Scott Engineering and ABB have partnered to deliver six unique capacitor banks for six huge Canadian gas processing plants, the companies announced recently.
The specially designed harmonic filter banks—built by Scott and designed by ABB—will help improve power quality for the electrical systems of three liquefied gas plants in Dawson Creek, British Columbia. The Sunrise, Tower and Saturn plants were developed by Cutbank Ridge Partnership, an agreement between Mitsubishi Corp. and Encana.
The metal-enclosed capacitor banks are built to last more than 20 years in harsh weather conditions. Each bank was sized based on actual site requirements with outputs ranging from 2.1Mvar up to 6Mvar.
“The dedication and passion of the Scott Engineering team to complete these banks to the customers’ requirements was fantastic,” Timothy Heemskerk, ABB’s global MECB product manager, said in a statement.
The passive harmonic filter banks will play a critical role in absorbing the harmonics produced by the non-linear loads at the plants. By protecting sensitive equipment and the electrical network from these potentially damaging harmonics, system availability is maximized and the costly impact of equipment outages is reduced. Energy costs are also reduced by the overall improvement in the power quality of the system.
The system is automatically controlled by ABB’s specialized RVT power factor controller which is able to monitor the network conditions and turn the MECB stages on and off as demand requires.
After each of the systems was completed at Scott Engineering’s facility in Chino, ABB engineers conducted final on-site testing in the presence of Encana representatives before final shipment to Canada. The total output from these plants will be over 1,000 Billion cubic feet of gas per day.
“Sunrise is going to be the biggest in Western Canada built in the last 30 years,” said David Noseworthy, a CIBC World Markets analyst.
The Encana plants receive sweet natural gas, remove water and hydrocarbons, chill and compress the gas to meet transmission pipeline requirements and recover NGL (natural gas liquid) from the gas streams. Total cost for the plants is estimated at $1.8 billion. The North American consumption of natural gas is currently over 80 billion cubic feet per day.
