ABB has a flare for gas power

ABB has delivered a combined heat and power generating plant in Poland that produces electricity, district heating and petroleum products from natural gas that was previously flared off.

The $56m project for Energobaltic at an offshore oil rig in the Baltic Sea makes use of the 100,000m² of natural gas per day that was previously burned off as platform operators extracted crude oil. The gas is pumped through an 82km underwater pipeline to a facility that consists of a combined heat and power (CHP) plant and a gas processing station located in Wladyslawowo, near Gdansk.

The gas is used to generate 76,000 MWH of electricity annually - enough to power 5,500 homes - for the Polish grid. The plant also produces heat for the town’s 12,000 people, and refines the gas into liquid petroleum gas and C5+, a light natural gasoline.

The district heating plant made it possible to shut down 10 oil-fired and about 110 coal-fired boilers in the town, eliminating the emissions that came from burning roughly 750,000 tonnes of coal a year.