OXIDATION OF MERCURY ACROSS SCR CATALYSTS IN COAL-FIRED POWER PLANTS BURING LOW RANK FUELS

This is the sixth Quarterly Technical Report for DOE Cooperative Agreement No: DE-FC26-03NT41728. The objective of this program is to measure the oxidation of mercury in flue gas across SCR catalyst in a coal-fired power plant burning low rank fuels using a slipstream reactor containing multiple commercial catalysts in parallel. The Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) and Argillon GmbH are providing co-funding for this program. This program contains multiple tasks and good progress is being made on all fronts. During this quarter, a review of the available data on mercury oxidation across SCR catalysts from small, laboratory-scale experiments, pilot-scale slipstream reactors and full-scale power plants was carried out. Data from small-scale reactors obtained with both simulated flue gas and actual coal combustion flue gas demonstrated the importance of temperature, ammonia, space velocity and chlorine on mercury oxidation across SCR catalyst. SCR catalysts are, under certain circumstances, capable of driving mercury speciation toward the gas-phase equilibrium values at SCR temperatures. Evidence suggests that mercury does not always reach equilibrium at the outlet. There may be other factors that become apparent as more data become available