Electric Power Research Institute: environmental Control Technology Center.

Operations and maintenance continued this month at the Electric Power Research Institute`s (EPRI`s) Environmental Control Technology Center (ECTC). Testing for the month involved continued investigations into the Clear Liquor Scrubbing Process for the production of Anhydrous Calcium Sulfate (Anhydrite). The 1.0 MW Cold-Side Selective Catalytic Reduction (SCR) unit and the Carbon Injection System (the Pulse-jet Fabric Filter) remained idle this month in a cold-standby mode and were inspected regularly. From May 3-18, the NYSEG Kintigh Station and the ECTC were off-line for a two-week scheduled Station outage. During the ECTC outage, the major systems of the Center were inspected, and several preventive maintenance activities were completed. A listing of the major O&M outage activities completed during this period is presented in the Pilot/Mini-Pilot section of this report. In May 1997, an extension to the Anhydrite Production test block was started following the NYSEG outage. The extension to the Anhydrite Production test block is being funded by the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) after promising results from the original test program. Both EPRI and the Department of Energy (DOE) funded the original test program as part of the DOE`s Advanced Power Systems Program, whose mission is to accelerate the commercialization of affordable, high- efficiency, low-emission, coal-fueled electric generating technologies. While the pilot portion of the Anhydrite project was conducted on the 4.0 MW wet FGD pilot unit at EPRI`s Environmental Control Technology Center (ECTC) in Barker, New York, the extension mainly used the 0.4 MW Mini-Pilot wet FGD unit to reduce operating costs. The project is designed to develop an advanced FGD process that produces a useable byproduct, anhydrite (anhydrous calcium sulfate). The original CLS/Anhydrite process included three steps: chloride removal, clear liquor scrubbing, and anhydrite production. The final step in the process involved sending the calcium sulfite slurry from the sludge bed reactor to the anhydrite reaction tank for conversion to anhydrous calcium sulfate (anhydrite). The original objective in the PRDA project was to demonstrate all three areas of the integrated process. However, the primary focus has been on anhydrite production because: The anhydrite process is the least developed and potentially most valuable of the three proposed processes; The initial anhydrite tests on the pilot unit were encouraging; and, The DOE has placed emphasis on the reuse of byproduct materials