Monday, October 30, 2006

CFB Boiler for Turkey

460 t/h CFB Boiler for Turkey
Source: Slovenská brána

Slovenské energetické strojárne, a.s. Tlmaèe succeeded again in penetration the Turkish market of manufacture and delivery of fluidised bed boilers for power engineering units.

The contract between EREN ENERJI ELEKTRIK ÜRETIM A.S. with its seat in Istanbul and SES Tlmaèe was officially signed on 17th February in Vienna. For behalf of EREN ENERJI ELEKTRIK ÜRETIM A.S. the contract was signed by Mr. Ahmet Eren, chairman of the board of directors and Mr. Ali Ihsan Aras, technical project coordinator.

For behalf of SES Tlmaèe it was signed by Mr. Štefan Ižold, member of the board of directors and general manager, and Mr. Ján Kukuèka, member of the board of directors. The contract value is more than 1 milliard Slovak crowns, or 35 million US dollar.

The subject matter of the concluded contract is a boiler house with a boiler for coal combustion in circulating fluidised bed of an output of 460 t/h, 563 C, 165 bar for 160 MWe unit in Zonguldak-Catalagzi.

It is a contract of turn-key delivery of the boiler house i.e. basic and detail engineering, manufacture, delivery, supervisory assembly and commissioning. The duration of the work starting from the contract commencement up to preliminary handing over by the client should be 30 months.

Estimated start of manufacture in SES Tlmaèe is the end of this year, the greatest intensity of work in manufacturing hall will be in the first half of 2007.

Awarding this important contract to SES Tlmaèe proved again good reputation of the company and references in this country acquired during last decades.

http://www.ses.sk/index.php?snid=134

Monday, October 23, 2006

Selective Mining in Orhaneli

Today I would like to tell you about our trip to Orhaneli Coal mine On 24th February 2000 Thursday

together with Mr. Clark A. Moseley from The North American Coal Corporation of USA, and Mine Field Manager of Orhaneli coal mine, Turkish Coal Board (TKI).

We arrived to Coal mine at about 1130AM. First we visited the coalmine. Minefield had a recent spoil landslide the week before. They also had an underground water flood on top of clean coal seam.

We have been advised that coalmine operation was stopped at that time due to landslide and flood. They said that they hope to start soon since they have not sufficient coal reserves in the coal-blending yard.

Thermal Power Plant had also limited coal stock for the next 2 months which is very critical for nonstop operation and electricity generation.

We then visited the engine repair shops, visualized engine overhaul activities. We visited warehouse. We noticed that they have a lean (short) stock compared to other Turkish Coal Board coalmine operations.

The following issues were discussed in this meeting:

1. Orhaneli Mine Management has 27 each Caterpillar (777) and 13 each Komatsu (HD785) trucks. They all have 85 short ton capacities. 11 trucks had serious engine problems.

2. Coal Mine Management had direct purchasing authority to place order not to exceed 120 billion TL per each purchase.

3. Their close proximity to Istanbul helps to speed up the spare parts emergency purchasing and warehouse stock.

4. New overburden removal activity would be tendered shortly. Current (year 2000) subcontract price was 550,000 TL per m3 overburden.

5. Turkish Coal Board had internal meetings in Ankara. TOR scheme was expected to take some time. Therefore Turkish Coal Board upper management gave new direction to mine management to make necessary overburden removal activity. They plan to remove 15 million tons of overburden in near future.

6. They had typical shovel breakdowns during coal operation.

7. Gumuspinar major coalmine was inspected on the map. Coal seam extension lies from north to south.

8. Nearby Dundar village would be relocated at a later stage of overburden removal.

9. We collected necessary coal production figures of the past years, we reviewed the available drawings, charts, figures, datas etc.


Preliminary observations and Recommendations

After visit to mine field, Mr. C.A.Moseley pointed out following important items,

1. In USA in a similar brown coal open pit surface mining operation, even in worse weather and environmental conditions, they works non-stop, 365 days per year. Here in Orhaneli, in wintertime, administration stops working in the coal field completely

2. In USA they have enough number of discharge water pumps to avoid any underground water flood. In the USA, they always keep spare engine to replace any engine breakdown. All their trucks are available and in full operation at all times. It is not normal practise to keep 11 (eleven) engines in repair shop.

3. He advised that in their US coalmines their average price is between 0.80-1.25 USD per Mmbtu, whereby here in Orhaneli Administration charges local Turkish ELECTRICITY GENERATION PUBLIC COMPANY approximately 3.00 USD per Mmbtu. Fuel Cost could be reduced to initial feasibility figure (8.97 USD per ton) but that needs effort and dedication.

4. In surface mining there is no need water washing of the coal for stone (incombustible) separation. All we need is dedication for careful work, commitment and training of the employees.

5. That is to say, “Selective Mining” procedures must be applied urgently.

6. He recommended that they might invite coalmine manager(s) to their sites in USA to help them to educate how they should work. This may take place sometime prior to coal mine transfer, provided that the future investor pays necessary traveling and living expenses.

