Luminant used remnants of the ill-fated Twin Oaks and Forest Grove plants (which were mothballed more than 30 years ago) to build the new two-unit 1,600-MW Oak Grove Plant. Though outfitted with equipment from those old plants, Oak Grove also sports an array of modern air quality control equipment and is the nation’s first 100% lignite-fired plant to adopt selective catalytic reduction for NO_x control and activated carbon sorbent injection technology to remove mercury. For melding two different steam generators into a single project, adopting a unique and efficient “push-pull” fuel delivery system, assembling a tightly integrated team that completed the project on time and within budget, and for completing what was started almost four decades ago, Oak Grove Power Plant is awarded POWER magazine’s 2010 Plant of the Year award.

Catalysts used in selective catalytic reduction (SCR) systems in utility boilers provide high NO_x removal efficiencies that routinely exceed 90%. A major co-benefit of applying SCR to coal-fired power plants is that the SCR catalyst also oxidizes the vapor phase mercury from an elemental form to a soluble ionic form, which can be readily captured in a downstream flue gas desulfurization process. Mitsubishi Heavy Industries and Cormetech have developed an advanced SCR catalyst technology with high mercury oxidation activity capable of achieving 95% oxidized mercury over a wide range of operating conditions.

A federal judge recently dismissed a lawsuit in which the plaintiffs alleged that defendants’ production of chemicals and electricity had “added to the ferocity of Hurricane Katrina.” The judge’s reasoning reveals the inherent limitations of courts unilaterally initiating policies to address climate change issues....

Regenerative activated coke technology (ReACT) is an integrated multipollutant control approach that removes SO_x, NO_x, and Hg from coal-fired plants by adsorption with activated coke to attain emissions levels found at natural gas–fired plants. One big advantage of this technology is that it uses only a fraction of the water used by conventional wet flue gas desulfurization. A recent license agreement brings this technology to the U.S.

When it is completed, later this summer, the UK’s Drax Power Station biomass facility will become the largest dedicated cofiring project of its kind in the world. As U.S. coal-fired generators come under increasing pressure to cut emissions and take advantage of incentives to promote power generation from renewables, Drax offers an example of what is possible.