Chile is racing to build electrical generating capacity to feed its foreign owned mining sector, which consumes almost 40% of Chile's electricity

Suez Energy to power Chile Esperanza project

SANTIAGO, Jan 28 - Suez Energy International, a unit of French utility Suez, said on Monday it reached an agreement to supply electricity to Chile's $1.5 billion Esperanza copper project, owned by Antofagasta Minerals.

Suez said in a statement it would soon begin construction on the thermoelectric plant (coal fired) that will supply up to 150 MW to the Esperanza mine in northern Chile as of 2011.

The plant will be built in Mejillones, some 1,400 kilometers north of the Chilean capital Santiago, and will feed into the northern power grid.

It will be the second plant of its kind for Suez's Andina Thermoelectric Complex. The first is already under construction and is expected to start supplying a mine owned by Codelco, the world's largest copper company, beginning in 2010.

Chile is racing to build electrical generating capacity to feed its booming mining sector, which produces about a third of the world's copper.

The new plant will be coal-fired and is part of Chile's solution to shortages of natural gas, which has been supplied by Argentina to run northern generating facilities.

Esperanza will be one of Chile's first major greenfield copper projects -- ones built from scratch -- in years.

The mine is expected to be ready for operation in the fourth quarter of 2010 and will add an annual production of some 195,000 tonnes of copper, 229,000 ounces of gold and 1.556 million ounces of silver to Chile's mining roster.

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China is overtaking the United States as the world's largest source of greenhouse gases even though its economy is only one-sixth in size

Treasury's McCormick Says China's Growth Harming Environment

Jan. 14 (Bloomberg) -- China must do more to prevent its booming economy and rising energy consumption from further damaging the environment, the U.S. Treasury's top international official said.

"China's rapid economic growth has come at a terrible cost to its air, water and soil," David McCormick, Treasury's undersecretary for international affairs, said in the text of a speech at a forum at the University of California, San Diego.

McCormick directed some of his criticism at China's Three Gorges Dam project on the upper reaches of the Yangtze, Asia's longest river. "The dam has created extensive environmental problems such as water pollution and landslides, and has come at a tremendous human cost, with the displacement and relocation of over 1 million people," he said.

McCormick's rebuke comes as China prepares to host the 2008 Summer Olympics, in Beijing in August. He noted that 16 of the 20 most polluted cities are in China, and said 26 percent of the country's surface water is "totally unusable." The U.S. and other countries must help China find "sustainable solutions" to its problems, he added.

"China is overtaking the United States as the world's largest source of greenhouse gases even though its economy is only one-sixth in size," he said.

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Endesa SA to build two coal and gas fired power plants in Chile - Is Endesa's Climate Initiative full of Hot Air?

Two Endesa Projects Featuring GE Technology To Help Meet Growing Power Needs In Chile

Endesa Chile S.A. has selected GE Energy turbine technology for two new projects, including one of Chile’s largest pulverized coal thermal power plants, which is expected to help meet the country’s growing energy requirements.

For the Bocamina II project, GE plans to supply a model RH D5, sub-critical steam turbine that is among the first 350-megawatt class steam turbines to be installed in the region. Located in Bio-Bio in central Chile, the plant would burn imported bituminous coal, but also have the flexibility to use a wide variety of other coals, including local sub-bituminous coal.

In the second project, GE is providing two 125-megawatt, Frame 9E gas turbine-generators for the Quintero Power Plant, also located in central Chile north of Santiago. Initially, plans are for the gas turbines to operate on diesel oil, but later switch to liquefied natural gas (LNG), which is expected to be supplied from an LNG terminal to be constructed nearby.

"With one of South America’s most robust economies, Chile is looking to increase its energy output, and we are pleased our technology can support that effort" said Guillermo Brooks, GE Energy’s Region Executive for Latin America. "The Bocamina II and Quintero projects build on a long-standing relationship between GE and Endesa, which has the largest installed capacity of any electricity generating company in Chile"

NOTE (CDM & JI): This initiative will been carried out utilizing two Kyoto mechanisms called Joint Implementation (JI) and the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM). Read more about the Endesa Climate Initiative here: Endesa Climate Initiative)

Read more about this matter here: How the Kyoto Treaty Drives Patagonia Dam Construction

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China’s Green Energy Gap - Economic Expansion at Any Price

BOXING, China — By next autumn, a muddy construction site here in a rural part of eastern China will give way to a small power plant that burns corn stalks and cotton stalks to generate electricity for nearby villages and steam for a neighboring industrial complex.

The plant would be ready sooner, but only four companies in China make the specialized precision boilers that the biomass plant requires. And all those companies are plagued by backed-up orders and delivery delays. Similar problems bedevil the wind turbine industry in China.

The same big utility company building the green plant in Boxing, CLP, has just opened a coal-fired plant in southernmost China. On schedule and built for half what it would cost in the West, that plant will generate 1,200 megawatts of electricity — compared with 6 megawatts from the Boxing biomass plant. CLP is so impressed that it is bidding to build coal-fired plants in India with Chinese technology.

These are the realities faced by companies seeking to make themselves more environmentally friendly in China, where coal is king. Coal-fired plants are quick and cheap to build and easy to run. While the Chinese government has set goals for increasing the use of a long list of alternative energies — including wind, biomass, hydroelectric, solar and nuclear — they all face obstacles, from bureaucracy to bottlenecks in manufacturing. CLP’s differing energy choices are a case study in how one company grapples with the need to provide electricity to hundreds of millions of impoverished Asians even as it is under a self-imposed goal of trying to limit emissions of global warming gases.

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The problem is particularly acute because governments across Asia, from China and India to Indonesia and the Philippines, are turning mainly to coal to meet their soaring electricity needs and prevent blackouts, even though coal produces more global warming gases than any other major source of electricity.

China’s increase has been the most substantial. The country built 114,000 megawatts of fossil-fuel-based generating capacity last year alone, almost all coal-fired, and is on course to complete 95,000 megawatts more this year.

For comparison, Britain has 75,000 megawatts in operation, built over a span of decades.

The most talked-about alternative to coal in China involves plans to quadruple the country’s share of power from nuclear energy by 2020. But the plan, which contemplates dozens of reactors, still amounts to just 31,000 megawatts of nuclear power over the next dozen years.

“That’s minuscule,” said Jonathan Sinton, a China expert at the International Energy Agency. China builds more coal-fired capacity than that every four months.

(For purpose of comparison, when the Three Gorges Dam is fully operating it will generate 18,000 megawatts. When the Rio Baker and Rio Pascua are fully dammed they will generate 2355 megawatts. The coal plant they discuss in China will generate 1200 megawatts. )

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The future of hydroelectric power in China is clouded by severe environmental problems at the Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River.

One of the strangest features of China’s energy policy is the paucity of environmental controls on coal-fired plants, because rules governing them were written long ago. Renewable energy projects actually face a more stringent review of their environmental impact.

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