Mr. C.A. Woseley advised that North American Coal Corporation desired not get involved in Thermal Power Plant third party due diligence consultancy works since they are not in core coal consultancy business.

There are many lessons-learnt in above trip report for all parties concerned.

“Selective Mining” procedures are to be applied in all our coal mining fields.

Privatisation is a good opportunity for better operation of the coal mines,
however it should be carefully monitored,

Local public R&D funds are to be spent for this purpose to develop local engineering

We should get control over our coal mines and power plants to operate properly, apply “Selective Mining” procedures, make necessary design and operation procedure changes by ourselves,

We should support our local companies to handle all design and operational work for upgrading, and we need to learn from our past experience.

Saturday, October 21, 2006

Koreans are coming !!




Dear Colleagues

Title reminds us the famous film "Russians are coming!" It is almost same but the player countries are different.

Last week, Korean Company Doosan came to Ankara in order to meet with reputable local companies private and public.

They asked me to help them. So I asked appointment from top management of public companies, EUAS, TEDAS, TEIAS etc.

Our Public companies have the similar attitute these days. They say "since we should get 3- offers and evaluate for almost 3-months for each bolt we need, we cannot finalise any investment in the modern times in a reasonable short period of time. Therefore we ask private investors to make the investment. We expect the maximum rental fee for our treasury." Good point, good thinking, very logical.

We also asked private companies for mutual meetings for future cooperation. Most of them accepted and invited us to their head offices. That was almost no cost for them other than some business time to allocate

On both sides, we had almost similar presentations.



First Doosan introduced their colorful hardcopy documentation, their home country references of various thermal power plants, as well as nuclear

Their international experiences, reference plants in the Middle East

However these documentation was explained with relatively poor verbal English

In response our local companies explained how wonderful work they do in local and/or international environments

Surprisingly Turkish scope covered only civil works and site installation, plus maybe some construction of administration buildings / some catering. That was all.

Most of our companies donot have courage to exceed these simple activities. These are simple, hardwork with minimum cost, almost with minimum value added value.

It is so sad to say that our companies cannot handle basic engineering, they cannot handle overall leadership. They donot have single thermal power plant reference as turnkey EPC contractor in the local market

So we all handle the hardwork, whereby our international partners get the biggest portion of the scope and profit.

The Koreans were at the lowest life style in 1950s in the Korean war and at that time we sent our troops to save them. After 50 years, their GNP is almost twice of ours now

Doosan has turnkey engineering and complete project leadership capability. They constructed all their thermal power plants by themselves. Similarly they constructed many nuclear power plants in Korea under license.

They have the same software and hardware available as elsewhere, and they purchased the necessary technical licence to handle design works of all types thermal power plants

They recently signed a license agreement with Foster Wheeler of USA to contruct CFB boilers to fire all types od pood quality lignite.

In the international markets, today US or UK companies, German/ Frech/ Italian companies are too expensive

On the other hand China, Indian, Korean companies are relatively cheaper in turn key EPC contracts

If we do not show our engineering expertise, our market will soon be dominated by these East world and local companies will be doing only the hard simple work.

All we need is courage, at least within our own environment. We should start to contruct our own thermal power plants by ourselves.

Foreign companies cannot design, contruct power plants to fire our special lignite

Only Turkish engineers can do it, since we live all our life with these local fuel.

Our local private companies are to decide if they will continue to have simple works all the time, and vanish,

or make drastic change and start doing new investments on engineering talent by supplying the engineering staff with appropriate software and hardware, plus necessary technical licensing, to enable their companies work as turnkey EPC contractor as leading company

That is the most important key decision now.

Tuesday, October 17, 2006

A Rehab Story- Yenikoy

Today, I would like to share my past experience in Yenikoy thermal power plant . I will try to avoid technical jargon, or at least try to minimise it while telling the story.

On 19th December 1994, upon invitation of the power plant management, together with Mr. Barney Baker from Babcock & Wilcox Ohio, USA, we visited the site.

There are three power plants close to each other, at the same SouthWest corner of Turkey, where Yatagan is designed to generate 3x210 Mwe, Yenikoy should generate 2x210 Mwe and the last thermal power plant Kemerkoy at the seaside is designed to generate 3x210 Mwe.

We stayed in the plant guest house for 2 days. We had our protective heavy work cloths, barets, protective gloves and hard shoes to inspect the boiler inside. We inspected the complete boilers, one after another almost every inch, from bottom wall to all four side walls, as well as roof wall.

Let me try to explain what we have found in the end,

The original contractor, so-called reputable East European company designed the boiler and put almost no compensation mechanism to their boiler water tubes walls. In simple words, the water tube walls were heated when fuel (lignite coal) was fired, the boiler tube walls get hot, want to expand but they can not expand since there is no adequate expansion mechanism, therefore they are bended, become round or even broken under heavy heat load. So simple.

It was so on all boiler walls, however that was compensated geometrically at side walls, but on the roof, it was so apparent that the complete roof surface was like rough sea wave, all sinusoidal surface.

In all thermal power plant steam boiler designs, you put certain compensation detail to all directions in order to compensate the expansion.

