Partnering for the sake of cleaner technology

Australian and Japanese firms have come together to build what will be the first Australian demonstration power station to use clean coal technology. The clean coal power station will be built at Biloela in Central Queensland.

Work on the Callide Oxyfuel project which is expected to use up to two hundred and six million dollars is planned to start in the early half of 2009. It is projected to be complete and functioning by 2010 and it will produce thirty megawatts of electricity.

Funding for the project will come from the Federal Government of Australia, the Queensland state-owned CS Energy, Schlumberger, the Australian Coal Association’s COAL21 Fund, Xstrata Coal, the Government of Japan and Japanese participants who will include Mitsui, IHI Corporation and JPower.

A coal-fired boiler at Callide A power station will be retrofitted with oxy-firing technology which will combust coal in a combination of re-circulated flue gases and oxygen.

This will produce a stream of carbon dioxide in high concentration, which will then be captured and stored deep down in the earth in geological areas west of the power station. This process is commonly referred to as carbon capture and storage.

The oxyfuel combustion process was initially devised in Japan in 1974 and has been trialled in Japan, the United States and the United Kingdom (among other countries in Europe) in small projects. The Callide project will move the technology to a bigger scale in a bid to prove that it can be employed in both old and new coal-fired power stations to attain substantial reductions in carbon emissions.