Dominion recycling center turns ash to cash

Joe Cochran, vice president of Progress Materials Inc., invented the procedure to remove carbon from fly ash in 1989. (STEPHANIE OBERLANDER/SPECIAL TO THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT)

By SCOTT HARPER
The Virginian-Pilot

CHESAPEAKE - It looks like a really big igloo, or maybe an indoor skating rink.

But Dominion Virginia Power says the new, domed structure next to its Chesapeake power station will make money, create jobs and help the environment.

The waterfront facility, on the Elizabeth River just south of the Gilmerton Bridge, is an ash recycling center - the first of its kind in Virginia, and just the fourth in the nation.

Dominion officials and their partners from Progress Materials Inc. christened the recycling complex Friday with site tours and a fried-chicken lunch, though its pipes and scaffolding and white storage dome have been operational for about a week.

The facility acts like a big oven. It bakes black, carbon-laden fly ash into a kinder, gentler and paler byproduct that can be sold and made into concrete, roof tiling and construction blocks, among other alternative uses.

By doing so, Dominion no longer will have to bury its fly ash in a nearby industrial landfill, which was nearly filled with the black, powdery soot generated when coal is burned for electricity at the Chesapeake power plant.

The state's largest utility also can reuse heat created at the recycling complex. And the complex, in turn, gets to save on water by taking some of Dominion's leftover moisture to help run its processes.

"This is a zero-waste, ammonia-free, low-carbon process," said Lisa Cooper, vice president of Progress Materials Inc., or PMI, a Florida-based company that has opened two similar fly-ash centers in South Carolina and another in Massachusetts.

So why has the green technology, invented by a PMI engineer in 1989, not become a bigger thing?

"Well, it's sort of like recycled paper," Cooper explained. "At first, people crinkled it up and threw it away, thinking it wouldn't work. Now, everyone uses it."

She said the company is negotiating contracts for similar complexes "up and down the East Coast," suggesting that at least three more will be constructed in the next four years.

Dominion is watching how the Chesapeake facility performs and may invest in more such complexes, utility officials said.

Cooper would not say how much the Chesapeake center cost but agreed that "millions" was an accurate estimate. It will create nine full-time jobs in Chesapeake, she said, as well as 13 others in related trucking and marketing arenas.

Under an agreement with Dominion, PMI will receive all fly ash generated at the Chesapeake power plant; the domed warehouse on the Elizabeth River can hold 16,000 tons of the stuff.

PMI then will sell its carbon-lite ash to Boral Material Technologies Inc., which then will sell the material to local concrete companies, Cooper said.

Those companies are interested in the new product because it is a cheaper, environmentally sensitive alternative to portland cement, a key ingredient in concrete but a huge producer of carbon dioxide - a greenhouse gas implicated in global warming.

Because no such recycling center existed in Virginia before now, state regulators were not sure how to handle it.

It took about six months, but the state eventually added the complex onto Dominion's air-quality permit for the Chesapeake power plant.

"We're in compliance and all set to go," Cooper said.