Randy Boswell
The Ottawa Citizen
September 20, 1997

Ontario Hydro can expect a knock on the door any day now from a Venezuelan salesman lugging a bag full of goo and pitching a sure-fire plan to help solve the troubled utility’s power-producing woes.

Eduardo Hernandez, vice-president of marketing with Bitor America Corp., is touting the merits of a new, tar-like fossil fuel called orimulsion. This sludgy blend of bitumen and water has the potential, he says, to ignite world energy markets in the fast-approaching post-nuclear age.

“Nuclear power is disappearing everywhere,” says Mr. Hernandez, noting that Ontario Hydro’s recent acknowledgment of major problems with its atomic energy plants is a story being repeated throughout most of North America’s big utility companies.

“I talked with Ontario Hydro a few years ago, but they were in the midst of such big changes we didn’t really pursue it. I think we’ll talk again.”

Bitor already has a Canadian beachhead for its product, which is pumped 1,000 metres to the surface of Venezuela’s vast Orinoco Tar Belt, processed and shipped to — among other places — Dalhousie, New Brunswick. NB Power, that province’s version of Ontario Hydro, has been burning orimulsion at its Dalhousie generating station since 1995 after converting both coal-fired and oil-fired units.

And just last week, Dalhousie Mayor Wally Coulombe was flown to Tallahassee to help the Florida Power & Light Co. argue its case before the state cabinet that a controversial plan to create the first orimulsion plant in the United States would be safe — and cost-saving — for local residents.

The idea had been nixed by the state cabinet in 1996 when Gov. Lawton Chiles and his departmental commissioners overruled a recommendation from Florida’s environment regulator to approve the project. Environmental groups in the area had successfully argued that emissions from burning the fuel could be hazardous, that a tanker spill in Tampa Bay could be catastrophic, and that, in the event of accidental discharges, a fuel additive needed to emulsify the water and petroleum in orimulsion could harm fish and other aquatic life along the coast.

“It was the NIMBY syndrome — Not In My Back Yard — in the guise of environmentalism,” counters FP&L spokesman Bill Swank. He adds that, because the Florida utility’s nuclear plants are probably headed for shutdown, the company is attempting to “diversify its options” for fuel supplies.

The proposed Manatee County plant is considered crucial to the future of orimulsion, which is also being burned in Japan, Italy and Denmark — but no longer in Britain. There, two aging plants that had converted to the fuel were recently shut down, partly because of concerns about the health impact of emissions, says Max Wallis of the British arm of the environmental group Friends of the Earth. Another proposed site in Wales was officially cancelled last week after a public outcry.

Mr. Hernandez argues that the poor condition of the generating stations, bureaucratic delays and public misperceptions conspired to scuttle Bitor’s plans in Britain.

Still, Mr. Hernandez is likely to face a tough sell when he does drop in at Ontario Hydro.

The provincial utility studied the potential of orimulsion a few years ago and didn’t find it very attractive, says Blair Seckington, Hydro’s senior adviser on technology programming.

“The difficulty for us is that it does contain a fair bit of sulphur,” he says. “By the time you spend a lot of money for retrofitting and environmental controls and safety features, you could probably have built a couple of (cleaner) co-generation plants.”

He adds that Ontario Hydro was considering orimulsion specifically for its fuel burners at the Lennox Generating Station near Kingston, but a consultant reasoned that the huge cost of building a harbour to accommodate supertankers — or, alternatively, the inflated cost of having smaller ships supply the fuel — erased the savings of a cheaper petroleum.

Last week, Ontario Hydro announced that the Lennox Generating Station would switch to gas from oil in an attempt to lower operating costs and environmental impacts.

Tom Adams of Energy Probe, a longtime critic of Ontario’s nuclear program, says orimulsion would make a poor substitute.

“Yuck,” he says. “Its environmental profile is virtually the same as coal, and coal is gross.”

Mr. Adams acknowledged that, because NB Power added scrubbers to its Dalhousie plant when it replaced coal oil with orimulsion, the net effect was “vastly cleaner and cheaper than before.” And orimulsion is “cheaper than oil and that counts as a credit,” he adds.

But compared with natural gas and other energy alternatives, the gooey stuff Mr. Adams calls “pumpable coal” doesn’t rate a second glance.