47 states and the Navajo Nation will receive a total of US$8 441 000 in funds to support safety and health training courses and other programmes to reduce mining accidents, injuries and illnesses, the US Department of Labor’s Mine Safety and Health Administration announced.
Grant recipients will use the funds to provide miners with federally mandated training covering the training of miners working at surface and underground coal and metal and nonmetal mines, including miners engaged in shell dredging or employed at surface stone, sand and gravel mining operations.
MSHA awarded these fiscal year 2016 grants based on applications from states and other eligible entities.
“This funding will enable educational, governmental and industry organisations across the country to develop training resources and train miners in an effort to ensure they return home – safe and healthy – after every shift,” said Joseph A. Main, Assistant Secretary of labor for mine safety and health.
In addition to safety and health training, some states use these grants to support their mine emergency response efforts and other statutory functions.
Edited from press release by Angharad Lock
Cloud Peak Energy Inc. has announced that Ms. Jeane L. Hull has been elected to the Cloud Peak Energy Board of Directors as a new Independent Director and will also serve as a member of the Audit Committee, the Compensation Committee and the Health, Safety, Environment and Communities Committee of the Board.
Hull retired from Peabody Energy Corporation in August 2015 where she served as Peabody’s Executive Vice President and Chief Technical Officer, with responsibility for global strategy and governance for health, safety and environment, supply chain, engineering, applied technologies and asset management functions.
Hull joined Peabody in 2007 as the Senior Vice President of Engineering and Technical Services and managed the global delivery of engineering, environmental, geology and design and construction services. She also served as Peabody’s Group Executive, Powder River Basin from 2008 to 2011 and assumed additional responsibility for Southwest Operations in 2010.
William Fox, Chairman of the Board of Cloud Peak Energy, said: “We are excited to have Jeane join our Board. Jeane has a strong background in the coal industry, and brings additional senior executive and operational leadership and substantial engineering and environmental and regulatory affairs experience to the Board. We look forward to her valuable insights and contributions to our company.”
Edited from press release by Angharad Lock
Researchers at the University of Strathclyde have secured funding for a four-year project to study the ability of complex rock strata beneath the North Sea to trap carbon dioxide emissions (CO2) securely.
Their findings will help to provide the tools for selecting the most suitable CO2 storage sites.
The study will look at how CO2, when injected into rocks deep below ground, could migrate upwards through the overlying strata, or overburden. The greenhouse gas can become trapped by dissolving into water-filled spaces between the rock grains. In more complex geology, where the fluids flow through complex pathways, there may be more potential for trapping CO2 as it rises, thereby minimising the risk of it escaping to the surface.
However, fault zones cutting geological layers could potentially provide shortcuts past the layers where CO2 could be trapped. The project team will investigate how the faults and rock strata interact to change the pathways for CO2 flow through the overburden.
The researchers from Strathclyde, an SCCS partner institute, will work with fellow scientists from the Universities of Cambridge and Imperial, and the British Geological Survey as part of a larger research project funded by Natural Environment Research Council (NERC).
Professor Zoe Shipton, University of Strathclyde, who will lead the fault zone study, said: “The rock types found within fault zones will change depending on the rocks that they cut. By understanding how the fault rock types influence mechanisms such as capillary trapping, dissolution of CO2 in water and migration pathways, our work can guide strategies for quantifying and reducing the risks of CO2 leakage from geological storage sites. We will construct simplified models of flow along layered strata with cross-cutting faults, alongside our partners’ laboratory analogue experiments, in order to constrain the effect of geological complexity on the fate of CO2 leaking from a subsurface storage site.”
Edited from press release by Angharad Lock
delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how news, features and opinion come together at The New York Times. In this piece, the investigative reporter Ian Urbina describes two new technologies that made a daunting reporting job easier.
A whistle-blower gave me hundreds of hours of surreptitiously recorded phone conversations that revealed potential wrongdoing at the power plant where he worked.
Hundreds of hours. How could I possibly listen to all of the recordings and make any sense of them?
More daunting still: I’d gathered thousands of pages of documents (corporate earnings statements, internal emails, company news releases, local news coverage, Security and Exchange Commission filings, and reports from state regulators). Was there a way to organize this material so I could easily spot the most important content?
These were some of the challenges involved in reporting for Tuesday’s paper about an innovative but troubled power plant being built in Kemper County, Miss.
The project occupies a central role in the Obama administration’s plans to counter climate change and has been heralded as a poster child for the promise of so-called clean coal. The plant would deploy new technology to superheat coal, would remove most of its carbons and other harmful pollutants and was to be a showcase for local ingenuity and engineering savvy. Many energy experts think the kind of carbon-capture technology that the Kemper plant uses will enable countries around the world to reach last year.
But the Kemper power plant is still not online. Instead, it is more than two years past deadline and more than $4 billion over budget. The plant’s owner faces credit downgrades, multiple lawsuits and an investigation by the S.E.C.
A holy grail for every president since Ronald Reagan, clean coal and carbon-capture technology promise a way to make electricity by . Producing roughly 45 percent of the emissions that cause climate change, coal is a dirty fuel source. Yet the world still relies on it for power, with more than 25 percent of the electricity used globally coming from coal plants, as it starts shifting to more renewable sources of energy.
A close look at the Kemper project’s troubles offered insight into the necessity — and danger — of federal subsidies. It also showed the conflicts created by our competing energy and environmental priorities.
It also raised some thorny questions: Did the plant’s owner intentionally mislead the public, investors and regulators about the cost and timetable of the project? Why have 23 of the poorest counties in the country been saddled with costs connected to the most expensive power plant in American history? What does this fraught power plant say about the financial feasibility of carbon-capture technology and its prospects for helping to slow global warming?
I was fairly confident that, if I could only organize them properly, the thousands of documents I had compiled would offer useful insights.
Two online tools proved enormously helpful. VoiceBase is a relatively new transcription site that converts audio into written transcripts. I could skim transcripts far more quickly than I could listen to all those hours of conversation, and this tool made it much easier to pinpoint useful information. In the end, I listened to all the conversations to check that the transcriptions were accurate.
A new website called , which is partly funded by The New York Times Company, allows users to create visual and interactive timelines. The site enables users to build annotated timelines that incorporate a variety of documents, videos, audio, and social media posts. We used The History Project to build a page called that drew from an array of raw documents and multimedia materials. This was especially helpful to me because it was difficult to keep straight so many different sources of information.
In a given week, what did the company say in a news release or earnings call on the one hand, and in recorded phone calls or internal emails on the other? How long after the company asked for permission to continue their project did it reveal that they were far more in debt than previously disclosed? The History Project made it easier to keep track of all this.
Interactive Feature | The Kemper Coal Files View a timeline of events and documents related to the Kemper coal plant at The History Project.
I also wanted to track subtle changes in how company officials described the project and its mission over time. There was a steady upward creep in the project’s cost, for instance; evolving explanations for delays; accumulating warnings from engineers; and the transition in the prevailing public perception of the project from hope to skepticism. The whistle-blower’s perspective also evolved.
When it was published, the timeline included more than 30,000 words, or about 65 pages worth of annotations to help readers understand why each document in the file was significant.
As I get more documents — there are nearly a dozen open-records requests pending that were sent months ago to federal and state agencies — they will be added to the collection. The timeline also offers an interactive feature which allows readers to focus on documents tied to one theme. It highlights various issues over time: Were there early warnings about this fraught project? What was the company’s view? Who should pay for the cost overruns?
The History Project and VoiceBase made what might have been an overwhelming task manageable. The new technologies helped me hone in on the right questions and trace them through time. They also helped make the publishing of these documents more interactive, by allowing readers to dive into the archives for themselves.
Global energy demand is rising and water is becoming scarcer in many parts of the world. The power generation industry is often the largest industrial user of fresh water. Many countries with a growing demand for energy are also water stressed. Coal-fired power plants need a reliable supply of water, of a specified quality, that will be available over the lifetime of the plant (often more than 40 years). This means alternative water sources will become increasingly important.
In her latest report for the IEA Clean Coal Centre, Anne Carpenter examines non-fresh water sources for coal-fired power plants in China, India, South Africa and the USA. These are the top four thermal coal consuming countries and all have water-stressed regions. The potential water sources are:
Treated municipal waste water (MWW) (or reclaimed water) is abundant and widespread and some power plants already use it for cooling. More could use it, especially in China and India. The Chinese government now requires new thermal power plants to use nearby MWW sources. In India it is mandatory for power plants to use treated MWW if it is available within a 100 km radius. MWW is the most used alternative water supply at US thermal power plants, with around 5% of existing cooling systems using it – and more could.
