Squeezing More Out of Coal
Electric co-ops are equipping coal-fired power plants with the latest pollution-control devices to clean the air, taking steps to make facilities run more efficiently, and looking at ways to reduce carbon dioxide emissions
According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, “King Coal” still reigns as the least expensive and most abundant fuel used to create electricity—some 1 billion tons are burned annually. The black rock, in fact, accounts for 50 percent of the nation’s and roughly 62 percent of electric co-op power supply needs.
Most of the approximately 65 coal-fired power plants owned by generation and transmission (G&T) co-ops—comprising 8 percent of U.S. coal-based electricity production—are relatively new compared to the industry as a whole.
Over the next decade, G&Ts plan to spend more than $5 billion installing state-of-the-art pollution-control devices on coal plants to cut emissions of regulated pollutants—acid rain-contributing sulfur dioxide, smog-causing nitrogen oxides, fine particulates blamed for respiratory problems, and toxic mercury that works its way into the human food chain through eating fish and seafood—by more than 150,000 tons a year.
A recent study, Electricity Technology in a Carbon-Constrained Future, by the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), a Palo Alto, Calif.-based non-profit consortium whose members include electric co-ops, finds that U.S. electric utilities could reduce carbon dioxide emissions below 1990 levels within 23 years—even as they add about 40 percent load, half of which will be generated by coal—by taking aggressive steps in seven principal areas, including improving the efficiency of coal-fired power plants.
Buckeye Power is in the middle of a program to invest $800 million through 2010 to add scrubbers and SCRs on its two generating units at the coal-fired Cardinal Station along the Ohio River.
Minnkota Power, serving 11 electric distribution co-ops and more than 115,000 consumers across 34,500 square miles in the eastern part of the Peace Garden State and northwestern Minnesota, plans to spend about $130 million to upgrade two lignite coal-fired units at its Milton R. Young Station near Center, N.D.
Seminole Electric has begun spending $300 million to upgrade existing scrubbers to achieve 95 percent removal and install new burners, SCRs, and an acid gas removal system on its two-unit, 1,300-MW coal-fired Seminole Generating Station, located along the St. Johns River 50 miles south of Jacksonville. The pollution controls are expected to eliminate 16,490 tons of sulfur dioxide and nearly 20,000 tons of nitrogen oxides per year.
Adapted from an article by Peter Nye printed in RE Magazine (September 2007). See “related links” for complete article.