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...Georgia Power’s Plant Hammond in Coosa will give its new “scrubber” its first run Friday.
Workers there undoubtedly will have their fingers crossed, but if all goes as well as a similar test last month at Plant Bowen in Euharlee, they can relax, and the scrubber will stay on schedule to begin commercial operation May 1.
Scrubbers remove sulfur dioxide and reduce fine particulates produced by coal-fired power plants, requirements of the U.S. Clean Air Act. Georgia Power says its scrubbers remove as much as 95 percent — one manager at Plant Hammond even predicts as much as 98 percent at his plant — of sulfur dioxide emissions.
Floyd County is designated a “nonattainment area” by the federal Environmental Protection Agency for fine-particle and ozone pollution. Counties in nonattainment status risk losing federal funding and face greater difficulty recruiting industry, said William Steiner, executive director of the Coosa Valley Regional
W.C. Dunaway, asset manager at Plant Bowen, said, “We gobble up three to four train loads (of coal) a day.” |
Development Center.
“Without the scrubber, Floyd County probably would not reach attainment,” said Heather Abrams, chief of the air protection branch of the Georgia Environmental Protection Division. “With the scrubber, you’re well on the way to attainment.”
“We certainly should be very close (to attainment). We’re sure hoping so,” said Sam Freeman, director of business and industry services for the Greater Rome Chamber of Commerce. “The efforts by Georgia Power at Plant Hammond and Plant Bowen, and the efforts by Temple-Inland recently, have to help our air quality immensely.”
(During the past three years, paper mill Temple-Inland in Coosa has completed various upgrades and replacements of process equipment in its steam power-generating and chemical recovery areas.)
“Our folks don’t recruit businesses that have emission issues,” Freeman said. But he did say that, in general, a business might have to spend extra money to meet standards in a nonattainment area that it might not have to spend in an attainment area.
‘A big bath’
Plant Hammond is installing a fountain spray scrubber. Plant Bowen uses a jet bubbling reactor, which one manager likened to a child sticking a straw into a glass of milk and blowing through it.
Either way, “a scrubber is nothing but a big bath,” said Mike Abernathy, system and process manager for Hammond’s scrubber. Flue gas from the coal plant is pumped into the scrubber and cleaned by a water-limestone mixture, then released as 95 percent water vapor.
There will be a visual effect.
“It’ll be a white, clean plume when it goes out (of the smokestack),” Abernathy said. “But it’s just water vapor, from hot gas going through water sprays.”
On a hot, dry day the plume will shoot straight up and evaporate quickly. On a cloudy, humid day, the plume may bend and hang parallel to the ground.
A byproduct of the process is dry-wall quality gypsum, which Georgia Power sells. “It’s a cost avoidance to our consumers,” said W.C. Dunaway, asset manager at Plant Bowen. Running the gypsum operation costs 15 times more than the revenue the gypsum brings in. “The biggest advantage is we don’t have to put it in a landfill,” Dunaway said.
Plant Hammond’s scrubber will produce 25 tons of gypsum a day, 1.7 tons of gypsum for every ton of limestone used. Its gypsum “barn” will hold 30,000 tons of gypsum.
Plant Bowen, which sits on 2,500 acres and includes grasslands where deer graze paying no attention to the hubbub of the plant, produces 3,300 megawatts of electricity. It is four times as big as Plant Hammond, which produces 845 megawatts. Plant Bowen will eventually have four scrubbers, while Plant Hammond’s one will serve the entire facility.
More than 500 contractors worked on constructing the Plant Hammond scrubber; just the first two scrubbers at Plant Bowen will require 1,000 craft laborers. Its first scrubber is 119 feet in diameter and 56 feet tall. “We believe it’s the largest piece of fiberglass ever spun on site,” Dunaway said.
The plant uses 18,500 horsepower fans to blow gas into the scrubber.
The scrubbers will also reduce mercury emissions, but that’s a harder target. “Think about The Forum being full of Ping Pong balls, floor to ceiling,” said Barry Tidwell, asset manager at Plant Hammond. “In all those Ping Pong balls, there are five blue ones. They represent the mercury. Now all those balls are being blown at you. If you’re going to achieve 20 percent mercury reduction, your job is to catch one of those blue balls. That’s the challenge with mercury. But we have a contract with (scrubber manufacturer) Advatech for 20 percent.”
That’s a lot of coal
Coal comes into Plant Bowen in 100-car trains. Each car holds 100 tons of coal. “We gobble up three to four train loads a day,” Dunaway said. That’s 30,000 to 40,000 tons of coal a day. It comes mostly from eastern Kentucky and Virginia.
Scrubbers are but one environmental step, though the biggest one to date, that Georgia Power is taking. Both Plant Hammond and Plant Bowen have Selective Catalytic Reduction systems, environmental controls that reduce nitrogen oxide.
The plants recycle the water they use. At Plant Hammond, 1,250 horsepower motors on pumps recycle water at the rate of 500,000 gallons a minute. “Every bit of water we can save, we’re saving it,” Abernathy said.
And the company is adding bio-fuel vehicles to its fleet.
The original cost to construct Plant Bowen between 1968 and 1975 was $400 million. Environmental controls installed between 1999 and 2001 cost $400 million. The cost of constructing the scrubbers will be more than $900 million.
Plant Hammond’s first three units cost $41 million to build in the early 1950s. Unit four, built from 1968 to 1970, cost $55 million. The common scrubber for all four units cost $256 million.
And the Selective Catalytic Reduction systems cost $78 million.
The result, plant managers believe, is worth it.
“All the waste going out of the plant will be neutral now,” Abernathy said. “It’s going to affect the standard of living in Floyd County positively.”
