"Units and In-Service Dates: 389 MW (1965), 617 MW (1972)" This was another mine-mouth (Truax-Traer) power plant that converted to Powder River Basin coal rather than add sulfur scrubbers. But in 2009, a billion dollars was spent to add scrubbers to this plant and the Duck Creek Station. [gem]
The Lake Coffeen Dam was built to provide cooling water for this power plant.
A remnant of the NKP's Cloverleaf still exists between the power plant and Sorento, IL, to connect with the CB&Q. NS now owns it, and it has trackage rights on BNSF/CB&Q between Sorento and its former-Southern route in Centralia. But when I looked at a satellite map, I noticed that new track has been built north from the US Minerals Plant to connect with the UP/GM&O in Hillsboro.
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| Alex Wood posted It's a hot and muggy summer morning in 2019 as steam billows from the Obama-era scrubber stacks at the Coffeen Power Station in rural Coffeen, Illinois. It's business as usual generating the megawatts for the electric grid whilst burning through train after train of Powder River coal. The coal pile is getting low, however, and in 14 days the last puff of steam would leave the stack and the lights shut off for good leaving hundreds without a job here and a rural school district without their biggest tax contributor. Daniel Bailey: Sad. No chance to convert to gas? Fred Burwell: Daniel Bailey Don't know this plant in particular, but most coal plants aren't close enough to pipelines to be practical...and of course we can't build any new pipelines. Also, gas conversions will never be as efficient as stand-alone gas plants. Daniel Bailey: Fred Burwell I was a CRO at the Bruce Mansfield Plant in Shippingport. 3 Units, coal-fired, 800 Megawatts each. Foster Wheeler once through supercritical boilers, GE turbine generators. They were scrubbed on the back end. All shut down now. This was in Shippingport, Pa. Fred Burwell: You know the drill then. I spent years in and out of Hatfield doing maintenance and construction. First Energy spent most of a billion dollars on FGD. Before they were finished, FE was told they would have to install SCRs at a cost of over 400 million. FE had to cut and run. Thanks, Obama. |
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| Carlton Crasher commented on Alex's post |
Why won't companies put a date on their news releases? I presume that this one was released around 2009. The owner of Coffeen Power spent $900m during the first decade of the 21st Century to improve the plant. Part of that was to replace the HP/IP turbine. But they also installed state of the art precipitators, scrubbers and NOx control (selective catalytic reduction). "Overall NOx emissions have been reduced by 80 percent and SO2 emissions by over 90 percent-–making Coffeen Plant one of the cleanest coal-fired plants in the nation in terms of emissions." I wonder how much of that investment became stranded assets in 2019. And how that loss is shared among banks, shareholders and ratepayers. I did not find anything about controlling toxic pollution from their wastewater ponds.
Jeff Dunn posted 50 photos from a tour of the plant while it was still running. These are four of those photos.
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| #07 via tour Unit #1 with the control valves in the middle foreground |
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| #10 via tour "Main control room" |
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| #12 via tour "Main control room" |
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| #14 via tour "Standing on Unit 1 boiler roof looking southwest at the scrubber" |
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| Blair Kunkel, May 2017 |
I'm saving a satellite image since it is old enough to show emissions coming out of the stack. Note that the plant has several wastewater ponds, some of which look rather ugly.
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| Satellite |
In this 1998 image the plant looks almost naked. I think it has only a first generation particle precipitator. This was before they spent about a decade and almost a billion dollars adding pollution control equipment.
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| Google Earth, Apr 1998 |
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