Corrosion, scaling and biofouling of pipes and cooling systems associated with the use of MWW can be controlled with adequate water treatment. Both power plant operators and municipalities can benefit financially and environmentally from the reuse of MWW. The problem is a lack of data on its availability, quantity and quality, and increasing competition for it in some areas.
Sea water can provide an unlimited supply for coastal power plants and brackish ground water is also an also important resource for inland power plants. Both can be used directly (with minimal treatment) for cooling purposes, if the plant is designed for its use. However, desalination is required to supply fresh water needs. The governments of China, India and South Africa all recognise that desalination is likely to be important. China, for example, requires all new power plants in coastal regions to use sea water desalination to supply their fresh water requirements.
Integrating the power plant and desalination units has economic and environmental benefits. Most of the energy needs of a desalination plant can be met by using the low-grade heat from the power plant, which reduces energy costs. This improves the efficiency of the desalination plant and less cooling water is required in the power plant. If the desalination plant has excess capacity, the power plant can become a co-producer of power and water, instead of a water consumer. The main disadvantage is that the integrated system is harder to operate due to seasonal variability in electricity demand.
Mine water from abandoned and active mines could be an important source for nearby power plants in some regions. Its use could turn a water pollution liability into a water resource. A number of power plants currently use it for cooling purposes. Legal and fiscal incentives would encourage more use of mine water. But, there are no comprehensive inventories of mine pools and drainage available. China has set targets for the reuse of mine water and new power plants in North China have been given priority access to mine drainage and recycled water. South Africa has recognised the importance of recovering water from acid mine drainage and the reuse of mine water.
Water produced from oil and gas wells is limited. It can be difficult to collect from each well within a field, transport it, and manage the variability in flow and quality over time. However, the combination of heat, pressure and salinity in the produced water may provide opportunities for energy recovery, and help lower the cost of its treatment. Only a few power plants, mainly in Australia, are currently exploiting this source. They are firing coalbed methane (CBM) and utilising the produced water from the coalfield for cooling purposes.
The amount of produced water may increase in the future as countries develop their unconventional oil and gas resources. India and China are both supporting unconventional gas development. In the US, produced water from oil and gas wells and from CBM activities, could potentially become a significant source of water. Data on the quantity and quality of produced water is lacking.
Water from deep saline aquifers could be used as part of carbon capture and storage (CCS), depending on site-specific conditions. Substantial quantities of water may need to be extracted to facilitate storage. The volume may be enough to replace, or even exceed, the increased water requirements of carbon capture and, in some cases, may even enable a power plant to become a net producer of both water and electricity. Also, using the heat, pressure and salinity in the extracted water, where possible, could help lower water treatment costs. This water source is not yet being used by a power plant, although a few projects are planned.
The use of economically treated non-fresh water by coal power plants can reduce the burden on fresh water supplies, whilst enabling the plants to continue to deliver the energy that is needed. In some cases, with a suitable on-site water treatment plant, a coal power plant could even become a supplier of both energy and fresh water, instead of a water consumer.
The economic feasibility of using alternative water sources depends on local conditions, such as the distance to the power plant, the amount of water available, its price, and treatment costs. Treatment, such as desalination, is required to avoid problems in the power plant. But it can be energy-intensive and expensive. New treatment technologies and new materials that are tolerant of lower water quality are needed. This could encourage more use of the alternative water sources.
Edited by Jonathan Rowland.
South32 South Africa Energy Coal has donated two light duty vehicles to the Mpuma Waste Material Primary Co-operative. The donation comes as part of a long-term commitment to support eco-friendly businesses in areas where it operates.
The donation follows a joint initiative in 2014 with the eMalahleni Local Municipality and Department of Environmental Affairs to establish the Co-operative, which has a focus on collecting, sorting, weighing and selling reclaimable waste.
South32 has committed R3.5 million over the next five years to support the establishment and running of the Co-operative as part of South32’s Social and Labour Plan. South32 will also provide machinery, tools and furniture, plus market and business support.
Mpuma Waste founding member Godfrey Malaza, said: “The donation of the vehicles and South32’s ongoing support will enable our company to grow and create more jobs within the next six months.”
Edited from press release by Angharad Lock
Murmagao Port in Goa, India, registered 46% year-on-year growth in cargo handling in June 2016, according to the Indian Ministry of Shipping.
The port handled 1.7 million t in June compared to 1.2 million t in June 2015. Cargo handled from April – June 2016 was 8.5 million t a 104% year-on-year rise.
According to the ministry, the growth was fuelled by a significant surge in iron ore exports and coal imports during the first quarter. Container traffic was also up by 31%.
Edited by Jonathan Rowland.
Baldor Electric Co. has awarded the Baldor Eagle Award to Flanders for being an outstanding distributor in 2015. Flanders has been a Baldor distributor for over 15 years, and has been servicing heavy industry and the mining community to power their operations for nearly 70 years.
“Baldor provides a number of universal motors used by a large number of our customers, which enables us to provide quicker turnaround times,” commented Flanders’ Midwest Sales Manager, Jed Elkins.
Edited from press release by Angharad Lock
Bankrupt US coal company, Arch Coal, has secured a global settlement with certain of its secured lenders, holding two-thirds of its first lien term loan, and the official committee of unsecured lenders (the UCC). As a result, an amended plan or reorganisation has been filed with the bankruptcy court.
The settlement ends the threat of litigation by unsecured lenders, easing the company’s route out of bankruptcy.
“The global settlement is a momentous achievement that should facilitate a timely and successful conclusion to our financial restructuring process,” said John W. Eaves, Arch’s Chairman and CEO, in a press release.
Edited by Jonathan Rowland.
US utility, Southern Co., has issued a forceful response to a recent New York Times article that criticises the Kemper County energy facility, an integrated gasification combined cycle plant that will turn lignite into gas, which in then used to generate power.
“Southern Co. is proudly investing America’s – and the world’s – energy future through the development of the world’s advanced coal plant,” the company said in a press release.
“Rather than educate readers on the worldwide benefits of this cutting-edge first-of-its-kind facility, the New York Time’s article on the Kemper project provides a negative recap of previously disclosed developments that have already been addressed.”
According to the New York Times, the project is currently more than two years behind scheduled and more than US$4 billion over its initial budget: “Members of Congress have described the project as more boondoggle than boon.”
In response, Southern Co. accuses the New York Times article of attempting to “deliver a pre-conceived narrative” and of failing to “mention key facts communicated to the reports that would clearly illustrated the company’s commitment to completing the project the right way for the benefit of customers.”
It also noted that concerns raised by the former Kemper employee, Brett Wingo, in the New York Times had been previously investigated through internal and third-party investigations that concluded the concerns were unsubstantiated and “not otherwise supported by the facts.”
Edited by Jonathan Rowland.
German coal marketing and trading company, HMS Bergbau, have acquired a 25.1% stake in South African company, Zamfin Capital, through its subsidiary HMS Bergbau Africa.
The deal will bring HMS Bergbau Africa access to coal processing capacity of 350 000 tpm in the Delmas area of Mpumalanga Province to the east of Johannesburg. The processing plant is located in close proximity to South Africa’s largest power plant, the Kendal power plant.
As part of the transaction, HMS Bergbau Africa also concluded an exclusive marketing agreement with Zamfin Capital and its parent company, Zamfin Group.
“With this acquisition, HMS Bergbau strengthens its position in the strategically important Mpumalanga region of South Africa and can supply domestic, as well as export, markets with the required coal qualities,” the company said in a press release.
Further details of the transaction were kept confidential. Based in Berlin, HMS Bergbau specialises in the international purchase and sale of coal and other raw materials, such as ore, metals and cement products.
Edited by Jonathan Rowland.
Leigh Creek Energy has announced the commencement of drilling operations at the Leigh Creek site. The drilling programme will initially comprise 3 drill holes that will continue to enhance and validate the models at the preferred Pre-Commercial Gas Demonstration Facility site, while obtaining required environmental data. The data collected will include:
Further drilling to install additional monitoring wells will be defined on completion of these initial wells.
The drilling and monitoring programme over the next 8 weeks will capture data that is used in the hydrogeological model, the geological model and the geotechnical model, all of which provides important information to the Environmental Impact Report for the Pre-Commercial Gas Demonstration Operations, along with refining site selection.
