Amid ongoing zest for locating an economically and environmentally viable coal technology to address the looming energy crisis, the Engineering Development Board (EDB) has identified Clean Coal Technology (CCT) to run country's existing power plants.
Based entirely on indigenous coal, EDB unveils broad contours of the technology during a workshop organised in collaboration with NUST under its Industrial Research Program (IRP), a program developed to foster industry-academia linkages for commercialisation of research.
The Coal Water Slurry Fuel Technology or CWS is the cheaper, cleaner and environmentally friendly replacement of furnace oil, diesel and natural gas for power generation. It converts coal to liquid form by adding certain amount of water and admixtures to it and is fired just like furnace oil at highly efficient combustion rate at lower temperature. Indigenous coal by virtue of having high moisture content ideally suits this tested technology, which runs power plants in USA, Russia, Indonesia and India. In China around 100 power plants are being run using CWS Technology.
The approximate capital cost of a new power plant on CWS Technology is $1.25 million while the present thermal power plants only require certain retrofitting of existing power plants especially the boilers, to make them run on CWS in a short span of less than one year.-PR