Western Farmers Electric Cooperative’s (WFEC) Hugo Station - (see Case Study)

“The Fuel Tech TIFI^® demo — which is now in its third year with the same additive- has turned into an ongoing and successful business partnership for both companies. The program has proven to be an excellent tool for significantly mitigating problematic slag in our PRB coal-burning unit. It has increased both our run time and overall megawatt output. The TIFI technology also has enabled WFEC to successfully burn a wider variety of PRB coals, increasing the savings realized.”

--Jimmy Blakley, Western Farmers Senior Plant Engineer, POWER, October 2005, “Computer Modeling Brings Slag Control into the 21st Century”

“The savings in outage time alone exceeds what we spend on FUEL CHEM^®. I have been in business for thirty years, and have never known a plant that did not have slag problems. I can’t believe it took so long to come up with this technology because it is much needed.”

--Jimmy Blakley, Senior Plant Engineer, March 2004

“With Fuel Tech, it is a team effort. We have an extremely good relationship with them, and they provide excellent support. Through good communication, we were able to do the installation online, with no down time, as well as utilizing our existing opening for nozzles without adding more boiler ports. We are pleased with what we have seen and as a result, have signed a three year contract for Fuel Tech’s TIFI technology.”

--Charles Collier, Western Farmers Plant Manager, March 2004

“The decision to utilize Fuel Tech’s chemical mitigation process has so far eliminated problematic slag accumulation and related furnace fouling issues. Another benefit of using TIFI is that Hugo Station has been able to reduce its excess-air levels as well as its emissions of NOx.”

--Charles Collier, Plant Manager, POWER, Sept. 2003, “Slag Fighter”

To get a better understanding of the (slagging) problem, WEN (Winslow Environmental News) contacted two customers using FUEL CHEM. Running average-sized coal-fired utility boilers, each plant had been losing $3.5 million annually in revenues, or 70,000 megawatts of lost energy that then needed to be purchased on the open market, due to downtime removing slag. Before using FUEL CHEM, company boilers were taken off line for seven days twice a year at a cost of $250,000 per day… In some cases, the return on investment (ROI) (from FUEL CHEM) has been over 200% annually. Indeed, one unit manager stated that his initial $1.5 million investment returned $4 million in just one year.

--Winslow Environmental News, “Making Coal Cleaner: Fuel Tech at the Forefront”, October 2003

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