Overview
The purpose of the project activity was to generate electric power from waste gas exhausted from converters using an advanced Oxygen Converter Gas Cleaning and Recovery (OG) technology at a newly built plant. Nanjing Iron and Steel Co., Ltd (hereafter referred to as NISCO), the project developer, was established in 1958. NISCO is the largest iron & steel enterprise of non-state-owned mixed ownership in Jiangsu Province in China. NISCO Converter Gas Recovery and Utilization for Power Generation Project applied an advanced OG technology patented by Beijing Central Engineering and Research Incorporation of Iron and Steel Industry (CERI) to recover and clean the gas produced by two newly built 120-ton converters. The recovered and cleaned exhaust gas has then been sent to two 50 MW power plants, where it has been utilized for power generation, along with other recovered gases, i.e., coke-oven gas (COG) and blast furnace gas (BFG).
At the time of the start of this Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) project activity, the project was the first of its kind to recover converter gas to produce electricity in China. Under the baseline scenario of this greenfield project, COG and BFG has been recovered to generate electricity and therefore this project accounted only for the emission reductions associated with the electricity generated by recovering the converter gas. Prior to this Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) project activity, there was no pre-project situation as all facilities were newly built. The electricity generated by converter gas, namely the waste energy defined in the project, has met the generator capacity of 20.4MW of the two 50MW power plants and supply electricity to the East China Power Grid (ECG), replacing an equivalent amount of electricity that otherwise would have been purchased by NISCO from ECG which is dominated by coal-fired power plants.
In absence of the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) project activity, only COG and BFG gases would have been used to generate electricity; however, the gas generated by the two 120-ton converters would have been burned and emitted to the atmosphere after being cleaned by the standard OG technology. No electricity would have been generated from the converter gas. The expected emission reductions from the project were estimated at 105,681 tCO2e per year for a fixed ten-year crediting period.
Benefits
The project has contributed to the sustainable development of China in the following aspects:
- It has promoted the integrated resources utilization and thus reduce the waste of energy sources;
- The generated electricity has displaced some electricity generated by coal-fired power plants and reduce the associated environmental pollution from coal combustion; meanwhile, it has alleviated the electricity shortage in the region.
- The successful running of the project has encouraged other steel producers in the same area or in the vicinity to utilize the surplus converter gas for power generation and has promoted sustainable development in local area as well as the whole country.
The project was the first of its kind in China to recover converter gas for power generation. It had a significant demonstration effect in the country for utilizing an advanced and innovative technology to achieve energy efficiency and utilize converter gas to generate power in the steel industry.