Coal

Omaha Public Power District commissioned Unit 2 at its Nebraska City Station in May of this year. The new 682-MW unit joins Unit 1, which went commercial 30 years ago in the same month. The project is outfitted with all the requisite air quality control systems and sports a very good thermal efficiency. More importantly, the plant will provide reasonably priced power for customers of eight municipal utilities that share ownership of the plant’s electrical output. Those utilities paid for their portion of the construction cost and now receive a like portion of the electrical output from Unit 2 under a unique participation power agreement.

Hard work was required at the 2,600-MW Rockport Plant to make improvements to equipment, materials, and processes. But that hard work has paid off: The plant’s units operate much better, employee safety has improved, the facility is setting generation records with both of its 1,300-MW units, and it earned the PRB Coal Users’ Group Large Plant of the Year honors.

Complying with a corporate environmental policy requires much more than just writing a check for equipment upgrades. It takes a dedicated and knowledgeable staff that’s willing to invest years of work to permanently reduce a plant’s environmental footprint. The staff of Seminole Generating Station have completed multiple, incremental plant improvements over the past decade that have significantly reduced air emissions and minimized solid waste disposal.

The world’s first supercritical circulating fluidized-bed (CFB) steam generator began successful operation at the Lagisza power plant in Poland early this July, according to power equipment and engineering firm Foster Wheeler. The new CFB — believed to be the world’s largest — replaced 1960s-era pulverized coal units at the power plant owned by Polish utility […]

"If you build it, they will come" — the litigants, that is. The lawsuit involving the construction of Southwestern Electric Power Co.’s (SWEPCO) John W. Turk Jr. ultrasupercritical coal-fired power plant in Arkansas gives new meaning to that popular quote from the movie Field of Dreams.

Xcel Energy has completed the third and final project required by its 2003 Metropolitan Emissions Reduction Project agreement: repowering the Riverside Plant with a gas-fired 2 x 1 combined-cycle plant and tearing down the old coal-fired plant. Saved from demolition was the Unit 7 steam turbine system that now serves the new plant. Xcel staff expertly managed the project to an on-time start-up and accepted many important construction tasks, harkening back to the days when utilities took a more active role in the design and construction of projects.

Uncertainty about CO₂ emissions legislation is prompting power plant owners to consider the possibility of accommodating "add-on" CO₂ capture and sequestration solutions for coal-fired plants in the future. Those same plant owners may be overlooking the possibility that future natural gas – fired combined cycles will also be subject to CO₂ capture requirements. This month we examine the capture options. In a future issue, Part II will present the installation and operating costs of different carbon capture technologies.

Carbon capture and storage (CCS) has of late gained steam as the best way to mitigate emissions of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide (CO2) from fossil fuel power plants, despite evidence that the approach would require much energy and increase the fuel needs of a coal-fired plant by more than 25%. A new study from […]

The New Source Review (NSR) permitting program was originally created as part of the 1977 Clean Air Act Amendments to ensure that new power generation facilities were properly outfitted with all the necessary air quality control systems when constructed. Plants in operation were exempt until they made plant modifications viewed as beyond “routine maintenance,” a term whose definition has been a moving target. Is it time for the NSR to take a back seat to improved plant efficiency and reduced carbon emissions?

Reducing dust from coal conveyors has moved from a housekeeping chore to a safety challenge, especially with Powder River Basin coals. Here’s what you need to know about the latest coal-handling system design.

The EPA has identified 44 "high hazard" coal ash ponds around the U.S., and a recent Tennessee Valley Authority report indicates that the agency should have known its Kingston Plant pond would have been one of them.

An analysis by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities concluded that two-thirds of the value of carbon emission allowances described by the recent H.R. 2545 will benefit utility business customers and households in the top quartile of personal income. The middle quintile will see increased cost for electricity.

MIT researchers push for faster commercialization of carbon capture technologies for coal-fired power plants by reducing system costs.

The annual meeting of the Powder River Basin Coal Users’ Group was held in association with the ELECTRIC POWER conference in early May in Chicago. Get a taste of the festivities, technical meetings, and the announcement of the group’s 2009 Large and Small Plant of the Year winners in this conference report.

While many CO₂ removal technologies are being researched through laboratory and pilot-scale testing, an existing technology has a significant operating history at commercial-scale facilities, where it is collecting CO₂ from multiple sources, including low-CO₂ concentration flue gas (<3.1% by volume) with high oxygen concentrations (>13% by volume).

