CIRI plans power plant

PALMER — Plans for a private power plant near the Beluga coal fields don’t change anything for the goals of the Valley’s power company.

The Native corporation CIRI announced plans this month to build a power plant using underground coal gasification technology. The plant would churn out 100 megawatts of power.

Meanwhile, the Matanuska Electric Association is moving ahead with power generation plans of its own. Most recently, the co-op announced it was seeking bids to construct a 180-megawatt plant fired by natural gas.

But according to the Matanuska Electric Association, CIRI’s plans don’t really affect MEA.

“If you kind of look at the time frame of our project and their project it would be foolish of us to abandon our project just based on theirs,” said MEA spokeswoman Lorali Carter.

According to its website, CIRI is already working on permits. CIRI’s power generation could begin as early as 2014. But that year is a significant one for MEA. Right now the co-op buys the vast majority of its electricity from Chugach Electric Association. But that contract expires on Dec. 31, 2014. According to MEA’s interim general manager, forecasts have Chugach facing gas shortages that year even before MEA’s contract expires.

Carter said MEA will look at possible power purchase agreements with CIRI.

“If they’ve got it to sell we would be interested in possibly getting power from it,” she said. “We’re certainly excited about their project being a part of the mix for the Railbelt.”

Though CIRI is a private organization, there’s nothing to stop MEA from signing a contract with the corporation. Carter said private companies in the electricity generation business are rare in Alaska but seem to be more common in the Lower 48.

She said she doesn’t have enough access to CIRI’s data to know if the power produced at the plant will be competitive with rates the co-op pays other utilities but said CIRI’s power plant won’t compete with MEA’s.

Jim Jager, spokesman for CIRI, said that the rates will be competitive.

“I think we’re going to produce cost-effective energy,” he said.

The project will be built somewhere in a stretch of land in CIRI’s holdings in and around the Beluga coal fields on the west side of Cook Inlet.

Jager said that while the wells down into the coal beds will be mostly on land inside the Mat-Su Borough, the company hasn’t decided yet where to put the actual power plant.

“It’s unclear where the power plant is going to be because we have land in both the Kenai borough and the Mat-Su Borough and we haven’t determined which spot it is going to be,” he said. “The Mat-Su Borough does have some complications because of the law it passed back when the power company was trying to develop the coal plant.”

But the borough’s power plant ordinance — in the past a subject of much legal wrangling with MEA — is just one of a number of factors that will weigh on that decision, Jager said.

He said while he doesn’t doubt MEA is sincere in their desire to move ahead with its power plant, he thinks CIRI’s project, which has the ability to expand beyond 100 megawatts, will change a lot of things in the energy business.

“I think it is unlikely that our plant is not going to impact Southcentral Alaska’s electric generation plan in a whole bunch of different ways that nobody, frankly, understands quite yet,” he said.

He said the coal fields could provide enough power for the whole Railbelt through underground coal gasification. But that’s not something CIRI plans to do, because the goal is to expand the number of different types of electrical generation in the Railbelt, not reduce them.

“When you have a single source of electricity, you’re basically painting yourself into a corner,” Jager said.

Underground coal gasification is a relatively young technology, but CIRI’s website says it’s been tested and proven effective in more than 50 projects worldwide.

The way it works is two wells are drilled down to the coal bed. Down one hole the company pumps air or some other oxidizer that causes the coal to burn. The heat and pressure then gasifies the coal. The gas that comes out of the second well, called syngas or synthesis gas, contains methane and can be burned to create power or can be purified into natural gas for sale.

CIRI says the process is as clean as producing energy with natural gas. The company points out that, unlike traditional methods of turning coal into energy, there is no mining involved. Most of the pollutants remain underground in the coal bed.

Contact Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com or 352-2270.