Catalyst Management Tools

Background
Since the late 1990s more than 100,000 MW of coal-fired electric generating capacity in the United States was retrofitted with mostly high-dust SCRs in order to comply with the Clear Air Act Amendments (CAAA) Title I State Implementation Plan (SIP) call aimed for ground level ozone reduction.  After installation and successful commissioning, most SCR operators are now faced with the challenge of long-term SCR operations. 
 
As virtually all SCRs will go from a 5 month ozone seasonal operation between May and September to year-round operation no later than 2009, managing an SCR for maximum performance, while ensuring minimum long-term operating costs, has become the most recent challenge for SCR operators.

Management Tools
Evonik Steag GmbH owns and operates a fleet of 24 SCRs in their own power plants and has been faced with these challenges since 1986 when the first SCR went into operation on a year-round basis.  As Germany had never operated their SCRs on a seasonal basis, Evonik Steag was forced to immediately develop all the tools and procedures needed to manage our SCR system for minimum operating cost while ensuring year-round compliance without the benefit of short-term operating experience. 

The tools we developed can be categorized into two fundamentally different types, namely:

• SCR Equipment Management:  Addresses properly tuning, maintaining and keeping up critical SCR equipment components including the ammonia injection grid (AIG), dampers, expansion joints, catalyst seals, and the SCR reactor(s) and
   
• Catalyst Management: Addresses properly testing, analyzing, determining deactivation causes, DeNOx potential tracking and forecasting, exchanging, replacing, purchasing and/or regenerating the catalyst.