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Orimulsion brings new life to Coleson Cove: a CDN $ 750 million upgrade at NB power''s 30-year-old 1050 MWe Coleson Cove aims to give the plants another three decades of competitive operating life. The key to the project is switching to Orimulsion.

Article Excerpt
The heavy-oil fired 3x350 MWe Cove plant, on the Bay of Fundy, near Saint John, Canada, is the biggest electricity supplier in New Brunswick. But it uses technology from the early 1970s. To meet ever more stringent environmental standards a radical upgrade was needed. There were also worries about the plant's economic vulnerability to the price volatility of heavy fuel oil.

Plant owner NB Power looked at: blending the existing fuel with low sulphur HFO; blending plus installation of a 400 MWe natural gas combined cycle system; full conversion to natural gas; and full conversion to Orimulsion 400 (transported by tanker from Venezuela).

Choosing Orimulsion

Switching to Orimulsion 400 (an emulsion of 30 per cent water and 70 per cent natural bitumen extracted from the Orinoco belt) turned out to be the most economic option, by a large margin.

The projected savings from the fuel switch are sufficient to fund the major programme of environmental upgrades needed, including: boiler modifications to lower nitrogen oxide emissions; installation of wet flue gas desulphurisation (FGD), downstream of the existing dry electrostatic precipitator system, to reduce sulphur dioxide; and addition of wet electrostatic precipitation to cut S[O.sub.3]/H[.sub.2]S[O.sub.4] mist and fine particle emissions.

The end result...