Planned redesign of beehive coke ovens for pollution control and power generation

Abstract

Fossil fuel based thermal power or ovens not only exude greenhouse gases and pollutants but transfer enormous amount of waste heat up in air. Heat gets enveloped in the stratosphere and circulate around the earth; escalating global warming. France, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Austria, Andorra, Luxembourg, Poland and Germany made it the hottest June on record in 2019. Around 50 coke ovens around Dhanbad are losing and facing closure, with fate of employees doomed. Jharkhand State Pollution Control Board, Dhanbad had been issuing letters to the small-scale refractory and beehive hard coke-ovens to bring down stack gas emissions to below 150mg/Nm3 of suspended particulate matter (SPM), equivalent to the standards of large thermal power plants, deploying electrostatic precipitators (ESP). Some locally made pollution control devices were deployed, but these reduced the chimney draft and coking time increased. Installation of wet scrubbing methods would not be economic and slow down production. With experience as the Manager of a by-product coke oven, the chimney detour method with mechanical exhauster suggested for beehive coke oven. Proposed design not only can generate power, but also trap pollutants by a kind of wet scrubbing and produce byproducts like coal tar. Various associations of small-scale hard coke ovens and refractory industries had approached The Institution of Engineers (India), Dhanbad Local Centre. In this paper, the authors briefly present how waste heat can be converted to power, while absorbing pollutants in hydraulic main in the unique chimney detour method and producing coal tar, exuding clean gas.