PSALM plans to repower Sucat facility
Sunday, February 11, 2007
The Power Sector Assets and Liabilities Management Corporation (PSALM) will be reviving plans to repower the mothballed 850-megawatt Sucat thermal plant and align this as a component of the facility’s divestment plan.
"We will likely have a decision on Sucat’s privatization by 2008. Its privatization will be tied to the plan to its repowering," PSALM vice president for asset management and electricity trading Froilan A. Tampinco has noted.
He said the prospective bidders will have to commit to utilizing low sulfur fuel to run the facility; and up until this point, the government’s preference would be a shift to liquefied natural gas.
The Department of Energy (DoE) has long been programming the construction of LNG terminal and supporting facilities, like high pressure gas pipelines to cater to the needs of expanded market for natural gas.
It was envisioned that the re-powered Sucat facility will serve as anchor load for the planned LNG facility and the proposed 100-kilometer gas pipeline stretching from Batangas to Manila or the 80-km pipeline from Bataan to Manila.
Due to established high volume of toxic emissions from the Sucat plant, the government was prompted to have it decommissioned years back as part of its firm commitment to successfully implement the Clean Air Act.
The plan for the construction of the proposed LNG facility to serve Sucat’s fuel requirements is being spearheaded by state-run Philippine National Oil Company (PNOC) with a preferred site in its Mariveles property in Bataan.
The project blueprint reveals a hefty investment budget of $ 1.38 billion, to which the burden of raising such amount would be shared with private investors.
The LNG terminals’s capacity has been proposed to reach 180 million standard cubic feet per day; and the revised commissioning date target is year 2012.
Of the total estimated project cost, US$ 1.263 billion has been set for the planned LNG facility; while another US$ 121.13 million will be for the gas pipeline.
Apart from Sucat, the other thermal power facilities due for fuel use conversion are the Limay and Malaya plants.
The expanded gas market will also eventually cover transport, industrial, commercial and residential end-users through spur lines that will be built from the main gas pipelines.
The energy department forecasts that the demand for natural gas will pick up in the coming years; primarily for power plant projects and the need of the transport sector.
posted by philpower @ 2:29 PM,
