Charlotte firm plans biomass power plant

Charlotte Business Journal

A Charlotte developer hopes to build a 50- to 100-megawatt biomass power plant as part of a proposed 667-acre clean-energy park northwest of the city.
Tom McKittrick of Forsite Development Inc. outlined the plan Thursday afternoon at the Third Annual Green Conference sponsored by the Charlotte and Gaston chambers of commerce at Pine Island Country Club.
The project, called ReVenture Park, would straddle the line between Mecklenburg and Gaston counties.
McKittrick predicts the clean-energy park could create 1,000 jobs and attract more than $1 billion in investment. The proposed site includes the current home of CoaLogix, a company that specializes in technology to remove pollutants from coal-plant emissions. McKittrick says the plan would be for CoaLogix to remain in the clean-energy park.
He said plans are in very early stages and are speculative. But McKittrick hopes to start construction of the plant, or a possible wastewater treatment facility, on the site in 2010. That would qualify either of the projects for federal stimulus funds.
He said the projects can be built without the stimulus funds but would be much more difficult to accomplish.
McKittrick estimates the biomass plant, which would burn landfill waste from Mecklenburg, Gaston and other area counties, will cost around $500 million to build. He says a key to the project will be getting Duke Energy Carolinas or another utility as a partner to buy the power plant’s output. He says Duke is generally aware of the proposed park, but he is only now preparing to have initial talks with Duke representatives.
McKittrick is in early talks with Charlotte/Mecklenburg Utilities about the possibility of building a $300 million wastewater plant on the site. He says that developing the plant privately and leasing it to CMU could qualify for the project to get up to 30 percent of the costs back in federal stimulus money. He says CMU has expressed some interest in the idea, but he emphasized the talks are preliminary.
In fact, the entire energy park is clearly more of a concept for now than an actual project. Forsite has an option to buy the property, which is listed as an Environmental Protection Agency Superfund site. The property, owned by Clariant Corp., includes a former chemical plan. That’s the source of the on-site contamination that affects about 345 acres of the tract.
Clariant has stabilized the pollution on the site. And McKittrick says the EPA has agreed to delist it as a Superfund site. The affected acres will be designated a brownfields area by the N.C. Department of Environment and Natural Resources. That will allow Forsite to develop the land without incurring the environmental liability that attaches to a Superfund site.
Getting the state brownfields designation is likely to take six months or longer. In the interim, McKittrick says, Forsite will buy the “clean” part of the 667 acres — a little less than half— and subdivide it for development.
His plans include a 4-megawatt solar-power plant on the site. That would provide essentially all the power needed for businesses there. Other operations in the park would include a company that converts traditional gasoline vehicles to propane power, according to the preliminary plan. And McKittrick says he is talking to UNC Charlotte about the possibility of putting a green-development research facility on the site.
The heart of the plan is the biomass plant, he says. The plant would burn fuel processed from waste material at regional landfills, industrial waste and other sources. He says the garbage would be processed into a fuel elsewhere and then shipped to the plant.