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Revista Brasileira de Tecnologia e Negócios de Petróleo, Gás, Petroquímica, Química Fina e Indústria do Plástico

Petrobras inaugurates the Euzébio Rocha Thermoelectric Plant (TEP)

Fonte: Petrobras

Date: 10/03/2010 15:22

Petrobras will inaugurate the Euzébio Rocha Thermoelectric Plant (TEP) Wednesday (03/10), a part of the Growth Acceleration Program (GAP) and the latest natural gas plant in the Brazilian power generation park to provide electricity to the National Interconnected System (NIS). The event will be attended by president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.

With an installed capacity of 216 MW, enough to supply a city of 800,000 inhabitants, the plant is already in commercial operation. The project was one of 49 winning projects of the A-5/2005 auction, the first new energy auction, held under the bases of the New Electric Sector Model. The 15-year contract foresees making 141 MW of electricity available to the NIS, which started in January 2010.

Installed in Cubatão (state of São Paulo), the plant helps increase the country's energy security and, especially, contributes to boost power supply reliability to the São Paulo and Santos metropolitan regions, major Brazilian consumption centers, with a daily average demand for 10.200 MW.

Fueled by natural gas, the Euzébio Rocha TEP is a combined cycle plant operating in the co-generation system: in addition to 216 MW of electricity, it also produces up to 860 tons of steam per hour. This amount of steam makes of this plant the biggest steam generator among the power generating facilities that belong to Petrobras, currently Brazil's eighth biggest generator, with a total installed capacity of 7360 MW. There are 15 thermoelectric plants running on natural gas (6,139 MW), 12 on oil (928 MW), 15 small hydroelectric plants - SHPs – (291 MW), and one wind power plant (2 MW).

In addition to reinforcing energy security, the Euzébio Rocha TEP plays an important environmental role as well. Installed in the area of the Presidente Bernardes Refinery (RPBC), it provides power and steam to the refinery. The 47 MW of electricity, in addition to the 415 tons per hour of steam sent to RPBC, allow the refinery's power house, which runs on fuel oil, to be turned off. This substitution reduces atmospheric emissions of greenhouse gases, such as nitrogen oxides (NOx), carbon oxides (COx) and sulfur oxides (SOx), by 75% (to 6.25 tons per day, down from 24.8 tons per day).

Another important environmental aspect of the plant is its 81.4% energy efficiency, well above the combined cycle plants that use similar equipment, since all of the steam is used either by the plant or by the refinery.

A thermal power plant operating in combined cycle and with equipment similar to that used at the Euzébio Rocha TEP, has an efficiency of 54.5%. Compared with open-cycle plants, the difference is even greater, as their efficiency is 36.3%.

For comparative purposes, when operating at its full generation capacity (216 MW of electricity and exporting 415 tons of steam), the Euzébio Rocha plant will consume 1.1 million cubic meters of natural gas per day. At an open-cycle plant, the same amount of gas would generate 161 MW of energy.

The construction work, kicked-off in January 2007 and completed in November 2009, received total investments of R$ 1.032 billion. Three thousand direct jobs were created, 70% of which recruited in the Baixada Santista metropolitan area. The indirect jobs are estimated at 9 thousand.

The plant is equipped with a MS 7001 FA model gas turbine manufactured by General Electric (GE), with a generation capacity of 161 MW, and one steam turbine, supplied by Siemens and with a capacity of 55 MW. The gas turbine exhaust gas is used by a recovery boiler with a capacity of 290 tons per hour, which, when added to two auxiliary boilers with a capacity of 285 tons per hour each, ensure continuous steam production for the refinery.