Arckaringa's Billion-Dollar Combined-Cycle Project Advances to Detailed Design Work

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Researched by Industrial Info Resources (Perth, Australia)--Arckaringa Unincorporated Evaluation's (Adelaide, Australia) 1,140-megawatt (MW) Arckaringa Combined-Cycle Power Station is in a bankable feasibility phase and is advancing toward the detailed design phase, due to begin in 2014.

The major development program known as Arckaringa was proposed in 2011 by Arckaringa Unincorporated Evaluation, a joint venture that was formed between Arckaringa Energy Pty Limited (Adelaide), a subsidiary of Altona Energy plc (London, England), and China National Offshore Oil Corporation- New Energy Investment Pty Limited (CNOOC-NEI) (Adelaide), a subsidiary of China National Offshore Oil Corporation (Beijing, China).

The project will be located 70 kilometres southwest of Oodnadatta in South Australia. It is expected to cost the company about $3 billion to $4 billion.

Of the several components of the development program, Arckaringa is building a 1,140 MW power station, along with a coal-to-liquid and above-the-ground coal mine. The project, as best summarized by Arckaringa, is "a conventional open cut coal mine, followed by processing and an oil refinery/petro-chemicals plant with efficient integrated combined-cycle electricity generation, which captures and uses waste heat."

The project is in the very early stages of a bankable feasibility process and is progressing toward the underground hydrological testing of ground water, which will commence early next year.

According to the project manager and the spokesperson for the company, there will be a detailed design phase that will begin toward the end of next year, with a focus on beginning construction by mid-2015. Phase I of the power plant will produce 580 MW of electricity, and Phase II will ramp up the capacity to 1,140 MW by adding 560 MW. Arckaringa intends to build the power plant in a combined-cycle configuration by installing two combustion turbines and two steam turbines, with associated heat recovery steam generators (HRSG).

More than half of the electricity generated from the power plant will be supplied to the grid, and the remaining will be utilized to run Arckaringa's open cut coal mine.

All the engineering and testing work for the feasibility phase is being performed by an in-house team based in Australia. According to Arckaringa, the project will create thousands of jobs in the construction stage and a permanent work force of nearly 800 in the production phase.

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