A little more than a year after the Bush administration abruptly withdrew its support for the FutureGen project, the Department of Energy has again announced it will back the proposed Illinois gasified coal power plant and carbon capture initiative. Though the 275-MW project may be different in technical aspects — it will be initially designed for 60% carbon capture, not 90%, and gasify only Illinois Basin Coal (Figure 2) — it is still riddled with many of same funding problems. Making matters worse, it may have been revived too late: Since the DOE withdrew its support, several major carbon capture and storage (CCS) projects and alliances have sprouted in the U.S., and these could give FutureGen a run for its money.

The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), a federal mapping agency, has of late been propounding the difference between "resources" and "reserves." It says that although the two terms are used interchangeably, the distinction is simple: Reserves are a subset of resources. Coal resources, as an example, include those in-place tonnage estimates determined by summing the volumes for identified and undiscovered deposits of coal, whereas coal reserves are those resources considered "economically producible" at the time of classification, even though extraction facilities are not in place and operative.

Hydraulic fracturing — the process of drilling and then pumping fluid deep into a formation to generate fractures or cracks, typically for extracting natural gas from shale formations — has been under fire lately, owing to concerns that it contaminates drinking water. But while Congress debates proposed legislation that would impose new restrictions on the technology, an entirely different concern related to fracturing — or "fracking" — is emerging: It may trigger earthquakes.

Energy provider ScottishPower on May 29 flicked on the switch of a carbon capture and storage (CCS) pilot program at its 2,304-MW coal-fired Longannet power plant, in Fife, Scotland, marking the beginning of a seven-month test — and the first time a UK coal-fired power plant has reportedly attempted to capture its carbon emissions.

City Water, Light & Power (CWLP), the municipal utilities agency of the City of Springfield, Ill., determined that coal-fired generation was its best alternative for providing long-term reliable and economic electricity to the city’s residents. For negotiating an unprecedented agreement with the Sierra Club that allowed the project to move forward, for choosing the latest in coal-fired technology and air quality control systems as the foundation for the city’s comprehensive energy policy, and for assembling a tightly integrated team that completed the project well before the contractual deadline and under budget, CWLP’s Dallman 4 is awarded POWER magazine’s 2009 Plant of the Year award.

If a number of technical, financial, and regulatory hurdles can be overcome, power generated by integrated gasification combined-cycle technology could become an important source for U.S. utilities. Our overview presents diverse perspectives from three industry experts about what it will take to move this technology off the design table and into the field.

Carbon emissions produced by the combustion of coal may be collected and stored in the future, but a better approach (in the near term at least) is to reduce the carbon produced through efficient combustion technologies. Increasing the efficiency of new plants using ultrasupercritical technology will net less carbon released per megawatt-hour using the world’s abundant coal reserves while producing electricity at the lowest possible cost.

The industry is preparing for carbon legislation by exploring options for dealing with CO₂. But even if the technical issues are resolved, actually sequestering CO₂ poses a number of other daunting challenges.

Reducing mercury emissions at coal-fired power plants by 90% has been considered the holy grail of mercury control. A new technique promises to get us there — at a price.

Demand for renewable power is burgeoning as state governments (and maybe soon the U.S. federal government) impose increasingly rigorous environmental and procurement standards on the energy industry. Surprisingly, biomass cofiring has yet to attract much attention, even though it could help many utilities meet their renewable portfolio requirements, reduce carbon emissions, and solve other regional environmental problems. U.S. developers, investors, and regulators should consider including cofiring as part of the energy mix going forward.

Though Canada is rich in fossil fuels, nuclear power may fuel a significant portion of the nation’s future electrical generation needs, especially in provinces that have traditionally relied on hydropower and fossil fuels.

Turkey’s growing power market has attracted investors and project developers for over a decade, yet their plans have been dashed by unexpected political or financial crises or, worse, obstructed by a lengthy bureaucratic approval process. Now, with a more transparent retail electricity market, government regulators and investors are bullish on Turkey. Is Turkey ready to turn the power on?

Because combined heat and power (CHP) plants optimize energy use, they cut fuel costs and pollution. Even though U.S. power plants have been using CHP for decades, today’s energy experts have a newfound appreciation for its ability to promote sustainable energy use.

Carbon capture and sequestration is very likely to be a key element of any future greenhouse gas legislation. Integrated gasification combined-cycle plants now under design have provisions to separate the CO₂ at elevated pressures. Coal-fired plants have a far more difficult and expensive task — separating and compressing CO₂ from pressures just above atmospheric conditions.

When roving Contributing Editor Mark Axford attended several recent energy conferences, he found the same questions asked at each one about new U.S. generation sources and consumption patterns. Unfortunately, the experts had few good answers to those questions.