POWER December 2021 - S8

POWER AWARDS
December 2021
Engro Powergen Thar Limited, Pakistan
T
he importance of a coal-fired power
plant to an entire region, and to a
country, was highlighted in Pakistan
earlier this year. It's not often that government
officials and the general public come
together to celebrate an energy project,
but in this case, there was plenty of excitement
about how the Engro Powergen
Thar Limited (EPTL) facility is enabling Pakistan to take advantage
of its natural resources, and provide economic opportunities
and support for a harsh desert region considered a difficult
place to live.
The EPTL plant utilizes Thar coal-which the country has
in abundance in the Tharparkar region-to generate electricity.
Officials say it will make Pakistan, a country that has faced
electricity shortfalls for years, more energy secure, and provide
a viable solution to an ongoing energy crisis.
The realization that the country's reserves of lignite coal can
be used in a domestic power plant prompted a three-day festival
in March, and have led Pakistani officials to call the EPTL
facility transformational for the country's future. It's among the
many reasons POWER has chosen EPTL as a Top Plant in the
coal-fired category.
" The proof of concept that electricity can be produced from
Thar coal has been demonstrated successfully by EPTL, [and]
it is the first plant to utilize this lignite coal for production of
electricity, " said Syed Manzoor Hussain Zaidi, CEO of Engro
Powergen Thar Limited.
Courtesy: Engro Powergen Thar Limited
The EPTL plant, located about 280 miles southeast of Karachi
in the Sindh province of Pakistan, is what Pakistani officials
call a first-of-its-kind mine mouth power plant, using
indigenous Thar coal-the first power generation facility to do
so. It is equipped with two 330-MW circulating fluidized bed
boilers, along with an innovative three (steam-cooled) cyclones
arrangement, with once reheat, two cylinders, two flow exhausting,
single axial and condensing steam turbine generators.
EPTL is a joint venture among Engro Powergen Ltd., China
Machinery Engineering Corp., Pakistan's Habib Bank Ltd., and
Liberty Mills Ltd., a Karachi-based industrial textile company.
The plant has what operators consider state-of-the-art environmental
control systems. ■
Grant Town Power Plant, West Virginia
S
ince 1810, West Virginia has harvested
14.7 billion tons of coal from
its rich coal seams in cycles of dizzying
growth and decline, fuel that has
founded a substantial share of the nation's
economic growth. But along with
this " good " coal, historic mining activity
produced hundreds of millions of tons
of coal " refuse, " including from underground mine development
and coal processing. This waste coal, often mixed in
with rock, shale, slurry, slate, clay, and other materials, is also
known as culm, gob, or boney. Until Congress enacted the
Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act of 1977, this material
was randomly stockpiled high on thousands of acres of
abandoned mine lands (AML). The safety and environmental
impacts posed by these dumps have been a longstanding
concern in West Virginia and elsewhere.
Providing some relief is American Bituminous Power Partners'
80-MW Grant Town Power Project, a plant that is sited
on 340 acres at the site of the former Federal #1 mine in Grant
Town, Marion County. Since 1993, it has remediated 530,000
tons of coal refuse annually and reclaimed roughly 30 acres of
land per year, all while producing 660,000 MWh under an electric
energy purchase agreement (EEPA), which ends in 2036
with First Energy's Monongahela Power Co.
As Plant Manager Steve Friend told POWER, producing power
with coal refuse, a fuel source of inconsistent quality, is not
easy. Often, the plant sources two types of waste coal: gob,
8
Courtesy: American Bituminous Power Partners
which is a coarse material leftover from screening operations-
" basically dirt " -and a finer material, " pond fines, " which were
typically deposited in a slurry pond. Once the fuel has been
combusted, the circulating fluidized bed boiler collects the
heavier ash at the bottom and the lighter ash-fly ash-in the
fabric collector. The majority of the ash products are sent back
to the mine site to aid with reclamation work.
Grant Town today owns or leases five reclamation sites, and
it has completed reclamation at three sites. For providing value
as both a power generator and a waste solution provider, and
demonstrating a unique sustainability-focused paradigm that
integrates both environmental and economic attributes, the
project is a worthy winner of a POWER Top Plant Award in the
coal-fired category. ■
www.powermag.com
Supplement to POWER
COAL
COAL
TOP PLANT
TOP PLANT
http://www.powermag.com
POWER December 2021

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