Plant’s energy recycling system will cut back on waste, make money
It’s a question that industries in West Virginia have been grappling with for awhile: is it possible to make money while still running an environmentally-friendly operation? A large alloy plant in Fayette County is figuring out how to do just that.
Inside Globe Metallurgical’s silicon plant in Alloy, West Virginia it feels like hell. Up ahead, there’s a huge open furnace. Coals burn and fire flies up a chimney. A worker stokes the fire; safely inside a piece of heavy machinery, he moves the woodchips and coal around.
The plant itself is constantly noisy. Fans are blowing, water is running, fire is burning. Under the furnaces, gunshots ring out.
The plant uses shotgun shells to drain the liquid silicon from its container, but more about that later. Tom Casten points to the furnace.
“And you see this, biggest bonfire you ever saw,” he says. “You can take care of all the Boy Scouts there with all their marshmallows. That heat is going up, and for the first 79 years the main challenge of the plant is to get rid of that heat so they can clean it out.”
Casten is the chairman of a Chicago-based company called Recycled Energy Development. He’s been in the business for 30 years. And he’s got his eye on all of that heat that’s—literally—going up in smoke. He wants to capture it, and recycle it as energy, like he’s done for numerous projects around the country.
First, let’s back up. People use silicon every day—in things like deodorant, caulks, computer chips, aluminum foil—but rarely get to see it in its pure form. Here it is, scattered around the grounds of the plant after it falls off a truck. It looks like a shiny, lightweight rock, and it’s made by melting quartz rock under those furnaces with a giant electrode.
Outside, Sam Cavalier, the plant’s manager of engineering and maintenance stands next to one of these electrodes—a big, septic tank-sized mass of carbon.
“This is the conductor that’s in the furnaces,” Cavalier says. “These things—this is a thread, this is like a bolt. So you take these and you screw them together. And as they’re consumed, we just add one. So the process is never, never shut down.”
So the furnaces melt the quartz with coal and woodchips, then the shotgun fires shells into the container to release the melted silicon goo. Simple, right?
Here’s the problem: the plant has five furnaces producing lots of heat. While some of that energy heats the electrodes to melt the quartz, a lot of the heat is wasted. Years ago it just went out a smokestack, but now because of environmental regulations the plant has developed a whole system just to cool the 1200 degree exhaust down so it can be released into the atmosphere.
Standing outside, Casten points to the plant’s hairpin coolers, stretching 90 feet into the air.
“That is nothing but a radiator and because of its height they don’t have to have fans on them,” he says. “As the wind blows by, it naturally radiates that heat off.”
So the heat goes through ductwork, into the hairpin coolers, and then into baghouses, which collect the dust. Then, finally it’s cool enough and clean enough to be released.
But starting next year, Casten’s company will change that. They’re going to be installing new furnaces to capture the heat, and make it even hotter. Then, the resulting steam will power a generator; sometimes, the electricity will be fed back into the plant, sometimes it will be sold to the grid.
Casten says besides being environmentally friendly, this will also make the plant—and his company—money.
“If you can burn coal and not capture any of the bad things in it, you can make power probably cheaper than going through all of the things we’re going to have to do here,” he says.
“But in today’s world where virtually every state and both political parties are trying to figure out how to make energy more environmentally acceptable, and then of course, you say, ‘what about the economy? How do we do this in a way that doesn’t hurt the economy?’ Well, what we’re doing will help the economy.”
There are 230 people employed at the plant 45 minutes from Charleston. They represent some of the area’s best jobs. Most of the workers make upwards of $20 an hour. Sam Cavalier has been there for 35 years.
“It’s probably one of the better jobs in the valley,” he says. “It’s good wages, good benefits; there’s significant job security here. We run 24/7, and as Tom mentioned earlier the plant’s never been shut down. So yeah, it’s a good place to work.”
And after Casten’s team makes its energy improvements, the alloy plant will be a more efficient place to work, too. Casten estimates the project will make the plant 20 percent more efficient, and at the same time cut the cost of production by 6 percent.
It’s not cheap—the project’s expected to cost more than $100 million by the time it’s finished in 2013. That’s money that Casten’s company is sinking into the project; he says it’s a worthwhile investment.
“To us, these are the ultimate green jobs,” he says. “I think they’ve figured the average person has been here 25 years. These are very skilled individuals. You’ve seen what’s happening on the floor. This is a very skilled job. To me, the exciting thing is that by removing the energy and making the plant greener, we’re actually ensuring that the jobs will stay here.”
But the gunshots will have to go. Casten says the new system will continuously cast the silicon, eliminating the need for hourly shotgun blasts.