The government has signed off on the use of petroleum coke (petcoke) to fuel a 120-MW plant scheduled to come on stream by 2010. Petcoke costs less than a quarter of the price paid for fuel used in current generating technology.

Mullings. the design for that plant is currently being done

Energy minister Clive Mullings, in an interview last Friday, told Sunday Finance that the joint venture expansion plan between Petrojam and PDVSA, the Venezuelan state oil company, will include the provision of the fuel to Jamaica Public Service Company (JPS), which will build the plant at its Hunt's Bay location.

"It was signed off recently," said Mullings of the move that he says will allow the petroleum company to "fully utilise a barrel of oil".
"Petrojam will use a delayed coker unit to create the Petcoke that would be sent to the Hunt's Bay plant, from which steam will be sent back to Petrojam," he added. This means that the plant will also operate as a cogeneration plant.

A coker unit is an oil refinery processing unit that converts the residual oil from the vacuum distillation column into light hydrocarbon gases, naphtha, Coker LGO, Coker HGO, and petroleum coke.

The project, which forms part of Petrojam's expansion plan which evolved out of a memorandum of understanding signed in August 2005 between then Jamaica prime minister P J Patterson and the Venezuelan president, Hugo Chavez, would be finished by the end of 2010.

Petrojam will use a delayed coker unit to create the Petcoke that would be sent to the Hunt's Bay plant.

At the time of the agreement between the two governments, the expansion would lift the capacity of the 40-year-old refinery from 35,000 barrels to 50,000 barrels a day, and would be largely financed by the Venezuelan government that would take a 49 per cent stake in Petrojam.
The equity participation by PDVSA is, however, being reviewed, according to Mullings.

The project was initially supposed to be done in two phases, but the overall expansion is expected to be done over the next three years at a cost of US$500 million (J$35 billion). As such the petcoke plant is expected to be done by 2010.
"The design for that plant is currently being done," said Mullings. "Plans for the very short term is centred around conservation, where we build a culture of conservation and rationalisation...we must realise we are in a crisis."
This is why he is intent on seeing the project through as quickly as possible.

Although not far away, Jamaica's electricity needs will outpace electricity-generating capacity before the new plant comes on stream, which is why the government had identified the need for a 40-MW stop-gap plant to be brought online by the end of next year.

The plant will likely use slow-speed diesel turbine, according to Mullings.
This will be needed to avoid frequent blackouts from scheduled load shedding - which at times affected as much as half of the island during most of 2001 - and this has to be completed by the beginning of 2009, according to Office of Utilities Regulation (OUR) director-general, J Paul Morgan.

In 2001, according to projection information on a loan application to the International Finance Corporation (IFC), "capacity challenges led to a drop in the company's (capacity) availability level to 79.7 per cent", due to a fire putting out one of its larger units in Old Harbour and one of the private power companies reducing its generation to the grid, "resulting in significant load shedding during February-September 2001".

"At the peak of load shedding, over 50 per cent of the island was affected," added the report done in August 2002, when load shedding was still continuing throughout the country, according to a rolling black-out schedule published by JPS.

By the time the 120-MW combined cycle plant was brought on in 2003 at Bogue, in St James, to meet the shortfall, electricity demand was already growing at a rate such that the OUR, by the end of 2004, believed that 114 MW of generating capacity would have been needed by 2006, and another 116 MW could be brought online either late 2007, or early 2008.

Jamaica's peak demand at the end of June this year was measured at 625.5 MW, placed against installed capacity of 894.3 MW including private power companies, which are contracted to provide 197 MW of electricity to the national grid, and Wigton Wind Farm, which is rated at 20.7 MW.
This provides for nearly 270 MW more than needed at peak or a 42 per cent reserve.

Electricity generation plants do not generally run at the full rated capacity and in the case of Jamaica, net output is placed at around 795.1 MW - about 100 MW less than installed - placing the total capacity at 27 per cent above peak.

But it is scenarios such as when large plants like Old Harbour's steam Number 3 and Number 4 units, rated at 61.8 and 65.1 MW respectively and which are over 30 years old, are out of service for routine maintenance or statutory safety checks, that explain part of the reason why Morgan believes "the system is being stressed".

If three and four are off the system at the same time, the system only has 40 MW available during peak hours or 6.3 per cent more than demand between the hours 6:30 pm and 9:00 pm.
President & CEO of the Jamaica Public Service (JPS), Damian Obiglio, admitted in a forum last month that JPS's 30 odd-year-old baseload plants have resulted in high maintenance outages - effectively dropping the company's total capacity to 663MW on average year-round.

Damian Obiglio, had complained about the need for government's approval to undertake expanding its capacity over 50MW without approval from the government, saying that it was seriously impeding its ability to effectively and efficiently distribute power.

But another part of the delay of generation expansion was the government's focus on switching to natural gas in Jamaica, 1.2 million tonnes per annum (mtpa) in the first instance with a potential for 2.5 million mtpa, which was touted as a major component of the previous administration's plan to diversify energy sources to reduce cost - last year Jamaica's oil import bill totalled over US$1.7 billion.

But the Petroleum Corporation of Jamaica (PCJ), the agency charged with locating the needed natural gas, thought it would be necessary to source bridging volumes to facilitate a 2009 start-up for a floating LNG terminal that would receive the gas, because "It appears that LNG from either of these two sources (Trinidad and Venezuela) will not be available in time to meet the 2009 target," said the PCJ in prequalification documents.

But even if sourced the cost of LNG are currently placed at US$6.05 per MBtu (million British thermal unit), just under the cost of Heavy Fuel Oil (HFO) that is predominantly used by generating plants in Jamaica and which cost around US$6.55 per MBtu.

In early January 2006, Cabinet had said that they would recommend to use coal as the fuel source for the 120 MW baseload plant. Incidentally, coal costs around US$2.29 per MBtu - a lot cheaper than LNG or HFO - but is still more costly than Petcoke as a fuel, estimated to cost US$1.60 per MBtu, or less than a quarter of HFO.

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