USC’s biomass plant debacle
How the university’s green dream went bust after three ‘potentially lethal accidents’ and a host of other problems
By WAYNE WASHINGTON (The State Newspaper)
On June 28, 2009, an explosion rocked the biomass-fueled power plant on the campus of the University of South Carolina.
The force of the blast sent a metal panel some 60 feet toward the control office of the plant at Whaley and Sumter streets, according to documents obtained from USC by The State newspaper through a Freedom of Information Act request.
No one was hurt, but USC officials were concerned enough about the “potentially lethal accident” that they ordered an independent safety review and, in a strongly worded letter to the company that had built the plant, made it clear that university staff would not be allowed back into the building until the review was completed.
The blast underscored what some USC officials privately grumbled about for years: That the plant has been a $20 million disaster, a money pit that was poorly planned and built by a company that had never constructed such a cutting-edge “green energy” power plant before.
Interviews with USC officials and a spokeswoman for the company as well as a review of more than 1,800 pages of documents show that:
• USC, whose officials touted the plant “as the cat’s meow” before its startup in December 2007, closed it in March of this year after it had been shut down more than three dozen times. In one two-year period, the plant only provided steam – its purpose – on 98 out of 534 days, according to a USC review.
• There was no separate bidding process for the construction of the plant. The firm that built it, Johnson Controls Inc. of Wisconsin, was the only firm that included the construction of a biomass plant as part of its effort to win a competitively bid energy services contract. JCI won that $33.6 million energy services contract, then alone negotiated with USC the added cost of the biomass plant.
• USC paid JCI an additional $19.6 million for the plant. The university was to get its money back in energy savings or payments from JCI. So far, JCI has paid USC $4.3 million because the plant did not perform as promised. As things stand now, USC will recoup its $19.6 million investment by 2020 from payments by JCI.
• Despite a relationship that was, at one point, so acrimonious that USC hired outside legal counsel, the university continues to work with JCI. One option that USC now is considering is putting natural gas-fired turbines in the closed biomass plant to produce power, and JCI may be involved, a USC official says.
• Most substantively, however, the biomass experience led USC to change its structure of governance, giving a reformulated committee of its board of trustees responsibility for overseeing and vetting projects.
Now sitting idle, with spider webs and a thin film of dust replacing a plant’s hard-hat hustle and bustle, the biomass plant stands as a monument to the university’s failed push toward new, “green” technology, inadequate oversight and naïveté, some of its own officials acknowledge in internal documents.
The plant blemishes the legacy of the late Andrew Sorensen, the beloved, bow-tied president who was in charge of USC when the plant was conceived and constructed. And it also raises questions about whether USC’s revised system of oversight will be able to prevent future instances of idealism gone wrong that marred the biomass project from the beginning.
“A (expletive) mess with many layers,” is how William “Ted” Moore, a former USC vice president of finance and planning, described the plant in an email to Ed Walton, USC’s chief financial officer.
In another email, this one to USC president Harris Pastides, who succeeded Sorensen, Moore said: “The value of this thing may be scrap metal.”
That’s not the way JCI sees the project.
“We remain committed to the long-term success of the USC project, and the university has been supportive and appreciative of Johnson Controls’ efforts to fulfill its commitment,” said Karen Conrad, the company’s director of marketing communications.
Full story: http://www.thestate.com/2011/10/09/2001993/uscs-biomass-plant-debacle.html#ixzz1aKeVXkUU
==========================================================
At least they finally (weeks late) complied with FOIA requests, unlike some public agencies we know:
About this story
More than 1,800 pages of records obtained by The State show the biomass project collapsed into delays, recriminations and frustration.
Click here to read excerpts of those documents
State senior reporter Wayne Washington requested documents, via the S.C. Freedom of Information Act, concerning USC’s biomass plant on June 29 from the University of South Carolina. That law allows public agencies 15 working days to respond to a request for public information.
University officials responded they would need additional time to fulfill the request. They also said, because USC is getting an increasing number of requests for public information, the university would exercise its legal right to charge for document production and copying.
USC supplied 1,816 pages of documents concerning the $20 million facility to The State Sept. 22, charging $255.80 to provide the information.