Actual water flow testing at depth will be used to calibrate recently constructed hydrogeological models developed from historical data obtained across the Leigh Creek Coal Field.
Edited from press release by Angharad Lock
Sensor Technology’s offering to the coal handling and transportation industry is built around its non-contact digital torque monitoring technology. Applied to the control systems for conveyors, it can transform these processes into accurately monitored and optimally managed systems.
Accurate monitoring of torque is a key indicator of impending mechanical problems. The data can also be used to ensure conveyors are being run at optimum speeds, and that mechanical shocks are being minimised.
Traditionally torque data has been hard to collect, with wired technologies vulnerable to the challenging environmental conditions inherent in coal handling operations, while also being expensive and difficult to set up. Wireless technology offers an important alternative that is being recognised as a real enabler for monitoring torque in even the most demanding applications.
The company’s TorqSense transducer is based on the patented technology of measuring the resonant frequency change of surface acoustic wave (SAW) devices. TorqSense torque sensors use two tiny SAW devices or SAWs made of ceramic piezoelectric material containing frequency resonating combs. These are glued onto the drive shaft at 90 degrees to one another. As the torque increases the combs expand or contract proportionally to the torque being applied. In effect the combs act similarly to strain gauges but measure changes in resonant frequency.
The adjacent RF (radio frequency) device transmits radio waves towards the SAWs, which are then reflected back and picked up by the device. The change in frequency of the reflected waves identifies the current torque. This arrangement means there is no need to supply power to the SAWs, so the sensor is non-contact and wireless.
TorqSense has seen widespread adoption in torque monitoring applications across a host of industries.
Edited from press release by Angharad Lock
The US Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) issued 89 citations during special impact inspections in May, according to an MSHA news release. The inspections were undertaken at 13 coal mines and one metal/nonmetal mine.
Monthly impact inspections began in April 2010 and target mines that “merit increased agency attention and enforcement due to their poor compliance history or compliance concerns,” according to MSHA.
Since 2010, MSHA inspectors have conducted 1156 inspections, issuing 16 315 citations, 1313 orders and 60 safeguards. Last month, a Kentucky coal was temporarily closed after a special impact inspection resulted in three unwarrantable failure orders.
In May, 13 coal mines in Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Virginia, Kentucky, Indiana, Utah and Alabama were inspected. MSHA inspections issues 70 citations to these mines with the Dotiki mine in Kentucky picking up 16 of these.
Dotiki mines Illinois Basin coal in Webster County, Kentucky, producing 4 million t in 2015. The mine is operated by Webster County Coal LLC, a subsidiary of Alliance Resource Partners.
Meanwhile Warrior Met Coal’s No. 7 Mine and Warrior Investments Co.’s Maxine-Pratt mine – both in Alabama – picked up zero citations.
The No. 7 mine was bought by Warrior Met Coal, an entity formed by Walter Energy creditors, from Walter Energy during its bankruptcy proceedings. According to MSHA data, the mine produced just over 3 million short t in 2015, down from 5.2 million short t in 2014.
Edited by Jonathan Rowland.
Indian state-owned coal company, Coal India (CIL), recorded strong monthly production in June of 42.72 million t, finishing the month fractionally under its target of 43.31 million t.
Financial-year-to-date production now stands 125.65 million, 5% below the target of 132.43 million t – but 3.5% up on the year before.
Northern Coalfields (NCL) continued its strong performance this year with above-target monthly production of 6.81 million t to take its FY-to-date production to 20.45 million t – a 12% increase on the same period last year.
Central Coalfields (CCL), Mahanadi Coalfields (MCL) and Western Coalfields (WCL) also beat their monthly production targets – although WCL remains significantly below its performance last year.
Headquartered in Sambalpur, Odisha, MCL is the largest coal producer among CIL’s subsidiaries with FY-to-date production of 34.1 million t. It is followed by South Eastern Coalfields (SECL) with 32.1 million t.
Edited by Jonathan Rowland.
Confirmed cases of coal workers’ pneumoconiosis in Queensland have jumped to 11 as four diagnoses were confirmed over the past week.
The spate of new confirmed cases includes the youngest case yet recorded in this recent outbreak: a 39 year old man that worked for a period of 11 years in a number of mines in the Bowen Basin.
Queensland’s mining companies are offering workers new x-rays, as well as offering to re-read existing x-rays, as part of attempts to deal with the outbreak.
“It is expected, as stated earlier this year, that further cases will be identified from this extra activities and as mines respond the focus on coal workers’ pneumoconiosis,” said the Queensland Department of Natural Resources and Mines (DNR).
The state government has implemented a five-point action plant to tackle the emergence of the disease, which is also known as black lung.
According to the DNR, a confirmed case is defined as when “a positive identification of coal worker’s pneumoconiosis has been reported to the Health Surveillance Unit of the Department of Natural Resources and Mines by the coal mine worker’s Nominated Medical Advisor or other medical expert and validated by the department’s occupational physician.
But unions claim that this is currently significantly underestimating the number of cases of black lung with the CFMEU saying it is aware of dozens of cases that are yet to be officially acknowledged.
Edited by Jonathan Rowland. Sources: Sky News; Courier Mail.
Botswana-focused coalbed methane (CBM) developer, Tlou Energy, has been selected to develop a CBM power plant at its Lesedi CBM Project by the Botswana government.
The company is still expecting full details from the Ministry of Energy and Water Resources (MMEWR), but the project offtake agreement is expected to be for 50 MW – five times larger than the 10 MW power plant originally proposed by Tlou.
“We are elated by this decision and look forward to receiving the full details from the MMEWR,” said Tlou’s Acting Managing Director, Gabaake Gabaake.
Although we always planned to expand our project beyond the 10 MW initially envisaged as being fast-tracked for development, a 50 MW project is five times larger than expected and a fabulous result for the company. Importantly it provides more certainty to our investment case to increase power output as we develop our field.”
The news follows a recent announcement from the Botswana government that it would target the incorporation of 100 MW of CBM power into its future generation supply plans.
Reaction from the investment community has also been positive with Panmure Gordon saying Tlou was now in the “box seat for domestic power generation in Botswana”.
“As the government plans start to firm up, Tlou should be in a strong position to gain financing to see Lesedi move forward,” the broker said in note.
Edited by Jonathan Rowland.
AAG Energy Holdings Ltd has announced that the Group has achieved new production milestones at both the Panzhuang and Mabi CBM concessions.
CBM production from the Panzhuang concession has exceeded 1.5 million m3/d. The Panzhuang concession was the first Sino-foreign CBM cooperative project to have received Overall Development Plan (ODP) approval from the NDRC.
At the Mabi CBM concession, the CBM gross gas flow rate from the pilot wells exceeded 100 000 m3/d. This is an increase of 300% over the January 2016 average daily production.
Mr. Carl Lakey, Co-CEO and COO of AAG Energy, commented: “I am very excited about these two encouraging news. This continued ramp-up in production should enable Panzhuang to soon exceed its ODP-designed annual commercial capacity of 500 million m3, marking yet another significant milestone as well as demonstrating its leading role in China’s CBM development. We have also achieved remarkable progress at Mabi, a direct result of our relentless testing and application of innovative CBM development technologies and operational best practices for the past several years. The performance improvement in the pilot area reinforces our confidence that we are on the right track to commercialise Mabi’s CBM resources. AAG Energy is committed to sustainable development in a socially responsible and environmentally sustainable way, providing superior returns on shareholders’ investment and simultaneously acting in the long-term interests of the environment and society. We will continue our efforts to secure and share even greater benefits wherever we operate.”
Edited from press release by Angharad Lock
Telestack displayed a number of debutants at Hillhead from across their comprehensive range.
Malachy Gribben, Commercial Director, explained: “Telestack have grown extensively, not only in terms of sales but also in terms of new markets, new industries and the associated product range. We have two specialist divisions with the company – Telestack Aggregates and Mining and Telestack Ports and Inland Terminals. Of course our years of experience are transferable in terms of design and functionality, but we now have specialist teams that understand intricately the individual sector that they are dedicated to serve. Each team has first-hand experience and understands their respective and specialist sector.”
Telestack used Hillhead to globally launch a number of new models. First up was the AggStack range – a series of value added mobile conveying systems designed to meet the needs of the quarry, aggregate, sand and gravel markets. The comprehensive AggStack series combines their range of entry level radial telescopic stackers, radial fixed length stacking conveyors, truck unloaders, hopper feeders and link conveyors with an emphasis on functionality, strength, performance and price point.
