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To begin with, this project is the largest in Sussex County in close to 30 years, which is when Unit 4 was built at Indian River Powerhouse. Before that it was better than 50 years ago when we seen projects of any size, which was Indian River Powerhouse and DuPonts. This is a $1 billion dollar (plus) project that will contribute between 400 and 1000 jobs during the construction phase and add another 85 to 100 permanent jobs. This also doesn't take into account the number of skilled tradesman from all crafts that will work there on and off during shutdowns (maintenance outages).

Cleanup at the Indian River Powerhouse had started better than a year ago. A couple of the units have been going through the conversions needed to burn the "clean" or "soft" coal as it's called, during shutdown phases. The soft coal burns at lower BTU's but has toxic emmission levels that are several times lower than the harder, hotter burning coals. The new unit to be built at Indian River is a Syn-Gas unit. It goes through a process that turns the coal into a synthethic gas, then the syngas is cleaned and used to fire the boilers that turn the turbines that create the electricity.

To get a basic idea how this process is done go to: The Cape Gazette Story and start reading about 2/3's of the way down. About 90% of the sulpher is recovered and can be resold and instead of a coal fly-ash byproduct from burning the coal you end up with a granular byproduct much like the coker at refineries (picture black sand). This byproduct is used to mix with asphalt in roads. The new unit will be able to capture around 90% of the sulfer, 80% of oxides of nitrogen, 75% of the mercury emissions, won't have the levels of arsenic that coal fire burners do and will have the ability to capture the carbon dioxide emissions. $330 million is to be spent on major emission control equiptment on the existing coal fired units. The word I'm getting is that the precipitators are going to be replaced with a scrubber system. Between the new syngas unit and new scrubbers on the existing units, the drop in emissions should be very impressive.