===========================================================
h/t to WUWT reader Mike Whaley
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
.
Is this another case of oxygen getting into a dangerously hot and explosive gas (or vice versa)?
The Fukushima was a similar engineering oversight, just waiting for a disaster. If they had put openable ‘windows’ in the top of the reactor containment buildings, there would not have been a gas build up, and thus no hydrogen explosions. The world would have been a safer place, and all for the want of a ‘window’.
.
It seems that the trend today is to take several steps backwards in order to get the same result from the technology we already have. Using energy to change a fuel into another fuel or reverse the combustion process like with CO2 to energy systems seems very backwards. I am all for energy conservation and new technology but not by sacrificing our lifestyle or future. I see a future that runs on millions of times more energy than we are using now. How will we ever move past fossil fuels if we don’t embrace and push for energy creation that is continuous and vastly more powerful? Atomic and subatomic solutions are the future. Will the spacecraft run on wind or biofuel? There is not enough biofuel on this planet or a hundred planets to power our energy needs. If everything in our world becomes “smart”, which it should, what will power them? What will power the electric cars, trucks, construction equipment, trains, planes, boats, and whatever else we come up with? Wind farms, tidal farms, biofuel? Surely all of these will impact the beloved planet. Wind farms will alter climate if you build them large enough, same with tidal energy. The only sustainable future I see is one where we go BIG and everyone else goes home. Take your energy inefficient and intermittent power, and leave the future to real scientists.
I don’t see this as a ‘Green fail’ just a contracting failure and consequent choice of a flawed design and contractor.
Actually burning biofuel is hardly “cutting edge”. It has been done on a large scale in e. g. Sweden for decades. However it is difficult to get really high pressures/temperatures out of these low-grade fuels, so it works best for plants who produce mostly heat for housing and a relatively small proportion of electricity. If you want to produce a larger proportion of electricity the accepted and well-tried solution is to “top up” the plant with some natural gas. Now this is not in accordance with the Green religion, hence the effort to produce some sort of “natural gas” internally in the plant. Now producing and handling large amounts of CO gas is a decidedly risky technology, so I am not surprised the whole thing went bang. By the way CO is extremely toxic, so it could have been much worse.
This is mostly a good example of poor quality control. There is no reason for a plant that new to be having such issues. There hasn’t been time for maintenance to get bad, so the problem has to be poor design and constuction.
Sorry, but this isn’t about shoddy biofuels, just shoddy construction.
Roger Sowell says:
October 9, 2011 at 9:01 pm
U. South Carolina management should have done a better job of due diligence before approving the expenditures.
That’s the point isn’t it.
It’s green and we are saving the planet so the kind of vetting that we apply to greedy, ugly corporate polluters isn’t necessary.
So we end up with windmills that are subject to turbine failure located on primary school playgrounds and industrial gasification processes that belong in an area zoned for ‘heavy industry’ on college campuses.
Johnson Controls did not build plant…They subcontracted job to Nexterra. Looking at Nexterra website they have many projects listed.. but not this one.
There are several important constraints not outlined well in the article. First, this was to be on the cutting edge, not as previous systems were. The reason was multifold. One is the permitting necessary with ozone requirements in an area that is non-attainment to almost non-attainment. There are new source performance standards, prevention of significant deterioration standards, and new standards for PM. If that was not enough of a challenge, there are governments and NGO’s that took an interest in the facility. There is the city of Cloumbia, Richland County, and Columbia is the state capitol.There are also civic organizations and real estate organizations interested in making sure that this unit did not have detrimental effects on their livihood or property.
The system was a modified dutch kiln that would produce coal gas, while enabling the steam production to reach reduced NOx and PM. The low volume of air to wood would mean less PM entrapment, and a way to control for NOx in the steam generation stage. This is not doable in a typical wood boiler without resorting to enhanced O2 of some sort, NH3 addition, or some other such as two stage separation, with ultra efficient wet scrubbing, or 5 stage electric precipitators. Of course, IIRC, the problems of explosion from a Coal/NG fuel and high O2 to permit easier sequestering of CO2 has been a subject of a thread here at WUWT. Multistage with scrubbing is messy and tends to clog, and even single stage EP’s can blow up, as can baghouses. So, the idea was to have a system that produced extremely low ash entrainment, and a separate firing sequence in order to have an ultra clean unit.
