African contract continues Dual-Fuel success | Africa

African contract continues Dual-Fuel success
MAN Diesel & Turbo has signed a contract with its long-time customer, Telemenia, the Israeli power-engineering company, covering the provision of 4 × 18V51/60DF generating-sets plus engine-related plant auxiliaries. The final customer is the Government of Gabon. The total output of the four engines is approximately 70 MW and the delivery is planned for late-2010/ early-2011 at a power plant on a greenfield site in Libreville. The plant will go into operation in 2011 and deliver power to the national capital’s 1,250,000 inhabitants. The 18V51/60DF engines are the first dual-fuel engines in the region, and were chosen in part due to Gabon’s plentiful, natural resources of gas and oil. The engines will run on natural gas with the fuel-oil mode acting as a back-up in the event of any disruption to the gas supply. Established in 1956 and with headquarters in Lod, Israel, Telemenia is a global provider of power-generation solutions and has supplied and installed generators and power stations in South America, Africa, Europe, and both the Middle- and Far-East. Growing activity The success story in Gabon reflects MAN Diesel & Turbo’s growing activity in the African market. As such, the continent represents a very interesting market for MAN Diesel & Turbo’s Power Business Unit with its many decentralised networks. Over the past three years alone, the business unit has landed orders all over the continent in Egypt, Sudan, Senegal, Burkina Faso, Libya, Madagascar and Cape Verde. MAN Diesel & Turbo already has a significant, existing network on the continent with its latest office, MAN PrimeServ Nairobi, opening its doors in November 2009. 18V51/60DF success The Gabonese order for the 4 × 18V51/60DF engines is a further milestone in the steady development of MAN Diesel & Turbo’s dual-fuel engine that has recently scored significant success. This includes the Owen Springs power plant, near Alice Springs in Australia’s Northern Territory, where the first of three 10.9 MWe generator sets, each powered by a twelve-cylinder, vee-configuration 12V51/60DF engine, recently arrived on site. The generator sets will supply base load power to the local grid in their gaseous-fuel mode. MAN Diesel & Turbo is constructing the Owen Springs plant for Power and Water Corporation (PWC), a major Australian public utility, with commissioning of the first engine expected in July 2010. MAN Diesel & Turbo has also recently signed a contract with the Turkish company, Karadeniz Powership Company Ltd., worth over Euro 100 million. The deal covers the supply of up to a total of 24 engines, of which twenty-one are 18V51/60DF dual-fuel engines. The engines are to be installed on board four ‘power ships’, the first of their kind globally. Power ships are floating diesel power plants that, due to their mobility, can be connected to local power grids to temporarily cover demands where onsite power plants are insufficient or new power plants cannot be built quickly enough. Unlike so-called ‘power barges’ – power plants on pontoons – ‘power ships’ are self-propelled. The MAN 51/60DF engine For power-generation applications, the 51/60DF is available in a nine-cylinder, inline version as well as vee-configuration versions with 12, 14 and 18 cylinders. The engines have mechanical ratings of 1,000 kW per cylinder for 60-Hz power generation (514rpm) and 975 kW for 50-Hz applications (500 rpm). These give an overall generator-set rating range of 8,560 to 17,550 kWe. With its fuel flexibility and low emissions, the MAN 51/60DF engine targets applications where operation on a back-up fuel is either essential or desirable. The engine’s fuel flexibility centres on the capability to operate on either gaseous or liquid fuel, and to switch between them seamlessly at full-rated output. In the gaseous-fuel mode, an air-gas mixture is ignited by injection of distillate diesel fuel. On the 51/60DF, the liquid fuel micro-pilot amounts to 1% of the quantity of liquid fuel needed to achieve full-rated output. It is injected via a common rail system that allows flexible setting of injection timing, duration and pressure for each cylinder. This flexibility allows the engine to achieve low emissions and to respond rapidly to combustion knock signals on a cylinder-by-cylinder basis. In back-up, liquid-fuel mode, the 51/60DF engine operates as a normal diesel engine injecting distillate or heavy fuel oil (HFO) through a separate, normally dimensioned injector in a camshaft-actuated, pump-line-nozzle system. At 500 mg/mn3 at 5% O2 on gaseous fuel, the 51/60DF readily achieves emissions of oxides of nitrogen (NOx) in compliance with both Germany’s TA Luft clean-air regulations and the World Bank Pollution Prevention and Abatement Handbook.

News posted on Tuesday 20th, Jul 2010