Fortum, a Finnish energy company is bringing its proven NOx (Nitrogen Oxide) reduction technology in India under the new business ‘Fortum eNext’. As part of this initiative, it organized two seminars in Delhi and Mumbai respectively. The seminar was attended by leading industry experts, regulatory and pollution authorities and power plant companies. The seminar was aimed at showcasing Fortum’s innovative global technology and its holistic solutions, with a special focus on offerings for thermal power plants in India.
“Thermal is going to be a mainstay in India’s energy mix for the next 30 years. Burning fossil fuels like coal leads to acid rain and is the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions warming up the planet. Many countries already have a strict limit on the emission of nitrogen oxides; thus, NOx reduction technologies are being widely deployed. Keeping a clean energy spectrum in mind, India also recently introduced its NOx emission limits, wherein pollution control technologies will be installed on most coal-fired plants,” said Sanjay Aggarwal, Managing Director, Fortum India.
Keeping this in mind and our expertise in planning and execution of low NOx combustion refurbishments, we would like to bring our innovative time and cost saving NOx technology to India which will help lower the emissions, thereby aiding India in its sustainable goals. With one of our successful pilot projects with NTPC, was a major achievement in our efforts to enter the Indian market for environmental technology, and in enabling Indian coal fired power plants to reduce their emissions and make the air cleaner to breathe, he further added.”
Juha Suomi Area Director, Asia, Fortum eNext, said, “India is one of our key markets and we are fully committed to support India reach its emission targets by year 2022 with the assistance of our solution. Aiming to comply with the latest legislation, India is looking forward to reducing NOx emissions in a substantially shorter time in the coming 5 years to commensurate with Europe who achieved this in 30 years. Fortum’s advanced NOx technology reduces emissions effectively. Compared to alternative solutions, there is a minimum need for new equipment, no auxiliary power consumption, no water consumption, and no ammonia or urea consumption thus no by-products for disposal.”
In 2017 NTPC gave Fortum eNext the possibility to perform a pilot study at its Ramagundam power plant on two 200 MWe wall fired boilers, and one 500e MW tangential fired boiler. The aim of the study was to demonstrate and prove that Fortum’s long utilised NOx reduction technology is suitable also for the Indian market. During the study, Fortum carried out various field data analysis, tests with local coals in different coal mill operations and combinations, measurements of NOx emission levels at different production loads, as well as Computational Fluid Dynamic modelling combined with their burner technology. Results showed that this technology can be implemented to meet the desired NOx emission levels given by the Indian regulation at any local power plant in India.
