Tohoku's Haramachi starts to use biomass

OREANDA-NEWS. April 23, 2015. Japanese utility Tohoku Electric Power has started using wood chips at its 2,000MW Haramachi coal-fired power plant in northeast Japan's Fukushima prefecture, as part of its efforts to cut greenhouse gas emissions.

Tohoku today began test burning of domestically produced wood chips at Haramachi, around a year after it started plant upgrading to enable co-generation of coal and biomass. It will gradually increase throughput of wood chips to around 60,000 t/yr, cutting its use of thermal coal by around 20,000 t/yr. The project will cut CO2 emissions by around 50,000 t/yr.

This is Tohoku's second biomass project, after a similar upgrade at the 1,200MW Noshiro coal-fired plant in northwest Japan's Akita prefecture. It started to use around 30,000 t/yr of wood chips at Noshiro in April 2012, which cuts coal consumption by around 10,000 t/yr and CO2 emission by around 30,000 t/yr.

Tohoku consumed 14,544t of unspecified biomass in 2014, up by 55pc compared with 9,385t in 2013. This partly helped reduce its coal consumption by 1.2pc to 8.1mn t during the same period.