As waste to energy plants go, they don’t come much bigger than this. In fact they don’t come any bigger than this. The numbers are huge: 3 million tonnes of waste per year, nearly 9000 tonnes per day. If this plant where a mythical creature, it would surely be a dragon.
Scheduled to be completed by 2018, the Phase III expansion will add an additional 4675 tonnes per day to the existing two phases, enabling the plant to process up to 8875 tonnes of municipal solid waste every day.
Keppel Seghers also provided the process design, technology and services for Phase I and II of the facility, which were completed in 2006 and 2013 respectively. The plant is owned and operated by Shenzhen Energy Environment Engineering, which awarded the Belgian firm this and the previous contracts.
“The collaboration started in 1999 and so far the company has awarded 18 waste to energy lines to Keppel Seghers,” explains Nicolas Maertens, project manager at Keppel Seghers.
Big Numbers
Once Phase III is completed it will replace the generating capacity of 700,000 tonnes of coal each year with the effect of cutting CO2 emissions by around 2 million tonnes per year.
It will also bring the total amount of municipal waste treated by Keppel Seghers' proprietary technology across China to over 10 million tonnes per year, generating some 12,000 MWh of energy every day and reducing CO2 emissions by 6 million tonnes per year.
To put that into perspective, if all the waste processed at the Baoan facility was dumped on football pitch, aside from making the ground keeper rather unhappy, it would make a pile 2km high.
“It’s fair to say that the second phase is more or less the technical reference plant for waste to energy in China and it got a Golden Award in 2014,” Maertens tells WMW.
He adds that the reasons that the Baoan phase II is the reference plant for Chinese waste to energy are first because of its size in China (four lines of 750 tonnes/day). Despite being an unprecedented scale at the time, the plant is generally recognised as highly reliable and setting the standard in many ways.
The plant operator agrees: "In 2014, Baoan Phase II acquired the first National High-quality Project Gold Prize in the waste incineration industry and became one of the 79 winners of the prize in different industries since the PRC was founded. It was also the first of Shenzhen since it was built. The prize is the top honor in engineering construction in China."
"Baoan Phase II is the only waste to energy power plant globally that was one-step built and put into operation and provided a disposal capacity of 3000t/day,” says Shenzhen Energy Environment Engineering.
The second reason Maertens ascribes the facility’s status to is its automatic combustion control.
Flexibility Key for Scale
According to Maertens nowadays, Keppel Seghers offers the best available technology for bigger size waste to energy lines because its grate is extremely flexible. “Every line is built up of several modules, or lanes,” he explains. “These modules are mounted together from left to right. Baoan III consists of six lanes. Every lane consists of different air zones or elements. Baoan III consists of six elements which cater for drying, gasification, ignition, combustion, burn-out and recovery of energy from the hot ashes.”
For Baoan III, this leads to 36 cells. Each of them can independently slide, tumble and receive combustion air. So actually the Baoan III grate consists out of 36 mini grates all controlled autonomously.
This flexibility says Maertens comes in very handy for large waste to energy lines. This because the waste characteristics vary over the surface of the combustion grate. For example, the waste at the left side could be wetter compared to the waste in the middle. Thanks to the flexibility and the automatic control the waste anywhere on the combustion grate can be processed appropriately by adapting the supplied combustion air; retention time and/or number of tumbling actions.
Maertens adds that this increases the performance significantly compared to a less flexible combustion grate where the slowest burning waste determines the pace for the entire combustion grate/process.
Exporting to China
In terms of doing business in China as a European manufacturer Maertens explains that there are two systems. One for being an importer of technology and one for manufacturing locally. When Baoan Phase III comes online Keppel Seghers will have completed 56 lines in China, making it the largest importer of the technology in the country.
“Of course the business model in China is a bit different from European,” notes Maertens. “We deliver the core components - the grate, the hydraulics, the burners. But not the casing and the insulation or electrical cabling, all that is done locally.”
He adds that the firm has to continually innovate to stay ahead of local and overseas competitors. In the earlier days, Keppel Seghers was setting itself apart by means of the tumbling grate, which well suited to process waste with a higher moisture content that than would typically be incinerated in a European waste to energy plant.
“We have two offices in China and our engineers travel their regularly. The biggest difference (to Europe) is the speed. Everything goes very very fast. They expect the supplier to be very organised, firstly in terms of design and secondly to supply the grates or equipment in a short period of time,” says Maertens.
“As a foreign importer we have to work very closely not only with the clients, but with the design institutes. The design institute will require certain information from us to enable them to do their work. We’ve got used to all this but if you are new it may come as a surprise,” he adds.
Keppel Seghers it seems is successfully navigating the tricky businesses of exporting to China. In doing so it has carved itself a sizable slice of a huge and growing market. With plenty of capacity yet to be built, watch this space.
