Grand opening of Elkem Carbon`s energy recovery and Sulphur treatment facility

Elkem Carbon has finalized its project to clean Sulphur emissions from its calcination furnaces at Fiskaa.

The project had an investment budget of NOK 141 million and was co-funded by the Norwegian Environment Fund, ENOVA and Elkem.

Three of the plant’s 13 calcination furnaces are used to process petroleum coke. The project was limited to these three furnaces as they represent about 60% of the total SO₂ emissions from the plant and will therefore give the highest possible improvement for the available funding.  The new facility will reduce the Sulphur emissions from the three rebuild furnaces by 98%. Elkem Carbon`s total Sulphur emissions will thereby be reduced by almost 70%, which equals 620 tons of SO₂.

Equipment installed by the project will lead furnace off-gas through a heat exchanger to heat up oil. The hot oil is used to keep pitch in a liquid state during storage and hot enough to flow through the different production processes. Elkem Carbon uses pitch in the production of electrode paste, among other things. Excess heat will also be used to dry another raw material, anthracite, before the calcination process, so that less energy is required to remove moisture during this part of the process.

In addition to thermal oil heating and anthracite drying there will also be a substantial amount of heat energy available for other initiatives to replace electricity and oil as sources of heat for offices and other buildings in Elkem’s industrial area at Fiskaa in Kristiansand.

- We are very happy to finalize the project, it is great to see that we will be able to save so much energy. This is a big day for Elkem and a big step towards a greener industry, says Odd Olsen, Plant manager at Carbon Fiskaa.