Spring Creek's power driver

After running on locally produced lignite for almost 40 years, Stanton Station, an electricity generating plant in North Dakota, last year decided to change its supply source and buy its coal from Kennecott Energy's Spring Creek mine n Montana. Peter Brigg explores the thinking and the politics behind the change-over.

When the summer sun bakes the North Dakota landscape, it's hard for a visitor to imagine the savagely low temperatures that workers at the Great River Energy (GRE) electricity generating plant at Stanton have to contend with at the other end of the year. In mid winter, this is no place for wimps.

“It can drop to minus 30 degrees Fahrenheit (-34°C), or sometimes even lower,” says Stanton Station manager John Pelerine, “and of course there may well be wind chill on top of that.”

Extreme temperatures such as these can turn normally straightforward tasks - unloading coal from rail cars for example - into major logistical exercises.

“When we were running the plant on lignite we'd be lucky on a really cold day to tip more than a wheelbarrow load out of a 100 ton wagon,” Pelerine says. “We had to pound the frozen coal with sledgehammers and even ram our rail cars into each other to free it.”

“Now that we've switched to coal from the Spring Creek mine the problem is less severe because the coal has a much lower moisture content. And it arrives in aluminium wagons with ends more steeply sloped, which means that the coal slides out better.”