POWER digest
News items of interest to power industry professionals.
Big CC plant coming to Texas. In early December, Panda Energy Inc. announced its intention to build, own, and operate a 1,000-MW combined-cycle plant in an industrial area of Temple, Texas, on Interstate 35 between Waco and Austin. The area is one of the 10 densest and fastest-growing population centers in the U.S. Nearly half of the state’s 21 million citizens live within 50 miles of I-35.
“This plant will help meet the future energy needs of our growing state and strengthen the economy of central Texas” said Robert Carter, Panda Energy’s chairman and CEO. “With little or no power plant construction having occurred during the past five years, state and local officials are being farsighted in working now to enhance the future reliability of the region’s power supply. We look forward to working with them in bringing this project to completion.”
Panda told POWER that it is deciding between two different configurations for the gas-fired plant. One option is a Siemens Power Generation FlexPlant10, using SCC6-5000F combustion turbine generators in combined-cycle mode, with four 1 x 1 power blocks. The other is a General Electric Frame 7FA-based plant with two 2 x 1 power blocks. Panda noted that the choice will depend on the units’ availability and other market factors when the time comes to specify major equipment.
Temple Generating Station will be located on a 250-acre site at the South Temple Industrial Park. It should take about two years to build, assuming timely receipt of regulatory approvals and financing. Panda has already filed for an air permit with the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality. The company says it is designing the plant to maximize the use of reclaimed water, thereby conserving the state’s fresh water resources.
North Dakota to get new gasification plant. The North Dakota Industrial Commission and representatives of Great Northern Power Development LP (GNPD) and Allied Syngas Corp. have announced a $1.4 billion coal gasification project at South Heart that would produce pipeline-quality syngas.
The South Heart project would be a joint venture of GNPD and Allied. Both companies have subsidiaries that bring strategic value to the table. For example, Great Northern Properties LP, a GNPD affiliate, owns a substantial amount of the coal reserves that would fuel the plant. Meanwhile, Allied’s Envirotherm GmbH affiliate is a co-owner of the advanced British Gas Lurgi (BGL) gasification technology that the project would use. BGL’s other owner is Advantica Ltd. Advantica and Envirotherm will provide the technology license, design, and technical support for the gasification process.
The project will use seven BGL gasifiers to turn North Dakota lignite into as much as 100 million cubic feet/day of pipeline-quality gas that could be sold locally or nationwide. According to the project partners, the gasification plant will also produce many of the chemical by-products needed to manufacture fertilizers or serve as feedstocks for chemical plants. This project also will capture CO2, which could then be sequestered in underground brine or shale formations in and near North Dakota or used to enhance recovery of oil from nearly depleted nearby fields.
Construction is slated to begin in late 2009 or early 2010 and wrap up in 2012.
NRG, Powerspan announce large-scale CCS demo. In a recently announced memorandum of understanding NRG Energy Inc. and Powerspan Corp. agreed to demonstrate at commercial scale the latter’s ECO2 technology for carbon capture and sequestration (CCS). (See POWER, October 2007, p. 54, for details of the ECO2 process.)
ECO2 is a post-combustion, regenerative process that uses an ammonia-based solution to capture CO2 from the flue gas of a power plant. Once the greenhouse gas has been captured, the solution is regenerated to release CO2 and ammonia. The ammonia is then sent back to the scrubbing process, leaving the CO2 in a form suitable for geological storage. Ammonia is not consumed by the scrubbing process, which creates no by-products. Powerspan says ECO2 technology is applicable to both existing and new coal-fired plants and is particularly economical for plants that use ammonia to reduce their NOx emissions.
To date, CCS demos have only been conducted on pilot-scale coal plants with capacities between 1 MW and 5 MW. This demo will take place at NRG’s W.A. Parish plant near Sugar Land, Texas, on quantities of flue gas equal to those of a 125-MW unit. The project’s goal is to capture and sequester about one million tons of CO2 annually.
As at the South Heart project, the CO2 captured by the Parish project may be used to enhance oilfield recovery operations in the region. The demonstration facility, which is being designed to remove 90% of the CO2 from a flue gas stream, is expected to be operational in 2012.
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