Company’s like First Energy are vital to the continued growth and future of our 6th district. Utilizing the resources we have here at home, like coal which is used in the Sammis Power Plant, is necessary in achieving true energy independence.

I spent a day visiting the Sammis power plant and touring the facility. This plant is the largest  of First Energy’ in ohio. It Employs over 400 people and produces over 2,233 MW of electricity. While touring this facility I saw  the retrofitting which First Energy did to this plant which has enabled it to be more Eco-friendly. Proving that coal power can provide the energy necessary to power this great country, and the 6th district has the work ethic and drive to achieve energy independence.

We met Bob Bertram at 8 a.m. and went to the plant director’s office to get hard hats and eye protection.  We met with the director, Jon Zoppelt, then headed out to see the plant’s operation from beginning to end.  Bob drove us to the outside coal storage yard first.  A 60-day supply is usually kept here.  Coal is transported to the site via barge up the Ohio River, and by rail.  The huge piles were being worked over by two yellow Caterpillar bulldozers, and the coal was picked up underground by feeder conveyors taking it into the plant.

Once inside the coal is crushed to a fine “face powder,” which moves on to be burned in the huge boiler.  Through a complex system of boiler and super heaters, water is turned into steam, which powers giant turbines as the steam expands, cools, and transfers its power into shaft power to turn the generators.  The generators, seven of them, can create a total of 2,316 megawatts of electricity, about 40 percent of First Energy Ohio Edison Systems’ total generating capacity. Newest improvements to the plant are sulfur dioxide “scrubbers,” which use ammonia, limestone, a catalyst to take this coal contaminant from exhaust gasses.  A byproduct of this process is the production of gypsum, and a technological marvel in itself is the 2.4-mile long continuous conveyor belt that will take the gypsum up the hill behind the plant to a reclaimed strip-mine area.

We saw where cooling water is taken in from the Ohio River, passing through a moving screen belt that minimizes clogging risk.  Next we stepped inside one of the enormous smokestacks, one of which rises 1,000 feet into the sky.  Not just a single hollow tube, there are actually three smaller pipes inside that carry away heated air.

Bechtel Corporation and Babcock & Wilcox are the primary construction companies handling the plant’s improvements.

As coal inventories increase across the nation (WSJ Nov. 30, 2009, “Coal Glut Rocks Mining Companies“) and coal prices sink to 57% of last year’s prices, I wonder if the Democrats objective in Washington, at the behest of the White House Administration’s request, to destroy the coal industry is possible.  A recent announcement by Progress Energy (WSJ Dec. 2, 2009, “Progress To Shutter 11 Plants Using Coal“) to convert eleven of its plants from coal to natural gas by 2017 is ominous.  What becomes of the coal mines and miners that now provide coal to those plants?  Progress is planning on building two new nuclear-power plants over the next ten years, but will that be allowed?