READY TO REFUEL: DRAX COAL FIRED POWER STATION IS SWITCHING TO BIOMASS FUEL

摘要

Redesigning freight trains, learning about dust as an explosive, building inflatable storage domes on a heavily congested site this is the story of how Drax power station has gone from coal fired power station to biomass. Projects such as this surely do not come up very often. Drax, a 4,000MW coal fired power station in Selby, North Yorkshire was once one of the biggest carbon emitters in the UK. But after the government announced plans to close coal fired power stations by 2025, its owners made the do or die decision to convert three of its six boilers from coal to low carbon biomass at a cost of £700M. The journey saw the chief engineers on site having to break down the whole fuel delivery and energy production process from scratch - from setting up a sustainable fibre processing plant in the United States, building new infrastructure at four ports in the UK, to redesigning the freight trains the power station uses and working with Network Rail to maximise the volume of material it could transport. It also had to design and build a vast new processing unit, threading around the existing infrastructure on site.