Probably one of the worse situations is that with gas fracking and the poor economy, the cost differential is that the pay back period is now much longer than when the design was conceptualized. The extra steps mean greater energy loss, more costly, and more equipment, and more maintenance, as well.
Looking backwards, the biggest oversight would appear to be safety. I am a USC graduate (twice), and my wife and one of my daughters are graduates as well. We cannot imagine a situation where a student could be killed, and not cause almost insurmoutable problems for the University.
But as shown here at WUWT at the school yard in England, raptors in US and Greece, there are real problems with siting, and with power generation and transport. This is where it becomes important not only to consider the “green” part, but the “deadly” part as well. Adding modules to a unit, means adding complexity, need for better and more control, and is less efficient and more costly. It is even worse for the diffuse energy sources such as wind and solar. The unintended consequences of any powwer generation need to be examined during the conceptual stage, and the implementation stage. Nor can one aspect, such as cost, cleanliness or whatever, be more predominant than safety, use, or feasibility.
From Ralph on October 10, 2011 at 7:20 am:
Slight technical issues with that. Nuclear plants generate Deuterium and Tritium. Especially with radioactive tritium, there are complaints and regulations involved with the release of hydrogen isotopes to the atmosphere, see this HuffPo piece. Small monitored regular releases OK, uncontrolled releases NOT OK.
So at Fukushima, as seen elsewhere, the containment building retained the hydrogen (including isotopes), it seems likely there was a process in place to do a slow release as authorized as needed during normal plant operations. But under emergency conditions, as happened, the top of the containment buildings were made with “blow-out” panels, releasing the sudden overpressure of an explosion without incurring the damage that would have happened with normal building construction.
Indeed, as I remember from the news coverage when the cooler heads were commenting, the building looked terrible after the explosions, but that is how they were supposed to look, with the framework and equipment still intact.
Thus there was not a “similar engineering oversight” at Fukushima.
I’m at a loss here. If burning biomass is carbon neutral, why is burning coal not?
I always though coal was the result of trees and vegetation being covered up and eventually placed under great pressure. So, why is the burning of coal not carbon neutral?
I guess the same could be applied to oil. Was it not too the result of the deaths of organisms that, at one time, sequestered CO2?
As to those who criticize the story simply based on the “accident”, you have it wrong and perhaps the thrust of the article should have directed more to this plant producing power only 98 out of 534 days! This is the crux of all “green” energy stories! Their output is woefully short of what they advertise! Yet, none of the technologies is really new! PV has been around a long time. Generators, whether water driven or wind driven have a long history as does gassification.
If they worked, the private sector would have been all over them a long time ago!
From Ben of Houston on October 10, 2011 at 8:54 am:
More broadly, it highlights the “It’s GREEN, therefore it’s good!” mentality. There’s a lot of crap floating around the marketplace with that being the main to the only selling point, with “saves money” often being a faint also-mentioned that doesn’t stand up to real-world scrutiny. Many things don’t make logical sense with proper consideration, after they’ve been on the market for awhile it becomes clear they weren’t very well thought out, but they were GREEN. A reoccurring theme, such ideas refuse to die, and will often be reintroduced to the market, often repackaged, barely as soon the public memory begins forgetting they didn’t work the first time.
Our ancient ancestors were very Green, with households using durable metal and wood housewares that would last generations. When I look at what my grandparents and parents made do with… Nowadays we use plastic and plastic-encased gadgets that often don’t last five years before needing replacing. This is Green? Is an electric can opener powered by a PV solar system more GREEN than just using a human-powered manual version?
Well, since this was a “green” biomass project, we’d better not tell them that vegetation, and in particular trees, have a fairly high amount of natural radioactive constituents in them. Which means that the ash has measurable radiation, and any particulates that are released have measurable radiation. Not that measurable means dangerous, but just mentioning radioactivity seems to cause emotional terror to some people.
>>Kadaka
>>Thus there was not a “similar engineering oversight” at Fukushima.
I understand that under normal operations, the environment around the reactors should be contained. That is a given.
