Siemens Energy has been selected by US-based energy specialists Northeast Energy Center (NEC) and Chart Energy & Chemicals to supply a gas/electric hybrid drive system for a liquefied natural gas (LNG) plant being built in Charlton, Massachusetts.
As the world’s first LNG plant to incorporate a gas/electric hybrid drive system, the NEC project will source all parts of the integrated drive from Siemens, combining a low-emissions industrial gas turbine and integrally geared compressor with an electric motor-generator.
By opting for a hybrid system, NEC claims it will reduce emissions and costs while increasing efficiency of the plant’s main refrigeration/liquefaction train throughout the year.
In conventional systems, power is often wasted due to oversized gas turbines generating much more power during cold periods than is required. According to Siemens, the hybrid solution provides NEC an ‘active and powerful’ tool in demand side management, reducing its costs and the need to purchase power from the grid, while allowing the sale of power back to the utility.
Rich Voorberg, President of Siemens Energy North America believes that natural gas can help facilitate the energy transition, saying, “It will serve as a reliable complement to renewable energy in many regions of the world.”
“The combination of the gas turbine, integrally geared compressor, and motor-generator at the NEC plant represents a highly flexible solution that will enable the liquefaction plant to operate efficiently year-round, regardless of the ambient conditions.”
Equipped with an onsite storage capacity of two million tonnes, the facility could produce a baseload of 170,000 gallons of LNG per day for Boston Gas and up to 250,000 gallons per day to other users. When production hits 250,000 gallons on hot summer days, output will decrease as the motor-generator will function as a power-source for the compression system.
Calling it a ‘next generation’ design with inherent environmental advantages, Boris Brevnov, Manager and Developer of NEC praised the hybrid drive solution, saying that it ‘demonstrates the next step in hybridisation of the energy systems in their decarbonisation process’.
