City Water Light and Power is about to embark on a $10 million venture known as the Natural Gas Startup Project.
The city council is being asked to approve the first phase, a $2.1 million contract for engineering, consultation and design services. Chief Utilities Engineer Eric Hobbie says CWLP’s older power generating units, Dallman 31, 32 and 33, start up with diesel fuel. This would switch the process to natural gas.
“It takes natural gas to be able to meet the EPA rules that are coming up on us in 2015 and 2017,” Hobbie says. “Convert to natural gas, or you close it.”
Hobbie says diesel can’t run through the plant’s pollution controls but natural gas can. He says two hours of start up emissions can skew averages for thousands of operating hours and put CWLP out of compliance.
Hobbie likens the current process to a diesel truck — hence the black smoke that sometimes comes from the stacks.