However, had large panels in the containment building been easily openable with simple cranks and levers (not electric), the build-up of hydrogen could have been released in an emergency and so those hydrogen explosions could have been avoided. Surely you are not implying that those massive explosions were ‘planned’ and an acceptable part of site ‘safety’? In reality, they devastated the buildings; ripped up wiring, pipework and systems; and prevented access to the reactor vessels.
.
I daresay a similar oversight was responsible for the explosion at the biomass plant.
In fact all we ever see with Green technology is failure after failure. Wave generators are regularly destroyed by waves; solar panels degrade much faster than advertised; tidal turbines have their blades ripped off; hydro lakes silt up; biomass plants explode; windelecs fall over; windelecs have continual bearing failures; windelecs regularly catch fire; electric vehicles only do half the advertised milage; hydrogen busses give out more pollutants than diesels**. This is real pipe-dream engineering.
** The hydrogen is produced by natural gas reforming, and the plant is in central London.
.
there is a book entitled STEAM published by the Babcox Wilcox company (my copy is from the thirties) that goes into firing boilers with what the nitwits call biomass fuels.
they built boilers that used EVERYTHING.
obviously the school did not know, realize or care that boiler operation needs to be licenced and that just cannot be waivered at a whim. licencing is speciffically set up to avoid problems like this.
just where is the state licencing board??????
this is the kind of stuff that ends careers for the building/designing entities.
by the way wood and wood products fell out of use a long time ago because ov the low heat value of wood as a fuel. this bunch is “reinventing the wheel” and they’re not half as good as the gang was 100 years ago.
c
From Ralph on October 10, 2011 at 12:44 pm:
To use such manual controls would have required actual people in the building. Do you want humans around in such a potentially explosive situation? Such operations would normally be carried out in the control room, by remotely-operated electric systems. If there had still been operators present, with sufficient electricity available…
What was planned for was the possibility of such explosions. So instead of having an all-concrete building, with the force of the blast being directed further into the building and heavy chunks from the top of the containment building falling on the equipment, lightweight panels blew apart and let the brunt of the blast go outside. Much safer than the alternative imho.
The reality is it would have been much worse without the blowout design. Granted, there would have been even less if the hydrogen could have been allowed to vent naturally, perhaps if such vents were opened before the evacuation. But there are other issues involved, such as possible releases of radioactive steam, dictating the design. All in all, what happened didn’t go all that badly, and could have been much worse.
All large industrial processes are inherently hazardous. Academics are not the best people to run such a facility. They are much better at small prototypes to demonstrate principles. GK
pk brings out a good point. South Carolina is one of the few states that licensed boilers and certified boilermakers is optional. However, there is and was plenty of electricity available. The unit was for seam production for the University and excess steam was for co generation of electricity. The problem was according to some two fold, a problem with the dutch kiln part and a problem with the tranfer part that cuased the two conditions of explosive potential, and ignition. I hope to see a report on the actual causes.
LazyTeenager says:
October 9, 2011 at 11:55 pm
“Anone who has ever burned wood knows that there is a lot of ash left that needs to be disposed. This is green? And they shut down clean gas fied boilers to fire up this polluting mess? Also keep in mind that wood like coal can have all kinds of nasty chemicals like mercury, etc. that are difficult to remove.
————
So according to this theory everytime there is a brushfire the state has to strip the contaminated and mercury polluted ash from thousands of acres and bury it in landfill.”
“And I thought ash was plant food. Silly me.”
Silly yes!!
To compare a concentrated ash collection from a wood burning gasifier farm that could leach into a stream or into the water table to a brush fire that spreads the ash out over a large area is silly to be kind. Also if this is a natural fire not manmade the EPA cannot regulate it. They did have a pollution problem from the ash disposal, if you read the article.
The other point you are missing that some of the mercury, sulfur, and other nasties are also emitted into the atmosphere in the same manner as with coal plants even with best available technology which they may or may not have. Calling this green while condemning coal fired plants is inconsistent.
Also while I have worked on a lot of gasifiers, I am not an expert on the disposal of the ash, But I do know that the EPA and local authorities do regulate such activities and ash is not green.
