INDIAN RIVER POWER PLANT
Millsboro, DE - Contributed by Mike G. -
L.U.782
Spring 2006
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. |