Swedish Stirling, a fixed-income company that converts toxic gases into electricity, this week opened a new pilot operation at Samancor Chrome’s TC Smelter in Mooinooi.
The company’s offering, known as the PWR BLOK 400-F, is a containerized solution, each consisting of 14 Stirling engines that can use the heat from gases emitted from a smelter and convert it back into electricity.
The solution comes when ferrochrome smelters are under the weight of rising input and electricity costs in particular. Swedish Stirling has declarations of intent for the sale and installation of 241 PWR BLOKS to Samancor, Glencore and Richards Bay Alloys.
At present, the company is exclusively focused on the SA market. It’s partly by luck and partly by design, says Swedish Stirling CEO and founder Gunnar Larsson, who founded the company in 2008.
Former CEO of Kockums Naval Shipyard in Sweden, Larsson became acquainted with powerful and efficient Stirling engine technology – which is used to power submarines – on which PWR BLOK is based.
At first, Larsson saw the potential for technology in renewable energy applications. At the presentation at an exhibition in SA 2015, Larsson was contacted by a person in the ferrochrome industry who asked about the application of technology to recover energy from the smelting process from which an enormous amount of exhaust gases are emitted and flared.
“It has been extremely difficult to use these gases with other technology,” says Larsson. “Essentially, the mixture of carbon monoxide and hydrogen is constantly changing. And it is impossible for an internal combustion engine to handle. But for a Stirling engine, it does not matter. ”
Two years later, PWR BLOK was introduced to SA as a solution for the ferrochrome industry when Swedish Stirling secured its first agreement with Afarak Mogale.
Each PWR BLOK has a net output of 400 kW of power. The modular nature of the offer means that it is easy to expand capacity.
Swedish Stirling sees a number of beneficial factors in SA for the technology. In Sweden, most of the smelting industry has been located near cities where exhaust gases are used for district heating. In SA, there is no similar innovative use of exhaust gases. There is an additional problem with rising electricity fees, all of which drive PWR BLOK’s attractiveness, which can save a smelter as much as 15% on Eskom’s electricity bill, says Larsson. Loads, environmental considerations and carbon dioxide taxes also make the system attractive. However, the return on investment is a little more than five years. “So the economic driving forces are really high,” says Larsson.
However, there is the bigger question of the poor condition of SA’s smelting industry. Swedish Stirling, for example, has removed its equipment from the factory in Afarak Mogale, which was closed when the company went into business rescue in 2020.
Annual increases in Eskom’s tariff are indeed a challenge for the industry. “To some extent we are worried, but we want to be part of the solution to that problem,” says Larsson. “And being more energy efficient will help them. We want them [to sustain their operations] to be able to make the investment. I think it really is a challenge for these companies. But you know, the world will need ferrochrome, he said.
The regulatory barriers that hold back alternative power solutions in SA are also a limitation for PWR BLOK, which is considered to be embedded power production that is covered by a permit requirement of more than 1 MW of production capacity.
Larsson welcomed the news that this roof would soon be lifted, possibly to 50 MW. “If we can avoid the license, it’s much easier to get the contracts and get the projects flying,” he said.
The long-term strategy is to go further than ferrochrome and the SA market. “The obvious next step for us will be ferroalloys, [but] In essence, the technology has the potential to capture more or less energy for all applications where you flare gases, says Larsson. “It’s a huge market. If you just look at the global ferro-alloy market, it will keep us busy for the next five to ten years. ”
Source: sn.dk