Another development for the Telestack Aggregates and Mining division is the enhancement to the Telestack hopper feeder range. On the Telestack stand were the LF520 and the brand new LF520 Radial. The Low Feeder range allows the operator to directly discharge from wheel loaders/ grab cranes and excavators at a significantly lower feed in height compared to standard hopper feeders. The LF520 Radial was launched at Hillhead.
Telestack also displayed the HF1021R from the Revolution series – the hopper feeder range with centre mounted slew bearing that enables 360° rotation of the hopper and boom. Ideal for barge loading and unloading, rail loading and unloading and stockpiling, the parallel travel feature enables the operator to manoeuvre the unit parallel to the vessel removing the need to reposition the unit, thus enhancing loading rates and efficiency. The Revolution option is available on all HF/LF models.
Marketing Manager, Mairead McCrory, explained: “Hillhead is a pivotal show for Telestack – we had a comprehensive display of equipment that demonstrates the breadth and depth of our range. Telestack are an exciting company who truly understand their markets. It’s also a great opportunity to catch up with our long-standing and loyal customers who travel far and wide to Hillhead as well as those who are in the process of including Telestack equipment in their fleet!”
Edited from press release by Angharad Lock
SUEK’s Daltransugol coal terminal has handled 10 million t of coal so far this year, the first time the milestone has been hit over a six month period.
Daltransugol is the largest coal terminal in the Russian Far East and ships coal to the Asia-Pacific region. Last year, the terminal handled 18.3 million t of coal.
“Achieving such results become possible thanks to the modernization of the terminal equipment, the introduction of new highly-efficient technology [and the] well coordinated and professions work of the whole team at Daltransugol,” SUEK said in a press release.
The terminal is currently undertaking a further upgrade to increase its capacity. The first stage of this project – a connecting route between the Vanino Railways park station and Daltransugol – was opened in early June.
Daltransugol was opened in 2008 with an initial capacity of 12 million t. SUEK is Russia’s largest coal company, supplying 27.5% of the country’s coal in 2014 – some 98.9 million t. It is also one of the largest coal exporters, shipping 38.7 million t in 2014.
Edited by Jonathan Rowland.
The Swedish government has approved Vattenfall’s divestment of its German lignite assets to Czech energy company, Energetický a prumyslový (EPH), and its financial partner, PPF Investments.
Vattenfall, which is owned by the Swedish government, announced in April that it planned to hand over control of the lignite mines and power plants to EPH, but the Swedish government had come under pressure from environmental groups to reject the proposal and force the utility to close the assets.
The transaction will cement EPH’s position within the lignite mining and power sector in Germany, adding the Vattenfall assets to those it already owns through its MIBRAG subsidiary.
Speaking at the time the deal was announced, Jan Špringl, Member of the Board of EPH, said that EPH was “well positioned to assume the responsibilities related to the ownership of Vatenfall’s lignite assets in Germany in currently challenging market circumstances.”
The deal is expected to be closed on 31 August 2016. It remains subject to merger clearance from the European Commission.
Edited by Jonathan Rowland.
Australia Pacific LNG has confirmed that its first LNG shipments to the Kanai Electric Power Co. of Japan left its Curtis Island facility in Queensland, Australia. The shipment is the 27th shipment by APLNG since exports began from Train 1 of its LNG plant.
The first cargo from Train 2 is expected by the end of 2016.
The Kansai Electric shipments left on the LNG Fukurokuji, which was recently built to fulfil the Japanese utility’s contact with APLNG. The Japanese company is contracted to received about 1 million tpy of LNG for 20 years.
APLNG produces LNG from coalbed methane (CBM; called coal seam gas in Australia), which is supplied by Origin Energy, one of APLNG’s joint venture partners.
“This is yet another milestone for the first coal seam gas to LNG project in the world, an industry that represents more than AUS$60 billion worth of investment, 22 million tpy of LNG exports and export contracts with China, Kapan and Korea” said Queensland Treasurer, Curtis Pitt.
Pitt also noted that growth in the sector was continuing with QGC’s AUS$1.7 billion Charlie CSG project announced late last year.
“By 2018, Queensland could be the world’s fourth largest LNG exporter and, by the end of the decade, Australia has the potential to be the world’s leading LNG exporter,” Pitt concluded.
Edited by Jonathan Rowland.
TerraCom Ltd has announced that the company is to acquire Blair Athol Coal Mine in Queensland, Australia. The acquisition price is AUS$1 and TerraCom will receive AUS$80 million from the Blair Athol Coal joint venture to meet the mine’s rehabilitation liability. The acquisition comprises mining leases, licences, land, contracts and all mining equipment.
The company plans to start 50 ha. of site rehabilitation with a production rate of approximately 2 million tpy of coal expected.
Edited from press release by Angharad Lock
According to World Mining Equipment Market – Opportunities and Forecasts, 2015 – 2022, a new report published by Allied Market Research, the global mining equipment market is expected to garner US$156 billion by 2022, growing at a CAGR of 7.9% during 2016 – 2022. Asia-Pacific accounted for the highest revenue of over US$50 billion in 2015, followed by LAMEA. The report argues that growth will be driven by increasing demand for coal in electricity generating applications and increasing demand for technologically advanced mining equipment.
Coal mining is anticipated to witness impressive growth in developing economies such as China and India in the coming years.
The sections by type include mineral processing equipment, surface mining equipment, underground mining equipment, mining drills & breakers, crushing, pulverising & screening equipment, and other mining equipment.
Surface mining equipment accounted for a market share of around 31% in 2015, as they are extensively being used in application areas such as coal mining. From a growth perspective, mining drills and breakers is projected to be the fastest growing segment due to increasing application in metal mining.
Edited from press release by Angharad Lock
DE KALB, Miss. — The fortress of steel and concrete towering above the pine forest here is a first-of-its-kind power plant that was supposed to prove that “clean coal” was not an oxymoron — that it was possible to produce electricity from coal in a way that emits far less pollution, and to turn a profit while doing so.
The plant was not only a central piece of the Obama administration’s climate plan, it was also supposed to be a model for future power plants to help slow the dangerous effects of global warming. The project was hailed as a way to bring thousands of jobs to Mississippi, the nation’s poorest state, and to extend a lifeline to the dying coal industry.
The sense of hope is fading fast, however. The Kemper coal plant is more than two years behind schedule and more than $4 billion over its initial budget, $2.4 billion, and it is still not operational.
The plant and its owner, , are the focus of a Securities and Exchange Commission investigation, and ratepayers, alleging fraud, are suing the company. Members of Congress have described the project as more boondoggle than boon. The mismanagement is particularly egregious, they say, given the urgent need to rein in the largest source of dangerous emissions around the world: coal plants.
The plant’s backers, including federal energy officials, have defended their work in recent years by saying that delays and cost overruns are inevitable with innovative projects of this scale. In this case, they say, the difficulties stem largely from unforeseen factors — or “unknown unknowns,” as Tom Fanning, the chief executive of Southern Company, has often called them — like bad weather, labor shortages and design uncertainties.
Many problems plaguing the project were broadly known and had been occurring for years. But a review by The New York Times of thousands of pages of public records, previously undisclosed internal documents and emails, and 200 hours of secretly though legally recorded conversations among more than a dozen colleagues at the plant offers a detailed look at what went wrong and why.
Those documents and recordings, provided to The Times by a whistle-blower, an engineer named Brett Wingo, and interviews with more than 30 current or former regulators, contractors, consultants or engineers who worked on the project, show that the plant’s owners drastically understated the project’s cost and timetable, and repeatedly tried to conceal problems as they emerged.
The system of checks and balances that are supposed to keep such projects on track was outweighed by a shared and powerful incentive: The company and regulators were eager to qualify for hundreds of millions of dollars in federal subsidies for the plant, which was also aggressively promoted by Haley Barbour, who was Southern’s chief lobbyist before becoming the governor of Mississippi. Once in office, Mr. Barbour signed a law in 2008 that allowed much of the cost of building any new power plants to be passed on to ratepayers before they are built.
Seeing so many of the problems from the inside, at least one employee felt the need to speak up.
“I’ve reached a personal tipping point and feel a duty to act,” Mr. Wingo wrote in a 2014 email, which was among several that he sent to officials of Southern Company and Mississippi Power, the state utility that runs the plant, alleging that the company had broken federal law and engaged in corporate fraud. “Hope is not a strategy,” he added. “This is a high-profile project with many misguided enemies, so why give them free ammo?”