That missing detail was also repeated in all other nearby power plants, which were constructed by the same East European company

The power plant engineers were aware of that important issue, but they had nothing to make any correction, nor any initiative to make any remedy

The other major problem was due to incoming poor quality local lignite mine. Plant was designed to fire lignite with around 2000 kcal/kg lower heating value. Incoming Lignite has average 1000. Incoming lignite was to be cleaned, should be free from unburnable stones, soil, etc, should be enriched with water floating process etc.

It was fed as received, by machines in the open coal mine, no cleaning.

So all unburnable material (stone, soil etc) were grinded with no purpose, fed into the steam boilers with no heat output. Plant was feeding unnecessary amount of supplementary fuel oil in order to fire the poor quality lignite in the boiler.

Third missing issue was inadequate number of soot blowers. You should clean the boiler walls in every 8-hour shift with steam. They had high content of calcium in the incoming lignite. That calcium compositions were stuck to boiler wall, and they had almost minimum wall cleaning due to inadequate number of steam blowing soot blowers. Result was power output drop from 210 MWE to 150 Mwe in a few months. They stop the power plant and clean the inside surfaces with pressured water for 1-month each time before start-up again.

So power plant needed for major rehabilitation, expansion details were to be added to all walls, especially to the roof water tube walls, more soot blowers were to be assembled, and incoming poor quality lignite has to be washed, improved, cleaned before feeding into boilers.

We prepared our site report upon return to our offices, with photographs and sketches, and delivered to the power plant administration. All our work was free-of-charge,

Since then power plants were operated as explained above.

One day, one after another, all steam boilers stopped. No more.

They had inefficient dust filters, unreasonable amount of boiler tube failures, no flue gas desulphurization etc.

Local environmentalists reacted, and the public enterprise in charge of power plant operation decided to cease the power plant operation in these 3 power plants.

For a while, administration wanted to sell the plants to private companies. Nobody wanted to purchase. They had to have rehabilitation. Then world bank announced a rehabilitation fund to rehabilitate the plants, with some addition by the public administration. Now that is in international tendering.

In market economy, in complete private ownership, you do not work with a client whose performance is not good, who delivered a poor product, a poor system. There is a saying that “you cannot cheat a client twice, three impossible.”

In Erdemir Iron & Steel mills plant, once a reputable Italian company has received a big thermal power plant order. They are to fire heavy fuel oil to generate 180 tons of high pressure steam at maximum continuous capacity, but in any case they could not reach above 140 tons per hour.

So Erdemir administration blacklisted the company, but also blacklisted all Italian companies.

When we received the 5th power plant steam boiler order, we were requested to replace all Italian supplies, steam boiler tubes, valves, fittings, fans, pumps etc. all.

A foreign company receives a big important order to construct a high capacity power plant, they cannot satisfy the expected performance values, you do not disqualify them in the second power plant, then you invite for the third power plant. All three power plants are failure. Then you invite them for rehabilitation. You should disqualify at the upfront.

Now we have a rehab tender with a budget figure between 80- 100 m US Dollars.

After evaluation of the proposals, you invite the original supplier for rehabilitation since their price is the lowest.

Rule. You should not invite the original company to the rehabilitation tender.

Rule. You should not award the lowest price

Rule. A foreign company cannot make the rehabilitation

They make some activity, receive their money or go to arbitration and leave the country never come back

Rehabilitation has to be made by the local companies

They made the correct design, appropriate design to fire the available indigenous l ignite, they cannot escape to anywhere

You should not wait that long for rehabilitation of the power plants

Local public R&D funds are to be spent for this purpose to develop local engineering

Young engineers are paid properly, they work hard as elsewhere even much better for a local accomplishment

Foreign companies can escape in case of performance failure, local companies cannot escape, they are destined to succeed

You gain local experience and expertise to use your local coal mines, as well as your own engineering capabilities

Never leave your kitchen to strangers, get control over your own house kitchen

Get control over your power plants to operate properly, make design changes by yourself,

The World Bank funds are not free-of- charge, we shall pay back together

Rehabilitation works are not so difficult, this is not space technology. We are talking about some bundles of boiler tubes. A country with F-16 fabrication plant, can do much easier work in thermal power plants. Our young engineers can do much better, they are no different than other counterparts, I believe that even much better

In Yenikoy thermal power plant,

You will add expansion joint details to all steam boiler tube walls to avoid tube failure

You will add ample number of soot blower to clean the inside boiler surfaces and operate them

You will clean the incoming poor quality lignite prior to boiler feed,

You will trust to your own young engineers, you give them enough hardware and software tools for proper design,

We engineers all use the similar or same softwares and hardwares

You will support local academicians and your local young engineers with public R&D funds

You should support your local companies to handle all design work,

You should not stay under mercy of foreign companies,

If you do, not at the mercy of East European designers or contractors only,

but today Chinese and Indians, or Koreans will do your own homework on your behalf,

Today it is in Yenikoy, tomorrow it is in Afsin Elbistan-A rehabilitation.

We need to learn from our past experience.

Your evaluations and contributions will be highly appreciated
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