processing plants, and digesters using waste from agricultural operations.

Processes that create synthetic gases from biomass feedstock often produce a fuel-quality gas that can be used by the microturbine.  Processes such as slow pyrolysis can produce output mixtures that are typically composed of combustible gases such as hydrocarbons and hydrogen along with inert gases.

Acceptable hydrocarbon fuels can result from many operations along the oil/gas recovery stream.  "Raw" gases associated with upstream recovery operations can often be conditioned for direct use with a microturbine.  Hydrocarbon constituents with carbon numbers above methane can be accepted as long as sufficient dewpoint supression can be maintained.  Overhead vapors from downstream processing with significant ethane and propane content represent good opportunity fuel gases.

The table below shows the diverse range of gaseous fuel types supported by our microturbine systems:

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