In their recorded conversations with Mr. Wingo, at least six senior engineers from the plant said that they believed that the delays and cost overruns, as well as safety violations and shoddy work, were partly the result of mismanagement or fraud.
“It has nothing to do with the design, it has nothing to do with the technology, it just has to do with poor project management,” Landon Lunsford, an engineer at the plant, said during one recorded call with Mr. Wingo last December, when they discussed an email from Southern’s legal department telling senior employees to retain all emails because of a continuing S.E.C. investigation.
The company will never admit the project-management problems because they will attract more scrutiny from regulators, Mr. Lunsford said. “As long as they can talk away the results as attributable to something else other than just poor performance, the other public service commissions can’t hold them over the fire as much,” he added.
Officials from Southern Company and , which is a Southern subsidiary, said that they could not comment on Mr. Wingo’s allegations but that all decisions about cost and budget projections were made by consensus. They also said that Mr. Wingo’s accusations had previously been investigated by the company and could not be substantiated. Mr. Wingo was fired in February, a move that the Occupational Safety and Health Administration later ruled illegal.
Ed Holland, the former chief executive of Mississippi Power, added that one of the project’s biggest mistakes was to start construction with little of the plant designed. “We still believe that from our investors’ standpoint, this was a wise investment to prove the technology,” he said in an interview.
In the end, the Kemper project is a story of how a monopoly utility, with political help from the Mississippi governor and from federal energy officials who pressured state regulators in letters to support the project, shifted the burden of one of the most expensive power plants ever built onto the shoulders of unwitting investors and some of the lowest-income ratepayers in the country.
Kemper’s rising price tag and other problems will probably affect the Environmental Protection Agency’s proposed rules on new power plants, and also play into broader discussions about the best way to counter climate change. E.P.A. regulations in effect require new coal plants to have carbon capture technology but are being held up in federal court partly by arguments that the technology is not cost-effective.
The importance of this technology grows, as well, after President Obama said last week that the United States would join Canada and Mexico in pledging to reach a shared goal of generating 50 percent of North America’s electricity from zero-carbon sources by 2025, up from 37 percent today, with a power mix that includes wind, solar, hydropower, and coal or gas power paired with carbon capture technology.
“The big question with clean coal has always been whether it’s a moonshot or a money pit,” said Charles Grayson, the director of the , which advocates fiscal conservatism in Mississippi and has been critical of the Kemper project for years. “The Obama administration and my state made a really bad wager in trying to use Kemper to make the economic argument for this technology.”
Interactive Feature | The Kemper Coal Files View a timeline of events and documents related to the Kemper coal plant at The History Project.
Coal represents a conundrum: It is among the dirtiest sources of fuel, producing roughly 45 percent of the emissions that contribute to climate change. And yet the world still relies on it for power, with more than a quarter of the electricity used globally coming from coal plants.
Southern Company proposed a promising idea with the Kemper project. Providing a cleaner way to use coal, which is cheap and abundant in the United States, the plant also offered the means to preserve many coal-mining jobs that are fast disappearing in this part of the country.
, with mostly two-lane roads cutting through clay hills and pine forest, has an average per capita income of $14,837 and an unemployment rate roughly double the national average. To the region, the plant offered more than clean power: It promised hope, at least 12,000 jobs and long-term savings. As construction ramped up, the county took in over $8 million annually in extra tax money, which went toward repairing roads, bridges and schools, lowering local property taxes, and clearing debt.
In the summer of 2005, as Hurricane Katrina toppled drilling rigs and uprooted pipelines in the Gulf of Mexico, the price of natural gas rose by more than 40 percent. In Mississippi, utility regulators saw the Kemper plant as a way to diversify its energy options in a state that relies on natural gas for nearly 80 percent of its electricity.
Interactive Feature | Short Answers to Hard Questions About Clean Coal Technology A primer on carbon capture and storage, and why it has an uncertain future as a force for fighting climate change.
The plant, which broke ground in 2010, would run on lignite, a type of coal that is difficult to process but is plentiful in the region. Most of the carbon dioxide produced by the plant would be captured, compressed, sold and piped to oil fields. There, it would be pumped underground in a process known as enhanced oil recovery, to help push up previously unrecoverable oil to levels where it could be reached.
Though carbon capture technology is proven and widely viewed as a potentially important tool to slow global warming, the question has been whether it can be scaled up affordably.
Before becoming governor, Mr. Barbour helped orchestrate the transfer of about $270 million in federal subsidies from a canceled coal plant in Florida to the proposed Mississippi plant. As governor, Mr. Barbour then signed the , which shifted much of the cost and risk of building power plants from investors to consumers, and allowed utilities such as Mississippi Power to charge ratepayers for projects before they were completed.
Carbon capture has been considered a holy grail for decades. For Ronald Reagan, it was a solution to acid rain; for Bill Clinton, an alternative to nuclear power. George W. Bush billed his FutureGen project as the world’s first zero-emissions coal plant but mothballed it when it became too expensive.
As the emphasis on fighting climate change grew, the Obama administration hung many of its hopes on Kemper. Gina McCarthy, the E.P.A. administrator, cited federal support for the project as proof that her agency was not anti-coal, despite strict new rules on power-plant emissions. The Energy Department repeatedly wrote state regulators emphasizing the importance of the project.
By 2012, though, “Miss Power,” as locals called the state utility, was facing mounting criticism about the plant. In May of that year, after the utility said that the Kemper project was $366 million over budget, it announced a plan to raise its customers’ rates by 13 percent.
Campaigning for a seat on the , Thomas A. Blanton, an opponent of the project, ran television ads featuring an older woman eating dog food and warning of sacrifices that poorer people sometimes make to afford electricity. In cramped trailers where some of the poorest people in the state live, summer temperatures topped 110 degrees — potentially deadly for older residents who could not pay to keep their air-conditioning running.
“You don’t want to pay to build my home, and I don’t want to pay to build your plant,” John Gooding, a cabinetmaker from Bay St. Louis, who lost his home in Hurricane Katrina, said during a public hearing about the rate hikes. “Some people are still living in trailers, and now you want to build a plant you can’t guarantee.”
Other critics piled on. Environmentalists called the plant the “Solyndra of clean coal,” a reference to the heavily subsidized but failed federal solar project. They asked whether the plant’s climate change benefits were overstated because the carbon it would capture from coal was going to be used to pump more oil.
Why was Kemper being cited as a model worthy of replicating, they asked, given that other plants would not share one of Kemper’s main advantages: a plentiful supply of cheap coal nearby.
Alleging that Southern Company and Mississippi Power had overstated the plant’s cost-effectiveness, the Bigger Pie Forum sued to unseal project records. To help make their case that the Kemper plant would be competitive with natural gas, which is coal’s main competitor, utility executives predicted to investors and regulators that the per-unit price for natural gas would be higher than $11 by 2016. But gas remains less than $2 per unit, undermining the business case for the plant.
The project did create jobs, but Mark Klinedinst, a retired economics professor from the University of Southern Mississippi, said that more were lost in the region as businesses laid people off to pay for the higher electrical bills caused by Mississippi Power rate increases from plant construction. The University of Southern Mississippi also raised annual tuition $236 per student, partly to offset its additional $1 million in higher electrical costs, he said.
Mr. Wingo, 48, had lived paycheck to paycheck for years, working at small, struggling engineering firms. When he was hired in 2007 by a subsidiary of Southern, it was a big step up. He doubled his salary to become a midlevel manager to help oversee scheduling and some design decisions on a project that he believed would make history.
Before long, Southern began flying him around the country to explain the project to others. He received glowing performance reviews and was awarded an annual $2,000 “Southern Excellence” employee award.
By 2012, though, Mr. Wingo had begun his transition to whistle-blower. About two weeks after state regulators renewed the license for the project to continue, Mississippi Power admitted to regulators that it had concealed cost overruns of about $366 million.
In increasingly testy meetings and emails over succeeding months, Mr. Wingo told his supervisors that other scheduling information that Mississippi Power and Southern Company were providing to the public was infeasible and misleading.
Ed Day, Mississippi Power’s chief executive at the time, tried to tighten control over what was shared. “I would like to remind everyone ‘again,’ no numbers, schedules, or information in general should be communicated to external parties until I review it/them first,” Mr. Day wrote in an Aug. 8, 2012, email to senior staff.
