| In late December, EPRI Senior Vice President Mike Howard
and I (Mike is on the far right in the photo above) were part
of a group that visited Southern Company’s Mercury Research
Center, located at Gulf Power’s Plant Barry near Pensacola,
Florida. The visit, which also featured an outstanding primer
on environmental controls by Southern’s Larry Monroe and April
Sibley, highlighted the long and extensive research by the
industry into controlling emissions from power generation
– R&D about which few outside the industry are aware,
and many inside the industry take for granted.
Finding ways to measure and reduce mercury emissions are
just one example of the many “long hauls” in industry research
that EPRI has supported. George Offen, one of our senior technical
executives, has a great presentation on these “long hauls”
– efforts that go back decades in developing technologies
and processes which weren’t in big demand in the beginning,
but new knowledge and regulations have brought them into wide
use today. Work on power plant selective catalytic reduction
(SCR) systems, used for reducing nitrogen oxides (NOx) emissions,
began in the early 1980s and we’re still improving them today
– lowering emissions, reducing impacts, making them more durable.
Work on mercury controls started in the late ‘80s, when EPRI
and others anticipated a future need. The initial focus was
on overcoming a lack of knowledge about the fundamentals,
debunking early, overly-optimistic assessments about effectiveness,
and learning how to measure mercury emissions. It took more
than a decade, with some surprises along the way, before full-scale
tests began that are still ongoing today. And we’re still
working to close performance gaps, reduce impacts and lower
costs, even as regulatory targets keep on shifting.
Carbon capture and storage (CCS) is one of the hot-button
industry topics today, and it’s likely that it, too, will
take a “long haul” to bring it to commercialization. But that
road is a lot shorter and straighter thanks to those inside
and outside the industry who join with EPRI and other organizations
to form the R&D collaboratives and host the pilot projects
and scale-up demonstrations needed to move new technologies
from paper to power plant. The Mercury Research Center is
just one of the many places where that happens every day.
Sincerely,
Carolyn Shockley
Vice President, Generation
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