In something resembling a bottle return program, Detroit’s enormous petroleum coke pile, a byproduct of Canadian oil sands, is making its way back to Canada.
A Canadian electrical power plant, owned by Nova Scotia Power, is chipping away at the three-story-high, blocklong pile of petroleum coke on Detroit’s waterfront. The company is burning the high-carbon, high-sulfur waste product because it is cheaper than natural gas.
The uncovered black pile, which has angered and upset some residents of Detroit as well as others across the river in Windsor, Ontario, began appearing earlier this year. Owned by Koch Carbon, a company is controlled by the industrialists Charles and David Koch, it is a byproduct of processing heavy bitumen piped from the oil sands in Alberta to a Detroit refinery.
Its final destination had been something of a mystery. Most petroleum coke, often referred to in the oil industry as petcoke, is used as inexpensive fuel in countries like China, India and Mexico with relatively loose emissions controls. Environmentalists were concerned not only about the impact of the growing pile in Detroit but also about where the material would be burned..
The electrical utility’s use of petcoke, which is a particularly high emitter of greenhouse gases, comes amid concerns that the waste material’s unusually low cost and increasing availability in the United States may derail efforts to shift coal burning power stations to cleaner natural gas. At the same time, the Obama administration is reviewing the Keystone XL pipeline, a project which would send more oil sands bitumen to American refineries and correspondingly increase the amount of American petroleum coke.
A power station at Point Aconi in Nova Scotia that uses the petcoke has an unusual burning system that minimizes some forms of pollution from high-sulfur fuels. Documents suggest that it is Nova Scotia Power’s heaviest user of petroleum coke.
Nova Scotia produces natural gas from offshore fields and Nova Scotia Power, which was owned by the provincial government until 1992, burns the cleaner fuel in some of its plants. But last year, the company produced 59% of its power from coal and petroleum coke, an increase of two percentage points from 2011.
In a blog post on the company’s website, the company’s executive vice president of operations said the increased use of coal and petroleum coke is a matter of price.
Despite the regular visits to Detroit by ships to take away the petcoke, the oil sands bitumen refinery there is producing the material at a rate which means the waterfront pile to continues to grow.
