The Belle Ayr mine is a coal mine located 18 miles southeast of Gillette, Wyoming currently owned and operated by Alpha Natural Resources, a large American producer of metallurgical coal for the industrial production of steel and iron and low-sulfur thermal coal to fuel steam boilers for the production of what type of power?
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Belle Ayr Mine The Belle Ayr mine is a coal mine located 18 miles southeast of Gillette, Wyoming in the United States in the coal-rich Powder River Basin. The mine is an open pit, "truck and shovel", mine producing a low-sulfur, sub-bituminous coal from the Wyodak-Anderson seam that is used for domestic energy generation. Coal produced by the mine is shipped to its customers via railroad. The mine is currently owned and operated by Alpha Natural Resources after being acquired in a merger with Foundation Coal in 2009.
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Alpha Natural Resources Alpha Natural Resources is a large American producer of metallurgical coal ("met coal") for the industrial production of steel and iron and low-sulfur thermal coal ("steam coal") to fuel steam boilers for the production of electrical power. The company also provides industry services relating to equipment repairs, road construction and logistics with domestic operations and coal reserves within the states of Virginia, West Virginia, Kentucky, Wyoming, Utah, Illinois, Tennessee, and Pennsylvania. Alpha Natural Resources doesn't produce all of the coal it sells; much of the coal sold by Alpha Natural Resources is purchased from independent mining operations and then resold in the worldwide market.
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Blast furnace gas Blast furnace gas (BFG) is a by-product of blast furnaces that is generated when the iron ore is reduced with coke to metallic iron. It has a very low heating value, about 93 BTU/cubic foot (3.5 MJ/m³, because it consists of about 60 percent nitrogen and 18-20% carbon dioxide, which are not flammable. The rest is mostly carbon monoxide, which has a fairly low heating value already and some (2-4%) hydrogen. It is commonly used as a fuel within the steel works, but it can be used in boilers and power plants equipped to burn it. It may be combined with natural gas or coke oven gas before combustion or a flame support with richer gas or oil is provided to sustain combustion. Particulate matter is removed so that it can be burned more cleanly. Blast furnace gas is sometimes flared without generating heat or electricity.
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Healy Clean Coal Project Healy Clean Coal Project is a clean coal technology demonstration program consisting of a coal fired electrical power station located in Healy, Alaska in Denali Borough. The project was a demonstration of the TRW Clean Coal Combustion System and the Babcock & Wilcox/Joy Spray Dryer Absorber (SDA) System designed to reduce oxides of nitrogen (NOX) and sulfur dioxide (SO) emissions while burning a variety of coal types, including waste coal.
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Biomass Biomass is an industry term for getting energy by burning wood, and other organic matter. Burning biomass releases carbon emissions, but has been classed as a renewable energy source in the EU and UN legal frameworks, because plant stocks can be replaced with new growth. It has become popular among coal power stations, which switch from coal to biomass in order to convert to renewable energy generation without wasting existing generating plant and infrastructure. Biomass most often refers to plants or plant-based materials that are not used for food or feed, and are specifically called lignocellulosic biomass. As an energy source, biomass can either be used directly via combustion to produce heat, or indirectly after converting it to various forms of biofuel. Conversion of biomass to biofuel can be achieved by different methods which are broadly classified into: "thermal", "chemical", and "biochemical" methods.
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Dakota Gasification Company The Dakota Gasification Company is a synthetic natural gas producing company founded in 1984 in Beulah, North Dakota, United States. It is an operator of the Great Plains Synfuels Plant. The plant is located at . The plant uses lignite coal to produce synthetic natural gas utilizing a coal gasification process. The plant processes 16 thousand tons of coal daily. Coal is oxidized to coal gas, which is then converted from a mixture of carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide and hydrogen to methane, by hydrogenation over a nickel catalyst. The synthetic natural gas (95% methane, 975 BTU per cubic foot) is pipelined to the Northern Border Pipeline which transports gas from Canada, Montana and North Dakota to the Ventura, Iowa area, where the pipeline interconnects with many pipelines supplying the eastern United States. The Dakota Gasification Company is a subsidiary of the Basin Electric Power Cooperative which is located in Bismarck, North Dakota.
