Japan-headed Taiheiyo Cement Corporation has announced that it will go ahead with plans to establish Ofunato Power Generation Co Ltd (OPI) in Ofunato-shi, Iwate Prefecture on the main island of Honshu. The plant will be built on the grounds of the Taiheiyo Cement Ofunato Plant as a joint investment with power wholesaler and retailer eREX Co., Ltd. OPI will build a 75 MWe output biomass power station to wholesale electricity under Japan’s Feed-in Tariff (FIT) Scheme for Renewable Energy.
Construction of the estimated JPY 23.5 billion (≈ EUR 178.6 million) thermal power plant project is slated to begin in the fiscal year 2016 and expected to reach completion in the autumn of 2019. Commercial operation for power generation business will be continued for 20 years after that. Palm kernel shells (PKS) are the main type of biomass fuel that OPI expects to use.
However, it plans to work with the increasingly diverse forms of fuels, reflecting its intent to get more involved with today’s biomass power generation business. To this end, Taiheiyo Cement has focused on the palm’s empty fruit bunches (EFB), which in the past would have been discarded after the palm oil extraction process.
Working with Saraya Co., Ltd., Rematec & KSN Thailand Co., Ltd, Thailand and The Green Biomass Sdn. Bhd., Malaysia, the company says that it has “successfully developed” EFB as power generation fuel. The plant will achieve stable operation by burning a mixture of EFB and PKS with up to 10 percent coal.
