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Co-located plant turns Great River's by-product into product

Great River Energy gave the phrase, "waste not, want not," new meaning when it signed an agreement with Headwaters Incorporated to build a new ethanol plant near the power wholesaler's Coal Creek Station powerplant in Underwood, N.D.

The Blue Flint Ethanol plant will use waste steam from the powerplant to process corn into 50 million gallons of ethanol annually. "We were looking for a way to use that steam instead of just cooling it down," said Lyndon Anderson, Great River's North Dakota communications director. "An ethanol plant was a good way to do that and support alternative fuels at the same time."

Partnership offers widespread benefits

The deal turns the waste steam into a small but significant revenue stream by making Great River a minority owner of the plant. It also increases the power wholesaler's load by three to four MW. Great River will provide ancillary services to the plant and build the path for McLean Electric, the utility servicing the area, but no major system upgrades will be necessary. "That's the advantage of co-locating and was one of the factors that made the project feasible," said Anderson.

For Headwaters, co-locating the ethanol plant at Coal Creek Station eliminates the need to build a boiler. Using steam instead of the natural gas boiler typically used in plants of Blue Flint's size will reduce overall operating costs and protect the company from volatile energy prices. It will also reduce emissions compared to a "stand-alone" plant.

The community will benefit from the project, too. The economic impact of the plant is projected to be about $160 million annually.

In addition to ethanol, the plant will also produce enough dried or wet distillers grain for approximately 225,000 feeder cattle on an annual basis. It will require 200 jobs during construction, and approximately 30 jobs when operating.

Creating products

The idea for the ethanol plant originally came from Great River engineers, said John Ward, vice president of marketing for Headwaters Inc. "It fit with our company's mission to find added value in energy," he noted, adding, "This is only the latest project in a long relationship."

Headwaters, which supplies pre-combustion and post-combustion services to coal-based electric utilities, has a long-term contract with Great River to market fly ash from Coal Creek Station. Fly ash, a waste product from coal-fired generators, is a key component in an aerated concrete developed by Headwaters called FlexCrete. The two companies are cooperating on commercializing the building material, which diverts waste from the landfill.

FlexCrete requires less energy to manufacture than conventional aerated concrete and offers many other environmental benefits. According to Headwaters, using just one ton of fly ash conserves landfill space equal to 455 days of solid waste produced by the average American. It reduces CO₂ emissions equal to two months' worth of automobile emissions and saves enough energy to provide the average home with electricity for 24 days.

Improving efficiency

Great River and Headwaters are collaborating on another project that also uses the waste steam from Coal Creek Station. Headwaters is marketing a coal-drying technology Great River developed that reduces the moisture in lignite coal from 38 percent to less than 30 percent. "Drier coal burns more efficiently with fewer emissions," said Anderson.

In fact, if power stations successfully applied the technology, it would reduce annual emissions per 10 GW by 6,890 tons of NOx, 18,360 tons of SO₂, more than 7 million tons of CO₂, 9,340 tons of particulates and almost 300 pounds of mercury. The drying technology could also be applied to high-moisture biomass.

The U.S. Department of Energy and EPRI contributed funding to the demonstration, which kicked off phase I in August. Great River cut the ribbon on the prototype module coal dryer, designed to operate off one of the 546-MW units at Coal Creek. In the second phase, Great River will design, build and test a full suite of module dryers for full operation.

Construction on the Blue Flint Ethanol plant is beginning this fall, and it is expected to be operational by fall 2006. This will be Great River 's first foray into co-located manufacturing facilities, but the utility hopes it will be a template for future projects. Like the fly ash concrete and the coal-drying technology, the ethanol plant is one more way for Great River Energy to get more than just electrons out of power generation.