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Oil shale in Estonia Oil shale (Estonian: "põlevkivi" ) is a strategic energy resource that constitutes about 4% of Estonia's gross domestic product. The oil shale industry in Estonia is one of the most developed in the world. In 2012, the country's oil shale industry employed 6,500 people – about 1% of the national workforce. Of all the oil shale fired power stations in the world, the two largest are in this country. In 2012, 70% of mined oil shale was used for electricity generation, accounting for about 85% of Estonia's total electricity production. A smaller proportion of the mined oil shale is used to produce shale oil, a type of synthetic oil extracted from shale by pyrolysis, which is sufficient to keep Estonia as the second largest shale oil producer in the world after China. In addition, oil shale and its products are used in Estonia for district heating and as a feedstock material for the cement industry.
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Belews Creek Power Station Belews Creek Steam Station is a 2.24-GW, two-unit coal-fired generating facility located on Belews Lake in Stokes County, North Carolina. It is Duke Energy’s largest coal-burning power plant in the Carolinas and consistently ranks among the most efficient coal facilities in the United States. During 2006, it was the fifth most efficient coal power plant in the United States with a heat rate of 9,023 Btu/kWh (37.8% conversion efficiency). The remaining 62.2% of energy released by the burning coal is in the form of heat. It is dumped into Belews Lake, a man-made lake created by Duke Power for cooling water purposes in the early 1970s. In 2008, it was the #1 most efficient coal power plant in the United States with a heat rate of 9,204 Btu/kWh.
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Advanced boiling water reactor The advanced boiling water reactor (ABWR) is a Generation III boiling water reactor. The ABWR is currently offered by GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy (GEH) and Toshiba. The ABWR generates electrical power by using steam to power a turbine connected to a generator; the steam is boiled from water using heat generated by fission reactions within nuclear fuel.
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Pressurized heavy-water reactor A pressurized heavy-water reactor (PHWR) is a nuclear reactor, commonly using unenriched natural uranium as its fuel, that uses heavy water (deuterium oxide DO) as its coolant and neutron moderator. The heavy water coolant is kept under pressure, allowing it to be heated to higher temperatures without boiling, much as in a pressurized water reactor. While heavy water is significantly more expensive than ordinary light water, it creates greatly enhanced neutron economy, allowing the reactor to operate without fuel-enrichment facilities (offsetting the additional expense of the heavy water) and enhancing the ability of the reactor to make use of alternate fuel cycles.
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Andrussow process The Andrussow process is an industrial process for the production of hydrogen cyanide from methane and ammonia in the presence of oxygen and a platinum catalyst.
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Coal mining in Brazil Coal mining in Brazil is the country's largest source of non-renewable energy, and is an important part of Brazil's energy economy. Brazil is the tenth largest energy consumer and the third largest in the Western Hemisphere, Coal accounts for approximately 5.8 percent of the country’s total primary energy supply. It is the country’s largest source of non-renewable energy (50 percent), followed by nuclear energy (27 percent), petroleum (eight percent), and natural gas (2.5 percent). Brazil produces about 6 million tons of coal per year, and total coal reserves are estimated at approximately 32.3 billion tons. It is also important in reducing reliance on imported oil and gas.
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War on coal In the United States, the war on coal is a phrase used by the coal industry and its supporters to describe what they claim is an effort by the Obama administration to impose stringent regulations on coal power in the United States and thereby make such power uneconomical. Proponents of this phrase also often identify the Environmental Protection Agency as one of the chief entities waging this putative war, although Michael Grunwald has claimed that the war on coal, although real, does not primarily happen at the national level but at the state and local level, and that the "boots on the ground" in the war are lawyers from the Sierra Club's Beyond Coal campaign. During Obama's tenure, the Obama administration denied that they were waging a war on coal, noting the possibility of upgrading older power plants with more efficient turbines, and also pointing to the possibility of carbon sequestration techniques.
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FINEX (steelmaking process) FINEX is the name for an iron making technology developed by Siemens VAI and POSCO. Molten iron is produced directly using iron ore fines and non-coking coal rather than traditional blast furnace methods through sintering and reduction with coke. Elimination of preliminary processing is claimed to make the plant for FINEX less expensive to build than a blast furnace facility of the same scale, additionally a 10-15% reduction in production costs is expected/claimed through cheaper raw materials, reduction of facility cost, pollutant exhaustion, maintenance staff and production time. The process is claimed to produce less pollutants such as SOx, NOx, and carbon dioxide than traditional methods.
