BECCS Success Story: Site Visit to Seifu-Shinto Biomass Power Plant
Hiroshima, 27 September 2023: Members of ACN Advisory Group, ERIA, and IEEJ conducted a site visit to Seifu-Shinto Biomass Power Plant located in Hiroshima city on 27 September 2023. Initially constructed to promote job creation in the local community of Hiroshima, Seifu-Shinto has become one of the success stories of commercially operating Bioenergy with Carbon Capture and Storage (BECCS) in Japan. Seifu-Shinto Biomass Power Plant has multiple sections within its facility: chip manufacturing building, chip warehouse, turbine building, biomass boiler, CO2 capture equipment, biotope, agricultural greenhouse, and solar power plant.
The facility is owned by Taihei Dengkyo Kaisha, Ltd., and has a capacity of 7.1 MW from the biomass power plant and 824.9 kW from solar power plant, which all of them are sold to Chugoku electric power grid. The plant uses a Bubbling Fluidized Bed (BFB) type boiler, which is suitable for biomass with relatively high water content. The supply of biomass is obtained from multiple sources, including scrap wood from demolition, garden trees, timber waste, etc. To ensure the continuity of supply, Seifu-Shinto has contracted with a supplier company, which then sourced the biomass supply, with multiple smaller suppliers. The power plant is also equipped with a chip warehouse with a total capacity of 1000 tons of biomass, which ensures that the biomass power plant can run continuously.
The CO2 Capture Facility was manufactured by Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, which has the capture capacity of 300 kg of CO2 per day, with capture concentration of 99.9%. The facility is a compact-unit type, with dimensions of 6.3m x 4.8m x 1.9m weighting 8 tons. The CO2 captured is then supplied though pipelines to the agricultural greenhouse, which the CO2 is used to cultivate tomatoes and strawberries. Based on the research conducted with Hiroshima University within the greenhouse facility, strawberries and tomatoes with continuous CO2 supply have better growth rate and better products compared to the one without any CO2 supply. Further research is still in progress to improve the utilization of CO2 in the agricultural sector.
The facility also demonstrates the coexistence between technology and the environment by introducing biotope within the premises, which is used as a sanctuary for fireflies. The biotope is built to contribute to Hiroshima prefecture, which previously has many deteriorated firefly sanctuaries and habitat due to recent flooding caused by heavy rain.
Seifu-Shinto Biomass Power Plant has shown its importance towards carbon negative, which has an important impact towards the climate issues. In the meantime, the facility also ensures that its contribution to the local community is sustainably provided, by providing jobs, natural habitats to local species, as well as its efforts to improve the agricultural sector.
During Q&A time after the site tour inside the Seifu-Shinto Bioenergy power plant, lots of questions were raised by the AG members and ERIA, and head of Seifu-Shinto Power plant answered the questions closely. The questions mainly focused on cost of biomass power generation and CCS as well as carbon credit.
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