Excuse me kadaka, but, this is the second time I read this and it was incorrect both times; Rx buildings 3 and 4 were all reinforced concrete on the upper, as you term it ‘containment’ floors … but those aren’t containment floors either so much as they were simply cover for the refueling operations floor when the actual _containment_ vessel was opened to gain access to the actual _reactor_ vessel.
I have spent hours poring over the photos of all for reactors buildings, I would strongly suggest a brush-up on those buildings and their construction (provided below).
Incidentally, I don’t think the upper walls on Rx bldlgs 1 and 2 were designed to ‘blow off’ either, even though they were of panel to frame construction. The Containment vessel ducting into the water within the Torus was to ‘handle’ any gases evolved for whatever reason, short, apparently, of core meltdown and voluminous release of Hydrogen gas as well some Oxygen …
Fukushima pictures may be found at:
http://cryptome.org/eyeball/daiichi-npp/daiichi-photos.htm
Complete collection of all visual materials here:
http://cryptome.org/eyeball/
.
#
#
Ralph says:
October 10, 2011 at 12:44 pm
>>Kadaka
>>Thus there was not a “similar engineering oversight” at Fukushima.
I understand that under normal operations, the environment around the reactors should be contained. That is a given….
__________________________
Fukushima is 40 years old and an older design. Given what that plant went through It held up very well. International Atomic Energy Agency Fact finding Report: http://www.iaea.org/newscenter/focus/fukushima/missionsummary010611.pdf
The WESTERN nuclear industry has a heck of a lot better safety record then the “Green Energy” industry. A summary of wind power accidents/fatalities: http://thenewamerican.com/tech-mainmenu-30/energy/788
G. Karst says:
October 10, 2011 at 1:55 pm
All large industrial processes are inherently hazardous. Academics are not the best people to run such a facility. They are much better at small prototypes to demonstrate principles. GK
___________________________
Amen to that!
In the same city, Columbia SC, a chemist I worked for came up with a “manufacturing process” and scaled from lab bench to full size reactor vessel without a chem Eng or a pilot plant study. Blew the reactor to smithereens.
Since she had a Phd and I had only a lowly BS in Chem she brushed off my remarks and the remarks of other about the heat of reaction. She had to cool the beaker in Dry Ice and acetone the reaction produced so much heat.
Being an intelligent sort I took the day off so I would “miss” the explosion.
You really can’t pound common sense into the ivory tower types especially if they have Phds
Catcracking says:
October 10, 2011 at 4:48 pm
So according to this theory everytime there is a brushfire the state has to strip the contaminated and mercury polluted ash from thousands of acres and bury it in landfill.”….
____________________________
Maybe not in SC but in MA a guy with a vineyard producing wine had to dispose of the lees (stems, seeds and skins) from the wine pressing as “hazardous waste” and could not compost the lees to add back to his soil.
It was also illegal for me to give my composted horse manure to my neighbors for their gardens. I ended up trucking it all the way to New Hampshire and giving it to a gardener in that state. The law states you can not add to your compost heap anything that did not originate on your property. I am not sure what the y did about adding Lime.
Gail Combs says:
October 10, 2011 at 5:55 pm
Gail,
The actual comment below was from Lazy … that I was quoting
“So according to this theory everytime there is a brushfire the state has to strip the contaminated and mercury polluted ash from thousands of acres and bury it in landfill.”….”
Sorry If I mislead you.
BTW the info you provided confirms that the environmental agencies totally lack common sense.
Similarly my gas station owner advise me several years ago that while his fuel tanks were not leaking, the small amount of gasoline spillage required digging up the tanks, removing a huge amount of soil, shipping the soil to a neighboring state for a short while to air out, then selling it back to clients in NJ as topsoil.
Jee. 73 posts after a minor boiler explosion without injuries, and the University gets their money back.
Why the fuzz ? Oh. It’s because it was powered by wood chips. So it was a “Green FAIL”. And of course there were FOIA requests involved, so it sounds really serious.
any time you have a “happenin” in a boiler plant where a fairly large piece of the action goes flying across the inside of the building the operators, engineers and supervisors get just a little excited.
they usually want to fix it right away because their reason for being is being “on line” and they are happiest when the plant is operating and clean.
C