Others shared Mr. Wingo’s growing concerns. Tom Theodore, a scheduling consultant who worked on the Kemper project for about eight months in 2012, described the company’s stated schedule as little more than “a pretty picture to show everybody that we’re all doing wonderful as opposed to what reality showed on the ground.”
Interactive Feature | Ed Day on Outside Communication
His predecessors had altered the software so it no longer automatically adjusted the final price and completion date to reflect problems as they emerged, he said.
Greg Zoll, who had been hired by the state to be the project’s independent monitor, also grew skeptical. While engineering expenses and purchases went up, reported construction costs went down and scheduling timelines were shortened.
“These trends are illogical,” he wrote in of one of a series of highly critical reports that he filed with regulators from 2012 to 2014. Documents show that in a rush to qualify for federal subsidies, Mississippi Power started construction with less than 15 percent of the plant designed, Mr. Zoll told regulators.
Mississippi Power rejected Mr. Zoll’s criticism, responding that the delays were caused by glitchy software and shifts in design, and that the company was absorbing most of the additional costs.
But Brandon Presley, now the chairman of the Mississippi Public Service Commission, which regulates utilities, said that the project was troubled from the start and he voted against it. “The train left the station,” he said, when, in a rush to qualify for millions of dollars in federal subsidies, the commission approved the project.
He added that the problem was not the federal subsidies, which are necessary to develop innovative technology, but the failure by all parties to slow down and ask enough questions.
On May 20, 2013, Mr. Day abruptly stepped down as chief executive. His replacement, Ed Holland, told regulators that Mr. Day had directed or allowed employees to withhold from regulators documents about cost overruns. That sparked public outcry because the information was withheld from the commission while it was deciding whether to reapprove the project. “I will see that it never happens again,” said Mr. Holland, according to news articles at the time.
Interactive Feature | Greg Zoll Speaks About Schedule
In February 2014, an argument erupted at the plant. Engineers told upper-level managers that the company should not promise to regulators and investors that the project would be done before the end of the year, emails and recorded calls show. Weeks later, the company did so anyway.
The next day, the owner of the project’s scheduling firm sent an email saying that he could not in good conscience continue to work on a project that did not “fairly and accurately represent the work that still remains.”
Mr. Wingo wrote in a subsequent email to an official at PricewaterhouseCoopers, an auditing firm that was helping to manage the project, “This has really put the entire project at a crossroads.” The other engineers in his division were in “utter disbelief” that the company had published a false schedule, he added.
On March 10, Mr. Wingo called Mr. Fanning, the chief executive of Southern Company, to ensure the message reached him. “I’m glad you brought this to me,” Mr. Wingo said Mr. Fanning told him. “I plan to get to the bottom of this.”
Interactive Feature | Increased Costs Were Foreseen
Instead, Southern Company and Mississippi Power focused in subsequent months at least as much on damage control as they did on rooting out wrongdoing.
In meetings, Mr. Wingo and other engineers said that they were told by plant managers that they needed to present an optimistic timetable for the project or the utility risked “financial Armageddon” of lost tax subsidies, spooked investors, possible bankruptcy, and harsh criticism from the news media, regulators and lawmakers.
After Mr. Wingo provided company officials with a binder of documents corroborating his allegations, he said he was ordered to stop sending emails on the matter because they could become public through litigation.
After he told his manager in an email that most project engineers agreed that the plant could not be completed by 2014, the manager continued telling executives that “to a man” all of the plant’s engineers thought that finishing by 2014 was feasible, Mr. Wingo said, and Mr. Lunsford, the engineer at the plant, reiterated in a recorded call that the manager’s comment was false.
Graphic | The Kemper Project
Mr. Wingo, who began speaking to reporters, refused an offer of roughly $975,000 from the company to keep quiet, according to interviews and court records related to his whistle-blower claims. Southern was then granted a restraining order, later dropped, forbidding him from speaking publicly about the plant, court records show.
Mr. Wingo said that he began recording his phone conversations in August 2014, hoping to protect himself. During those calls, at least two of Mr. Wingo’s colleagues said that they strongly disagreed with what one of them called “his grand conspiracy.” A half-dozen other engineers told Mr. Wingo that they shared his views.
The Times contacted each of the engineers whose conversations were recorded and shared by Mr. Wingo. All declined to comment.
The recordings include commiseration among colleagues, and ambivalence from engineers who vacillated between criticizing and defending the project. They include typical workplace grousing about bosses who workers say are in need of “Viagra for the brain” and are incapable of running even a Popsicle stand.
They also reveal an internal struggle that Mr. Wingo faced: While still a believer in the possibility of clean coal, he was uneasy to find himself on the same side as environmental groups that oppose fossil fuels.
“My enemy’s enemy is not necessarily my friend,” he said in one recorded conversation in February 2015.
Interactive Feature | Wingo Challenges Culture
What troubled the engineers most was the poor quality of work: leaking gaskets, cracked ductwork, and pipes missing inspection records, valves and supports. Ryan Brown, a plant engineer, said during a phone call that he was having to “go back and do some sort of repair or rebuild” for every piece of work handed to him by the plant’s construction teams, which were under intense deadline pressure.
In a call on Aug. 22, 2014, Mr. Wingo confronted one of his superiors, Brett Wingard, about photographs covertly taken by an inspector who was concerned about defective pipes at the plant. Mr. Wingard dismissed the threat, saying that the pipes were only in a section of the plant not yet in operation (part of the project is running on natural gas already). GPS information in the images indicates otherwise.
Other workers recounted in phone calls to Mr. Wingo that they had discovered a large section of outdoor exhaust pipe that was glowing cherry red one night in September 2014 because 1,400-degree gases were misdirected through it. “That’s so bad that it made people all over the company stand up and say this is ridiculous,” Mr. Lunsford said in an October call with Mr. Wingo.
Several co-workers warned Mr. Wingo against being “a martyr.” One engineer, Donald Falletta, told him in a phone call that jumping on a grenade “when there ain’t nobody else in the damn room don’t save nobody.” In a call six months later, Mr. Falletta added that he too believed that managers were being “told to lie” about the pace of progress.
In February 2015, Southern sued Mr. Wingo, alleging that he had agreed to a settlement but failed to comply with its terms, which included keeping quiet about the plant. Mr. Wingo said that he never signed or agreed to any settlement.
Tim Leljedal, a spokesman for Southern Company, added that Mr. Wingo’s allegations had been thoroughly investigated by the company and by outside counsel and were found to be unsubstantiated. He added that with any project of this scope, detractors are inevitable.
Shortly after the lawsuit was filed, Mr. Wingo’s colleague, Robert Adams, called him to say that he was leaving the company and to ask whether he would be legally allowed to speak publicly about the plant at that point. “Once we resign, do you think they will try to silence us?” asked Mr. Adams, who left the company shortly thereafter.
Interactive Feature | More Information
In March, the company dropped its case against Mr. Wingo. “Hug that wife,” Donald Falletta said in a phone conversation congratulating Mr. Wingo. “She’s been through a damn roller-coaster ride.”
The utility was on a roller coaster, too. In February 2015, the state Supreme Court ruled that Mississippi Power for increasing rates by 15 percent in 2013 and 3 percent in 2014 without proper approvals. Utility officials responded that the requirement would bankrupt it, and several months later persuaded regulators to approve a new increase, 15 percent.
Meanwhile, engineers discussed the pressure to hurry construction. One of them, Brent Duncan, recounted in a phone call that he told a scheduling contractor how discouraged he was that managers were being allowed to “screw” with the schedule and “then claim they can meet all these dates, and there’s no way.”
The engineers joked that Mississippi Power, eager to show progress to investors and regulators, overstated certain milestones. For example, it bragged of achieving the “first fire,” which involves the lighting of the gasifier, when what they did fell far short of the actual definition, according to Mr. Wingo.
“We burned natural gas in a pilot” light, Brandon Davis, an engineer, said during one phone conversation. “I accomplish that every day in my garage.”
Some engineers wondered aloud whether accurate information was making it to the top. “By the time the message gets to Tom Fanning,” Mr. Lunsford said in a September 2015 call, “it’s so muddled and messed up that he’s not even hearing the truth.”
In March, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration alerted Southern that it had violated whistle-blower protections. The agency rejected the company’s claim that it was justified in firing Mr. Wingo because he could “not be trusted to support the chain of command.”
Mr. Wingo filed his whistle-blower claim against Southern Company under the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. While that law does not lead to paying a cash bounty to successful whistle-blowers, Mr. Wingo declined to say whether he has also filed a claim with the S.E.C. under the Dodd-Frank Act, which does pay awards for successful cases.
