LOUISVILLE, KY (December 1, 2005) – Charah®, Inc., a leading ash management provider for the coal-fired electric utility industry, has been featured in the November/December issue of Platt’s POWER magazine. In an article entitled “Making IGCC Slag Valuable” by Ken Wicker, Charah’s patent-pending integrated gasification combined-cycle (IGCC) processing system used at Tampa Electric’s Polk Station was detailed.
Charah began work with Tampa Electric in 2001 to develop a solution to Polk Station’s on-site IGCC slag accumulation and create a process for beneficial use. After analysis, Charah and the University of Kentucky’s Center for Applied Energy Research (CAER) concluded that IGCC slag could indeed be processed into a product that was marketable. By segregating the slag’s constituents by size, the larger and medium-sized particles could be used to produce fuel and building materials, with only a fraction of the smaller fines requiring future landfill usage.
Charah then developed and built a $2 million processing system on-site to separate the slag into these three constituents. The patent-pending processing system separates the unburned carbon from the slag, making the slag available for reuse by the power plant. With this new system, Tampa Electric was able to reintroduce the carbon and fines from the 125,000 tons of stockpiled coal combustion products (CCPs) stored on-site back into the fuel stream. Charah then sold the slag left behind after fuel recovery was complete, turning the Polk Station’s problem into an income generator.
According to Charles Price, President and CEO of Charah, Inc., “With new technologies such as IGCC come an entirely new set of ash management and recycling needs now facing utilities. Our partnership with Polk has allowed us to tackle these needs together and come up with a unique solution for IGCC slag processing for many years to come.”
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