A coal-fired power plant operated by Toshiba Corporation subsidiary SIGMA POWER Ariake Corporation in Fukuoka prefecture, Japan, has been retrofitted to burn biomass. The 50 MW facility will supply enough The Mikawa Power Plant. Image credit: Toshiba Corporationelectricity for 80,000 households and reduce carbon dioxide emissions to about 300,000 tons a year.

Now equipped with a circulating fluidized bed boiler, the Mikawa Power Plant will be fueled with palm kernel shells (PKS), the highly fibrous shell fractions left after extracting oil in palm oil mills. The operator will import 0.2 million tons of PKS, mainly from Indonesia, to be stored in a newly-built roofed yard with the area of about three soccer fields and a storage capacity of 30,000 tons.

Toshiba is currently constructing a large-scale carbon capture facility at the plant as part of the five year “Demonstration of Sustainable CCS Technology Project” sponsored by Japan’s Ministry of the Environment. Together with deployment of biomass power plant technology, Toshiba will continue to develop power plant system solutions that realize energy generation with fewer environmental impacts.