K-Fuel on The Move Recs: 1 25 MILLION Ton K-fuel Plant
If you have 13 minutes to listen to Evergreen's recent ALEC presentation in Washington D.C., it's well worth your time:
https://www.nextgenenergy.org/Portals/Nextgen/video/ALEC_Carrie_Atiyeh.wmv
There is some new information in there, especially near the end of the presentation:
- Evergreen now seems to think that the treated water squeezed from the coal is going to be useful in some western utilities, where fresh water is scarce. That causes me to wonder if one of these upcoming deals has something to do with Tucson Electric Power Company. They have a serious coal emissions problem, and one of the EEE board members is also TEP's president and CEO. Also note that TEP already has an extensive relationship with Bechtel, Evergreen's EPC contractor of choice.
- Last year some plant engineer on one of these message boards yelled at me for suggesting that Evergreen could use waste steam from a power plant to power the K-fuel process in a K-Direct configuration. "There is no such thing as free steam!", he proclaimed. Well, if you listen to the above presentation, it's clear that Evergreen thinks there IS such a thing as free steam. They use the term "letdown steam" to describe this typically wasted steam from power plants. I assume they are talking about older inefficient power plants, as that is what Evergreen has been aiming for.
- There is new talk of mixing K-fuel with biomass, to meet new environmental restrictions.
- The big news in that presentation is mention of a 25 MILLION TON K-fuel plant "that they're looking at". I don't think she misspoke. If you listen to that presentation you clearly get the idea that it was well rehearsed, and she knows her subject matter well.
Do you realize the physical size of a 25 MILLION ton plant? To put that in perspective, the Ft. Union plant uses two of those huge Lurgi pressure cookers, but a 25 million ton plant would require roughly 67 of them!
A plant that size is unlikely to be built by any power utility. A monster sized plant like that would be used by a major coal supplier, such as Arch, CPI, or that Indonesian mining company mentioned in today's PR.
Imagine the PROFITABILITY of a 25 million ton plant. And that's just ONE plant on their current road map.