Longview Power, a 695-MW coal-fired power plant now under construction in Maidsville, W.Va., is scheduled to begin commercial operation later this year. The $2 billion project reached 580 MW in early June, just a month after completing the “first fire on coal” schedule milestone. Testing and tuning of the controls and various systems continue.
Longview Power is the largest privately funded project in West Virginia and is majority owned by First Reserve Corp. The plant was designed using supercritical boiler technology, allowing the plant to operate very efficiently with a net heat rate of only 8,728 Btu/kWh.
River Water Treatment
As with all steam power plants, water is a crucial commodity. Longview had originally planned to use treated acid mine drainage water from a nearby closed mine as its makeup water source (see POWER, September 2010, “Mine Drainage: An Alternative Source of Water” in our archives at http://www.powermag.com) and had purchased water treatment plant equipment for that purpose. That plan was ultimately shelved, as it was determined that the quality and availability of the mine water was not suitable. The plant owner instead decided to draw and treat water directly from the Monongahela River.
Dunkard Creek Water Treatment Systems, an affiliate of Longview Power, contracted Veolia Water Solutions & Technologies (Veolia) to design and build a river water treatment system to provide makeup water for the power plant (Figure 1). About 80% of the treated water will be used as makeup for the plant’s cooling tower; the remainder will go to its steam generator, scrubber, and various other plant uses.
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| 1. Smart water makeup. The new Longview Power coal-fired plant uses river water. Approximately 80% of the water treated at the plant will serve the plant’s cooling tower; the remainder will go to its steam generator, scrubber, and various other uses. The water treatment processes used are based on the quality of the river water and the intended use. Courtesy: Veolia Water Solutions & Technologies |
Veolia designed and built the facility, integrating its Actiflo high-rate clarification, multimedia filtration, and reverse osmosis (RO) technologies with microfiltration and RO equipment that Longview Power had previously purchased for the cancelled acid mine water treatment plant. The ability to incorporate owner-supplied equipment into the new treatment system design resulted in substantial capital cost savings.
The river water treatment system is designed to handle raw water with salinity as high as 500 mg/l and produce water quality of 200 mg/l total dissolved solids (TDS) continuously at average demand. The plant can produce up to 6,600 gpm of makeup water.
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