King Coal

For those old enough to remember, this month’s news of the death of Sir Edward Heath brings back memories of those, quite literally, dark days of ‘the three-day week’ in early 1974.

Faced with rocketing oil prices in the early 1970s and an increasingly militant coal mining industry, the Heath government’s ill-fated move to ration energy use by industry and commerce was energy conservation taken to the extreme.

It did, however, leave two long-lasting legacies. Energy would never again be thought of as a cheap commodity — and the coal industry found itself decimated during the 1980s.

Notwithstanding that, coal continued to be the major energy source for power generation until being supplanted by natural gas from the early 1990s onwards. Even then, the scale of the industry — or at least those parts of it remaining — could be gauged from the fact that some of the largest UK process plant construction projects of that time (and for some time since) were the flue gas desulphurisation (FGD) plants being installed at major coal-fired power stations.

The biggest of these was, and still is despite its current economic problems, Drax in Selby, North Yorkshire. Supplying some 7% of the nation’s electricity, the 4000MW Drax station was the first, and largest, station to be retrofitted with FGD plants.

These six chemical plants, for that is what they really are, recover 90% of the station’s SO2 emissions, or 280 000tpa. And, the station continues to enhance its ‘green’ credentials with its commitment to a NOx reduction programme to meet its obligations under the EU’s Large Combustion Plant Directive well before its implementation in 2008.

As with the previous FGD programme, the NOx technology at Drax is also now being rolled out to other coal-fired stations.

‘King Coal’ might long have lost its crown, but UK-developed clean-coal technologies clearly still have an important role to play both here and abroad, where countries such as China still see great value in coal.