A former Fort Union Employee speaks

A few posts from a former fort Union Employee:

Kfuel Storage problems
Briefly here is what would happen. From my observation the product going in the silo had a shelf life of about two weeks. If the product had not been moved at that time hot spots would begin to develop in the silo. Sometimes water would be sprayed on the product in the silo, but with little long term effect. It cooled it down for a day or two, but sooner or later the hot spots would return. (Perhaps you are not aware, but coal actually absorbs heat when it is sprayed with water, an endothermic reaction.) Usually when hot spots developed the procedure was to remove about 300 tons of product from the silo with the idea of collapsing the hotspot. Again, this would work for a few days, but it was almost guaranteed once the product in the silo began to combust little could be done about it and the tonnage that went back to the mine pit would probably astound you. The hot coal removed from the silo would be buried in the mine. Not really a safety issue there, but it was almost embarassing to have made the product and then turn around and put it back in the mine a couple weeks later. Hope that answers your question.

Kfuel water byproduct is a mess/nightmare
One of the unsolved problems at the Ft. Union plant was what to do with all that damn water squeezed from the coal. The coal from the Ft. Union mine was in the 25-33 percent moisture range. The process reduced that moisture to about 10%, a reduction of 20%. 20% of a ton of coal comes out to be about 48 gallons of water for every ton of coal processed. Add the water from washdown, drainage, etc and one can come up with a nice figure of 50 gallons of water to dispose of for every ton of coal processed. (Okay, so how much water boys and girls must be dealt with at this new and improved facility that will produce 1.5 million tons per year?) The water treatment plant at Ft. Union was a complete disaster. When I first began working there the water was treated by a system called VSEP. Through no fault of their own, the designers of the Ft. Union plant had no idea the water produced from the process would be laden with coal fines, almost to the point of being called a slurry. The suspended solids in the process water overwhelmed the VSEP system to the point of making it useless. That million dollar system was idled and a hodge-podge mess of tanks, pumps and stuff was thrown together to accomplish a makeshift water treatment plant. It worked, after a fashion, but could not keep up with the water being produced if the plant was operating with any consistency. On more than one occasion the plant would have to be slowed down and sometimes even stopped so the water treatment plant could catch up. In January 2007 then VP of Engineering, Dennis Coolidge, spent a couple hours with the crew I was assigned to one morning, briefing us on what changes were being considered and worked on. He was rather revved up because a new water treatment facility was going to be built later that spring. It was even going to be in an enclosed building so the damn thing didn't freeze up when the weather turned cold, something the design people didn't take into account when building Ft. Union. April 2007 came and Mr. Coolidge was shuffled off, I don't know why. About that time parts and pieces of the new water treatment plant began arriving. Weird though, summer came and went, as did autumn, but no water treatment plant was built. To this day there are still pieces for the new water treatment facility laying at the Ft. Union site providing a shelter for cottontail bunnies and collecting rust. Somewhere along the line a decision was made not to build the water treatment plant and not to attempt to solve that problem. This is one of a half dozen reasons why I begin to wonder if the corporate board of EEE was ever interested in solving the problems incurred at the Ft. Union site. (Remember, I am liar and never worked for EEE.)


K-fuel is not economically viable
Obviously one individual is not a company policy, however, when talking with a management type chap who has been at Black Hills Corp., (my current employer), for more than twenty years he said that BHC did a feasibility study on enhanced/dried coal and concluded it was not economically viable for them. In fact, the BHC generating complex at Gillette, test burned K-fuel, but chose NOT to pursue it because they would have had to make major modifications of their boilers. There was also that little insignificant problem of the Ft. Union plant operating long enough at any particular time to actually produce enough product to stockpile and burn. If BHC was interested in EEE it seems logical that some sort of workable joint venture would have already been accomplished.

Why don't you EEE advocates ask the corporate board for the production numbers for the two years the plant was in operation? Golly, if the Ft. Union plant was the future of the clean coal industry one would think that EEE would be more than happy to brag about the production that occurred. Unfortunately they can't do that, because little production occurred. Now they have to talk about production at some nebulous plant located somewhere perhaps being built sometime in the future.


Deserves To Fail
After working at EEE for almost two years it is my conclusion this was mostly a grandiose scam from the outset. (Either that or EEE has an extremely gifted management when it comes to ignorance and incompetency.) The press releases from the corporate folks since idling the Ft. Union plant have been laden with falshehoods and they know it, the greatest of which is that the plant at Ft. Union was never intended to be a production facility and has served its purpose as an R & D plant. When lies are knowingly disseminated by EEE to the public it would indicate to me a corporation that has no justification for its existence.