In April of this year, Southern informed the S.E.C. for at least the eighth consecutive month of a new delay and cost overrun, this time for $60 million, bringing the total spent on the Kemper project to about $6.7 billion. In May, the Obama administration said that it planned to cut spending on clean-coal technologies by 3 percent in next year’s budget.
Supporters of carbon capture say that Kemper’s problems are not representative of the entire industry, and that one part of the plant — the gasifier that converts cheap coal into synthetic gas — is primarily causing the delays. But critics say that the principal challenge of carbon capture is cost, and that the gasifier’s ability to use cheap coal has always been advertised as key to making the project affordable.
As Mississippi Power and Southern Company have continued struggling to bring the plant online, Southern has repeatedly promoted in calls to investors its plans to help offset the project’s cost by selling the carbon-capture technology abroad.
For now, Mr. Presley, the chairman of the Mississippi Public Service Commission, says he is taking a wait-and-see approach, hoping that when and if the plant finally comes online, it works as promised. Mississippi Power has said that every month of delay adds more than $20 million to the overall cost, but it will charge customers for extra costs from the plant only with approval by the commission.
Mr. Presley will eventually have to grapple with what he called the “awful task” of not pushing the utility into bankruptcy while determining how much electricity customers, taxpayers and investors should pay for the billions of dollars in cost overruns.
The Chief Executive of the Queensland Resources Council (QRC), Michael Roche, has announced his intention to step down in 2016.
Mr Roche joined the QRC as Chief Executive in July 2005, after a distinguished career in the government and private sectors. He said now was the right time to move to the next stage of his career.
“It has been a great honour to be able serve the great Queensland resources sector over such an extended period at the helm of its peak body. The sector comprises wonderful people and hundreds of great businesses – large, medium and small – which deliver so much employment and wealth for our state,” Mr Roche said.
“The QRC is a great organisation with a very talented team that continues to deliver excellent service to the resources sector through some truly challenging times in recent years.”
Mr Roche said he had no intention of disappearing off into the sunset.
“I enjoy my current non-executive board work and hope to do more of this. I also believe there is an opportunity to share my knowledge, expertise and experience built up over the past nearly 40 years, in a consulting capacity,” Mr Roche said.
“I am also keen to do more to assist the state’s charities and not-for-profit sector […] There is however no hiding the fact that the QRC Chief Executive role is a very demanding seven days a week commitment. I certainly look forward to also having more time with family and friends.”
QRC President, Stewart Butel, commented: “Michael’s skills and commitment as an advocate for the Queensland resources sector and as a leader of a great Queensland organisation are second to none […] Michael is leaving big shoes to fill.”
Mr Roche will remain to provide a suitable handover to a new Chief Executive.
Edited from press release by Angharad Lock
US coal company, Murray Energy, has warned it could lay off over 80% of its workforce in September because of weak coal markets. In a statutory notice informating its workers of potential job losses, the company said it make as many as 4400 redundant.
The move came after the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) rejected a proposed new labour deal with Murray Energy to replace a contract that expires at the end of the year. The new deal would have run through to 2021.
Along with the rest of the US coal industry, Murray Energy has been under significant pressure as US demand for coal has slumped over recent years as low-price natural gas has eaten into coal’s traditional market share.
“Coal markets and prices have generally been cut in half,” said Robert Murray, Chairman, President and CEO of Murray Energy in a recent statement.
Murray also directed his criticism at the government, claiming that the US coal industry had been “absolutely destroyed by policies of the Obama Administration”. According to data from the US Mine Safety and Health Administration, the US coal sector has lost more than 30 000 jobs since 2009.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Murray Energy is also struggling after the US$1.4 billion debt-funded acquisition of Foresight Energy last year and is currently renegotiating with its creditors. The company currently employs 5356 people, down from 8400 a year ago, with most workers based in West Virginia, Illinois and Ohio.
Edited by Jonathan Rowland.
Lucy Flemming, Managing Director/CEO of Coal Services, has reaffirmed that in NSW there have been no new cases of black lung disease for decades amongst current coal mine workers.
“The robust nature of the legislation and diligence of the dust monitoring and environmental standards in NSW coal mines has allowed us to help protect mine workers’ health and keep occupational diseases such as black lung disease at bay,” Flemming said.
“The re-emergence of this horrible disease is frightening for workers and their families,” she said. “Black lung disease generally takes a long time to appear – in most cases 20 to 30 years – so it is possible that some cases of black lung could still emerge from those working in the industry before dust mitigation and health surveillance was enforced.”
“We encourage any worker, current or retired, who has concerns about their health to contact their nearest Coal Services office. Even after leaving the industry, workers are entitled to attend for health assessments at CS Health where they may be referred for a chest x-ray.”
“As an industry we must continue to be vigilant. We must ensure that protecting our workers from occupational illness and disease is at the core of all decision-making, policy and actions,” she concluded.
Edited from press release by Angharad Lock
Media reports often characterise coal and coal-fired power as a technology of the past: a dirty baseload power source that has no place in today’s cleaner, greener and ultra-flexible power mix. But one company is challenging that perception and helping to bring coal very much into the twenty-first century.
That company is GE. World Coal first reported on what GE was doing in the coal-fired power space back in April, when the company announced it was acquiring NeuCo – a supplier of plant optimisation technologies to the coal power industry. But GE is going further with the launch of the Digital Power Plant for Steam at its Minds + Machines event in Paris.
Digital Power Plant for Steam is a suite of technologies that offer coal-fired power plants the opportunity to improve performance and efficiency, reducing greenhouse gas emissions along the way. It follows on the footsteps of similar solutions for the wind and gas power industries – but as Scott Bolick to World Coal in a recent interview, coal throws up its own unique challenges and opportunities.
Firstly, the average efficiency of coal-fired power plants around the world is just 33%, which is not helped by the relatively old age of the existing fleet: 50% of coal-fired power plants in Europe, for example, are over 25 yrs old. Coal-fired power plants are also increasingly being asked to operate flexibly to work around more intermittent renewables energy sources – not something that they were originally designed to do. And of course there is the challenge of emissions and climate change regulations – particularly after the COP21 Paris Agreement.
GE’s Digital Power Plant for Steam helps to tackle these challenges – both in new plants and as a retrofit on almost all existing plants commissioned in the past 25 yrs, including non-GE and legacy Alstom plants. It represents GE going “all in” on coal-fired power efficiency, said Bolick. For example, Digital Power Plant for Steam is able to contribute 1.5 percentage points of efficiency over the life of the plant, helping to maintain peak efficiency for longer periods of time. This reduces coal consumption (reducing costs) and carbon emissions.
But what is the technology that lies behind this. As Bolick explained, it all begins with a relatively simple concept – the digital twin – and spirals out from there. So what is the digital twin?
At the heart of GE’s Digital Power Plant solutions – whether for wind turbines, CCGT plants or coal plants – is the digital twin concept. This takes data on the construction, operation, maintenance, thermal performance etc. of the plant and combines them with data from the more-than 10 000 sensor inputs across the plant, weather data, market information etc. to form a complete picture of that equipment.
This allows operators to understand how to run a plant to best meet their operating context. For example, one CCGT plant uses GE’s Digital Power Plant solution to know when and how to take advantage of peak power periods – maximising revenue while minimising costs.
The digital twin concept it made possible by Predix – GE’s cloud platform for the industrial internet. Predix itself is the result of a vision GE’s CEO Jeff Imelt had about five years ago, Bolick explained, to move the company into the Big Data space – transitioning from a traditional industrial company to a “digital industrial” company. It resulted in the creation of GE Digital at San Ramon, California, and ultimately Predix.
A couple more products feed into the Digital Power Plant solution, Bolick continued: GE’s cyber security software and NeuCo’s optimisation software. These three building blocks underpin the solutions offered by Digital Power Plant.
So what exactly does Digital Power Plant for Steam offer coal-fired power plants operators? According to Bolick, it can be broken down into six major applications
An example of what can be achieved by GE’s Digital Steam Plant system comes from the town of Owensboro, Kentucky. Owensboro Municipal Utilities (OMU) has been running the boiler optimisation software, also know as BoilerOpt, at its Elmer Smith coal-fired power plants since 2005 – 2006. GE acquired BoilerOpt with its acquisition of NeuCo earlier this year and it now forms a part of the Digital Steam Plant offering.