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Coal industry in Wales The coal industry in Wales has played an important role in the Industrial Revolution in Wales. Coal mining expanded in the eighteenth century to provide fuel for the blast furnaces of the iron and copper industries that were expanding in South Wales. The industry had reached large proportions by the end of that century, and then further expanded to supply steam-coal for the steam vessels that were beginning to trade around the world. The Cardiff Coal Exchange set the world price for steam-coal and Cardiff became a major coal-exporting port. The South Wales Coalfield was at its peak in 1913 and was one of the largest coalfields in the world. It remained the largest coalfield in Britain until 1925. The supply of coal dwindled, and pits closed in spite of a UK-wide strike against closures. The last deep mine in Wales, Tower Colliery, closed in 2008, after thirteen years as a co-operative owned by its miners.
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Avedøre Power Station The Avedøre Power Station (Danish: "Avedøreværket" ) is a combined heat and power station, located in Avedøre, Denmark, just south of Copenhagen, and is owned by DONG Energy A/S. Avedøre Power Plant is a high-technology facility and one of the world's most efficient of its kind, being able to utilize as much as 94% of the energy in the fuel and convert 49% of the fuel energy into electricity. Apart from using coal, petroleum (oil) and natural gas, the plant runs on a wide variety of biomass fuels such as straw and wood pellets. The plant consists of two units with a total capacity of 793 MW of electricity and 918 MW of heat. The combination of producing electricity (combined heat and power) and heat for district heating at the same time is widely used in Denmark and the rest of Scandinavia, due to the need of domestic (and industrial) heating together with the Danish energy companies putting a big effort into optimising the energy plants.
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Steam-electric power station A steam-electric power station is a power station in which the electric generator is steam driven. Water is heated, turns into steam and spins a steam turbine which drives an electrical generator. After it passes through the turbine, the steam is condensed in a condenser. The greatest variation in the design of steam-electric power plants is due to the different fuel sources.
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Buck Steam Station The Buck Steam Station is a 369-MW formerly coal-fired electrical power plant, owned by Duke Energy. There are also three natural gas-fueled combustion turbines at the location that provide an additional 93 MW (and which began operation in 1970), and two natural gas-fueled combined cycle turbines are planned for the near future. Remaining coal-fired units (IDs 5-9) were decommissioned in mid-2011 and April 2013, with only natural gas units (11C and 12C) remaining.
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Lead smelting Plants for the production of lead are generally referred to as lead smelters. Primary lead production begins with sintering. Concentrated lead ore is fed into a sintering machine with iron, silica, limestone fluxes, coke, soda ash, pyrite, zinc, caustics or pollution control particulates. Smelting uses suitable reducing substances that will combine with those oxidizing elements to free the metal. Reduction is the final, high-temperature step in smelting. It is here that the oxide becomes the elemental metal. A reducing environment (often provided by carbon monoxide in an air-starved furnace) pulls the final oxygen atoms from the raw metal.
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Multifuel Multifuel, sometimes spelled multi-fuel, is any type of engine, boiler, or heater or other fuel-burning device which is designed to burn multiple types of fuels in its operation. One common application of multifuel technology is in military settings, where the normally-used diesel or gas turbine fuel might not be available during combat operations for vehicles or heating units. Multifuel engines and boilers have a long history, but the growing need to establish fuel sources other than petroleum for transportation, heating, and other uses has led to increased development of multifuel technology for non-military use as well, leading to many flexible-fuel vehicle designs in recent decades.
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Destructive distillation Destructive distillation is the chemical process of the decomposition of feedstock by heating it to a high temperature; the term generally applies to processing of organic material in the absence of air or in the presence of limited amounts of oxygen or other reagents, catalysts, or solvents, such as steam or phenols. It is an application of pyrolysis. The process breaks up or 'cracks' large molecules. Coke, coal gas, gas carbon, coal tar, ammonia liquor, and "coal oil" are examples of commercial products historically produced by the destructive distillation of coal.
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Mount Storm Power Station The Mount Storm Generating Station, located on the west bank of Mount Storm Lake 2 mi from Bismarck, West Virginia, is a coal-fired power station owned by Dominion Resources. It is the largest power plant that Dominion operates. The facility's three units use around 15,000 tons of coal to generate more than 1,600 megawatts of electricity from the coal synfuel for around 2 million people in Northern Virginia.