HECO pursues palm oil option

27 February 2011


Hawaiian Electric Co. engineers have been successfully carrying out tests to determine whether the utility's 40-year-old oil-fired steam generating units could run on crude palm oil. As a fuel source, palm oil did not receive any serious attention until a few years ago when Malaysia began refining it into a biofuel, which the country's oil companies blend with petroleum-based diesel for use in automobiles. But it has not been used before unblended in the crude state to generate electricity . "As far as we knew, no one had ever fired a steam turbine using 100 percent crude vegetable oil," said Ron Cox, HECO's vice president for generation and fuels.

HECO launched the project last year at the Kahe power plant as part of an experiment to see how various alternative fuels will work in its group of oil-fired boilers. HECO hascomitted itself to having alternative energy make up 40 percent of its electricity production by 2030.

Although the 1.6 million gallons of palm oil used in the test was imported from Malaysia, HECO officials say their goal is to use locally produced biofuels in the future. Palm oil was selected for the initial test because it was readily available in sufficient quantities at a price competitive with petroleum-based fuels. Palm oil was priced at a slight premium to crude oil when HECO started planning the Kahe biofuel test about two and a half years ago, but since then the spread has widened with Malaysian palm oil now trading for nearly $180 a barrel. Nonetheless, HECO officials contend the company's plan will play a key role in helping jump-start a local biofuel industry because investors won't put money into biofuel production until they have the assurance that there is a large potential customer for the product, such as a utility. Also, HECO says by retrofitting its existing generation equipment to run on biofuels, the utility can continue to make use of its $6 billion in capital investment without significant additional spending.

The basic goal of the Kahe test was to see how much palm oil could be substituted for the low-sulphur fuel oil normally burned at the plant and still have the plant function normally. HECO started with a mix of about 20 percent palm oil in one of the plant's six generating units and gradually increased the ratio with no ill effects until the unit was burning 100 percent palm oil last month.

HECO officials said they weren't sure what to expect. While there was plenty of information available on the performance of palm oil as a food additive, there was virtually no data available to HECO engineers on the oil's energy content, combustion temperature and other specifications.

Plant superintendent Teddy Canterbury said he was fairly confident going into the test that the unit could operate on 100 percent palm oil. "What surprised me is that we were able to run the unit at 100 percent of its capacity," he said.

The 90 MW generator on which the test was conducted is one of six generating units at the Kahe plant, which is HECO's largest at 650 MW. All the testing was done under the supervision of the Electric Power Research Institute, a nonprofit industry group that works to develop best practices for electrical utilities.




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