Northern Ontario 230-Megawatt Coal-Fired Thermal Generating Station Looking at Peat for Fuel to Continue Operations

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Researched by Industrialinfo.com (Industrial Info Resources; Houston, Texas). The township of Atikokan, Ontario has been leading the drive to keep the 230-megawatt (MW) Atikokan Thermal Generating Station open in spite of the current provincial government’s stand to close all coal-fired generating stations between 2007 and 2009 to reduce emissions. Ontario Power Generation (OPG), Ontario Power Agency (OPA) and the Ontario Ministry of Energy (Toronto, Ontario) have been involved with Atikokan and Peat Resources, Limited (Toronto, Ontario) and consultant Forest Bioproducts, Incorporated (Sault Sainte Marie, Ontario) in the effort to keep the thermal generating station open.

OPG’s 230 MW Atikokan Thermal Generating Station that employs over 90 personnel was completed in 1985. It utililzes a Babcock & Wilcox boiler and with a normal operational life should have been operating until 2025 or later, but due to the provincial mandate to close coal-fired plants will be closed in 2007 unless options are proposed and accepted. Forest Bioproducts was hired by the province to ascertain if there was enough biomass fuel (landfill gas and wood waste) to use in a circulating fluidized-bed boiler system or a gasification process as one of the options. Another option is to use pelletized peat as a fuel in place of coal. Peat Resources has proposed building a peat mine with a drying facility to provide the pellets. Peat has many attributes that make it a good fit for keeping the station open. First, the costs of converting the existing boiler to utilize peat is expected to be minimal. Next, the cost of peat is anticipated to remain on the same level as the price of coal. Last, the environmental benefits, SO2, mercury and methane emissions would actually be less than when using coal and CO2 emissions would not be expected to increase.

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