The STRAIGHT Poop

Like most people, you have probably noticed that power plants are often located next to a river, lake or the ocean. This location is not a surprise as power plants typically have required significant water resources for cooling purposes.

When Fibrowatt began development of it projects in North Carolina, local opposition would often try to convince people that a Fibrowatt plant would be a huge water user. This concern sometimes resonated with local residents as it was built on the above perception that – if it’s a power plant, it is a “gigantic” facility, and therefore must have a “gigantic” appetite for water.

Is this a valid concern about a Fibrowatt plant? Not Even Close

The Fibrominn plant in Minnesota requires very little water – as it was designed with an air-cooled condenser for cooling (as opposed to the use of a wet cooling tower as is often seen at power plants). The plant design and operations also include significant steps to recycle or reuse water. In North Carolina, Fibrowatt plants will use this same low water-use technology and efforts are being taken to further reduce external process water use associated with the air emissions control systems. Fibrowatt recognizes the importance of water resources in these agricultural communities and seeks to minimize its use. Fibrowatt plants are not major water users – a fact that is often purposefully ignored by local opposition.

When Fibrowatt was in the midst of developing a plant in western North Carolina, local opposition pointed to the nearby Yadkin River and tried to convince everyone that Fibrowatt would practically drain the area of all of its water. As part of this effort, they would report projected water usage in the largest terms possible, expressing concerns about the “gallons per year” that would be used by the project. Since few people have a good handle on the scale of their own water usage, the opposition knew that the larger the number they used – the larger the public concern they could garner.

While public concerns about water usage were continuously addressed by Fibrowatt, pointing out how little water was actually going to be used and how water consumption had been significantly reduced for it plants, these concerns continued to surface periodically. Maybe this is because the Company hadn’t heard a local public official’s down-to-earth response to this concern soon enough – a perspective that still has meaning in the context of the two remaining North Carolina projects and other projects Fibrowatt is considering.

As part of their fight against Fibrowatt, the local opposition was working a number of angles, enlisting local school kids into their campaign. As their campaign progressed, concern about Fibrowatt’s water usage was peddled to the local school kids. When this official’s daughter came home and explained that the Fibrowatt plant was going to use too much water, this concern was addressed in a very educated and creative way. While the quick answer would have been to say this was not true, a more instructive answer was offered that is useful for others to consider.

After hearing this concern, the local official took his daughter to the edge of the Yadkin River near where the plant was planned and asked his daughter to look at the lazy flow of water and start counting. When she reached 40, he stopped her and explained that the water that had passed by in those 40 seconds was the same as the plant would need in a full day. Yes – the plant would use some water but it was a very small amount of what was continuously flowing down the river. His daughter was surprised at how little water was going to be used.

[NOTE: Actually, the quantity used for his example was the system capacity to supply water to the proposed plant. Actual usage would have represented about half of this capacity amount or about 22 seconds of water. ]

To expand on this novel explanation, this could have gone further to suggest that for Fibrowatt to “drain the area of all of its water” it would have to build almost 4,000 of these plants. Facts are a little different than the opposition’s rhetoric.

In Minnesota, water usage amounts to about 100 – 125 gallons per minute (GPM), a very modest amount for a 55-megawatt (MW) power plant. The largest percentage of this water (roughly 75%) is used in the emissions control system – in the selective non-catalytic reduction (SNCR) equipment for nitrogen oxide reduction and for the reduction in sulfur and chlorine emissions in the spray dryer absorber (SDA). As Fibrowatt evaluates new approaches to controlling emissions at the North Carolina plants, it is likely that the water requirements for this equipment will be greatly reduced or even eliminated.