The Elmer Smith plant is a pretty old plant, explained Kevin Frizzell, Director of Power Production at OMU to World Coal in a recent interview. It comprises two units: the 151 MW Unit 1, which was built in 1964, and the 285 MW Unit 2 of 1974 vintage. The plant burns about 1.25 million t a year of high-sulfur Illinois Basin coal and was designed to provide baseload power to the city of Owensboro with surplus power sold to the market.
In the early 2000s, OMU – along with the rest of the US power industry – was preparing for new NOX emissions rules. These would require OMU to fit NOX control equipment to its units to maintain regulatory compliance. This driver led the company to look for ways to reduce NOX formation in its boilers, a B&W in Unit 1 and Alstom in Unit 2. After evaluating several options, OMU settled on NeuCo’s BoilerOpt, said Frizzell.
BoilerOpt allowed OMU to reduce its NOX formation by 10 – 15% before any post-combustion control systems were added. But it also provided a benefit after the NOX control systems started to impact steam temperatures in the plant’s boilers. BoilerOpt allowed OMU to balance the need to manage NOX formation with the need to maintain steam temperature – to “hit the sweet spot”, as Frizzell put it – something that human operators would have found much more difficult.
“It helps to keep performance very steady compared to human operators, each of whom has their own way of setting things,” said Frizzell. BoilerOpt is also able to respond to changes in combustion processes much more quickly that human operators, added Frizzell, with the constant monitoring helping to fine tune NOX performance and operations performance.
Although NOX regulation was the primary driver behind fitting BoilerOpt, over the last 4 – 6 years OMU has been challenged by the rise of renewables and natural gas and the resultant need to operate much more flexibly than the Elmer Smith plant was originally designed for, added Frizzell.
The challenge is particularly acute at night. At night demand from Owensboro drops to around 100 MW, while input from wind turbines – of which there are a lot in the US Midwest – peaks. This has resulted in significant load swings impacting the Elmer Smith plant’s performance with the plant sometimes cycling down to 30% of capacity on Unit 2 over night.
In these operating conditions, BoilerOpt is helping OMU to optimise performance at super-low loads, explained Frizzell, allowing it to stay competitive and maintain efficiency in the changed competitive landscape in which it finds itself. This has kept the Elmer Smith plant operating, even as many other plants of its vintage have closed.
Returning to the big picture: coal is set to remain the world’s second largest energy source through to 2030 – and an even more critical power source for emerging economies. Yet the operating environment in which coal is operating is in almost constant flux at present as renewables disrupt the traditional model of baseload power and regulations make it tougher to operate coal-fired plant – as the Elmer Smith plant has discovered.
In that environment, innovation is key. As Ganesh Bell, Chief Digital Offices at GE Power said, the only way to meet the current challenges “is by applying date science and intelligent software-defined automation to every aspect of the electricity value chain.” Digital Power Plant for Steam “marks another big step on that journey.”
The state government of Odisha and the Indian federal Ministry of Shipping are to partner to develop a heavy-haul rail corridor between Salegaon and the port of Paradip.
The rail corridor will strengthen the connection from the coal mines of the Mahanadi Coalfields Ltd, a subsidiary of state-owned coal giant, Coal India (CIL) and Paradip, boosting the ability to supply up to 140 million tpy of coal by sea to four industrial clusters.
Other partners in the development of the rail link include the Indian Port Rail Corp., Paradip Port Trust and Mahanadi Coalfields. The project forms part of the Sagarmala port-development programme that aims to boost the coastal shipping of commodities to reduce logistics costs.
As part of the programme, Paradip is also undertaking a number of projects to enhance its capacity to handle coal, including short-term berth mechanisation projects, as well the development of a new port in the outer harbour and capacity additions at existing terminals.
Edited by Jonathan Rowland.
Loesche Energy System Ltd has opened a workshop in India. The new LOESCHE Energy Systems India Private Ltd (LESI) workshop has been founded at Chennai City in Tamilnadu State of India. Due to its strategic location Chennai is a major manufacturing hub in the Southern region of India.
The new workshop was established due to the strict prequalification requirements of the NTPC. NTPC is a government of India Enterprise and is the largest power producing company of India.
The Indian power production is predominantly dependent upon coal power plants, which results in the ordering of a larger number of new coal based power plants. With the new workshop LOESCHE plans to serve the power industry best with LOESCHE coal mills and services to cover this demand in the future.
Edited from various sources by Angharad Lock
SUEK has received a new Komatsu PC 1250 excavator at its Vostochno-Beisky mine in Khakassia, Russia.
The excavator is the 100th Komatsu machine to be delivered to SUEK mines. Since 2005, the Japanese company has supplied SUEK with a range of equipment from excavators to loaders, dump trucks, graders and dozers.
As part of the celebrations to mark the delivery of the machine, SUEK operators closed a matchbox with the excavator bucket.
And when it comes to coal mining, SUEK Khakassia’s Vostochno-Beiskiy and Chernogorsky mines have set several world records using Komatsu excavators, according to SUEK Khakassia’s CEO, Alexey Kilin.
SUEK is Russia’s largest coal company, supplying both domestic and export markets. It employs more than 33 000 people across its coal mining, processing, transportation and service businesses.
Edited by Jonathan Rowland.
RungePincockMinarco (RPM) has completed its acquisition of iSolutions. As of today, iSolutions’ entire suite of products specialising in asset management, life cycle costing, maintenance shift scheduling and budgeting will now form part of RPM’s technology business.
With the acquisition of iSolutions, RPM intends to provide the missing link between maintenance and production for mining companies and a strong platform for OEMs globally. RPM is now the sole provider of a technology solution that bridges the gap between production and maintenance. According to the company this will take mining companies and OEMs into the next era of mining.
Chief Executive Officer of RPM, Richard Mathews, commented: “We now provide the mining industry with a fully integrated production and maintenance planning solution – the next level of productivity that will redefine how the industry operates.”
Matthews continued: “RPM is now the only single vendor of a production and maintenance execution software solution in the mining industry. We are providing the technology needed for the next level of productivity to fundamentally change the way mining companies and OEMs operate their businesses. Combined, our solutions will reduce the cost of mining as both the production and maintenance teams will be using the same software applications to maximise the operational efficiency and productivity of their mobile mining equipment.”
“This also further strengthens our relationship with SAP as it extends the value our customers get from their ERP implementations,” he added.
RPM will now be able to:
Co-founder and Managing Director of iSolution, Graeme Elgie, said: “RPM is truly driving change in the mining industry and iSolutions has always adopted a similar vision. The fit between both companies was right. iSolutions is the trusted leader in asset management solutions for mining equipment and is the clear leading provider for both OEMs and mining companies globally. With iSolutions forming part of RPM, we will offer customers around the world – from mining companies to OEMs – unrivalled technology solutions to meet the existing demands of the industry and take them into the next era of mining.”
iSolutions offices in Brisbane, Santiago and Johannesburg will amalgamate with RPM’s existing offices in those locations and employees of iSolutions will join the RPM team to propel sustainable growth. With iSolutions becoming part of RPM, mining companies and OEMs across the globe will significantly benefit now and into the future.
Edited from press release by Harleigh Hobbs
Coal India (CIL) has signed two agreements with Solar Energy Corp. of India (SECI) for the development of a 200 MW solar power project in Madhya Pradesh state.
The projects will supply solar energy to two CIL subsidiaries, Northern Coalfields Ltd and South Eastern Coalfields Ltd. The cost of the project is estimated at INR 6.5 billion (US$96.2 million) each.
The move marks a significant step into clean energy for the state-owned coal giant, which last October said it planned to develop 1 GW of solar project across in India.
In follows an announcement in May from Shenhua, China’s largest coal producer, that it had partnered with Californian solar company, Solar Reserve, to develop 1 GW of utility-scale solar in China.
Edited by Jonathan Rowland.
Ray O’Rourke, a non-executive director, has notified Anglo American’s board of his intention to step down after more than six years, in order to concentrate on his business commitments as chairman and chief executive of Laing O’Rourke.
O’Rourke’s leave from the Anglo American board will be effective as of 25 July 2016.
Sir John Parker, Chairman of Anglo American, said: “Ray has brought his tremendous experience of complex projects, safety and innovation to our board discussions over the last six years and more. I am very grateful for the commitment he has given us over that time and for his always valuable contribution. We wish him all the very best as he continues to build upon the successes of his business.”
Edited from press release by Harleigh Hobbs
