Algae grows on a Midwest prairie. GreenFuel Technologies Corporation has set up a mobile laboratory next to coal-based plant at Holcomb Station in western Kansas. (Courtesy Sunflower Electric Power Corporation)

August 1, 2007 — Nearly 24 years after the 360 MW coal plant at Sunflower Electric’s Holcomb Station facility first began producing power, the 10,000 acre site is preparing to return to its agricultural roots.

The western Kansas wholesale power co-op is working with several other businesses in an effort to establish a $417 million bioenergy center that could provide 161 new jobs.

“A great amount of the waste streams from each of these five independent facilities can be used by another one,” said Steve Miller, a spokesman for Sunflower.

The generation and transmission (G&T) co-op, which distributes power to six cooperatives in western Kansas, hopes to divert CO2 produced from power generation to an algae reactor.

“There’s a mobile laboratory on site where scientists are trying to determine the best type of algae to grow in western Kansas,” said Miller.

Microalgae cultivated there could be dried and burned as renewable power plant fuel, pressed for oil that can be refined into biodiesel, or processed for fertilizer or a protein additive for animal feed. There will also be an ethanol plant, a commercial dairy and an anaerobic digester for methane production.

Locating the businesses on acreage surrounding Holcomb Station’s 71,000 square-foot generation facility will enable each enterprise to use materials from nearby operations, controlling costs and reducing waste.

“You won’t have transportation costs and in some cases you won’t have disposal costs. To our knowledge, no one has tried to integrate all these operations in one place,” said Clare Gustin, vice president of member services at Sunflower.

Algae reactor technology could help reduce CO2 flue gas emissions amid concerns about climate change. Since a high percentage of co-ops use coal, providing an effective alternative to sequestering flue gases could have widespread impact on plant operations.

Starch from algae could also reduce the amount of grain used as feedstocks for ethanol production, Gustin said.

The overall cost is slightly less than the $465 million spent to complete the original coal-fired plant on the site in 1983. Before that, the Holcomb Station site had been a working ranch for decades.

“When an Indian in the Old West finished with a buffalo, nothing went unused. That’s the goal of this bioenergy center, all the waste gets reused for another purpose,” said Jim Van Someren, communications manager of Denver-based Tri-State G&T which is also backing the project.

Tri-State is also involved in construction of two new 700 MW coal plants at Holcomb. Groundbreaking on some operations could come this fall.

This article by Darril Holley is reprinted from Electric Co-op Today (July 20, 2007).