Upon completion of testing at the Gas Technology Institute in Chicago, SES said data demonstrated that the low-moisture, high-ash coal achieved 99% carbon conversion during the bench-scale testing.

The study was intended to determine the feasibility of mining and exporting up to 15 million tons per annum of low-vol coal from Ncondezi’s Tete province holdings in Mozambique.

“These positive test results are the first step forward toward securing additional economic utilization of Ncondezi’s low-volatile coal resources for the project in Mozambique and give us confidence to move forward with assessing the viability of Ncondezi’s low-volatile coal for future [SES joint venture] SRS projects,” SES Resource Solutions chairman Mike Oppenheimer said.

“This will include the economics of shipping the coal to major Asian countries and its subsequent conversion to substitute natural gas by SES’ U-gas gasification technology.”

Ncondezi has recently increased the JORC coal resource of its eponymous flagship project to 4.7 billion tonnes, up from 1.8Bt.

The planned Ncondezi mine is expected to be able to produce 10Mtpa of coal over a 20-year mine life, with initial output of 4Mtpa of coal.

The project is targeting first production in 2015.