Ohio Power Plant Turning Pollutants into Fertilizer
Posted on: Wednesday, 21 September 2005, 00:00 CDT
SHADYSIDE, Ohio - A 60-year-old power plant along the Ohio River is doing something about air pollution: making money by turning it into something productive.
The FirstEnergy Corp. plant converts the pollutants emitted by burning its coal into ingredients for fertilizer, then sells it to a Toledo-area farm products manufacturer.
The R.E. Burger plant, built in the 1940s about 5 miles south of Wheeling, W.Va., is equipped with an electronic device that vaporizes compounds contained in emissions from the burning coal.
Then, the mixture is fed into a "scrubber" designed to change the nitrogen and sulfur pollutants into elements of fertilizer.
A two-year test on the process ends today, but FirstEnergy officials have already pronounced it a success.
"Reliability is 98 percent-plus," Morgan Jones, a FirstEnergy environmental specialist, told The (Cleveland) Plain Dealer for a story published Saturday. "It's been a blazing success."
After the remaining vapor is electronically processed, it is packaged and sold to Andersons Agricultural Group LLP, a fertilizer maker based in Maumee.
Another bonus for FirstEnergy is the technology that allows it to burn cheap, high-sulfur Ohio coal rather than import cleaner coal from other states.
"The more sulfur you have, the better the process works," Jones said.
The project is a partnership among the Ohio Coal Development Office, which invested $5.5 million; Akron-based FirstEnergy, which paid $4.8 million; and New Durham, N.H.-based Powerspan Corp., which helped design the pollutant-removing system and contributed $17.7 million.
The two companies and the coal development office plan to demonstrate the project for other utility companies and regulators later this month.
FirstEnergy, which is under a $1.1 billion court order to clean up its power plants, says the technology is just one option the company is considering.
"Preliminary decisions about equipment we will install will be made within the next couple of weeks," spokeswoman Ellen Raines said.
The company also is looking at technology that removes carbon dioxide from smokestacks.
Powerspan CEO Frank Alix said he has had a good working relationship with FirstEnergy dating to the tenure of Peter Burg, the utility's chairman when he died in 2004.
"We would not be here if it hadn't been for Peter Burg and (current president) Tony Alexander," Alix said.
Jones feels the same toward Powerspan.
"We were so impressed that we decided to build the pilot. I've never seen another utility do what we have done - take a bench- scale technology and drive it to full commercialization."
On the Net:
www.firstenergycorp.com
www.powerspan.com
Source: Charleston Gazette, The
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