Maputo — The Brazilian mining giant Vale has pledged that the coal-fired power station it intends to build in the western Mozambican province of Tete will meet stringent environmental standards.

Speaking at a public meeting on the project in Maputo on Monday, Gleuza Jesue, the general manager of environmental matters in Vale's energy department, said that the project will obey Mozambican environmental legislation, and the World Bank's standards on such matters as air pollution and the release of effluent into the Zambezi river.

Vale has a mining concession in the Tete district of Moatize, which is on top of a massive and largely unexploited coal basin. Mining is expected to start next year, and at full capacity Vale predicts production of 8.5 million tonnes of hard coking coal and 2.5 million tonnes of thermal coal a year.

The coking coal will mostly be exported, but Vale plans to burn the thermal coal in a power station built next to the mine. Initially, the power station will contain two units each producing 300 megawatts. Later expansion will bring the total generating capacity to 1,800 megawatts, or 4,430 gigawatt-hours per year.

Coal fired power stations are major contributors to global warming, but Jesue insisted that modern stations are much cleaner than their predecessors., with ten times fewer emissions. She said that emissions of the main greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide, would be reduced through more efficient burning of the coal.

The power station would use flue gas desulphurization (FGD). This is a technology that removes sulphur dioxide from the exhaust flue gases in power stations. Sulphur dioxide is a pollutant that is responsible for the formation of acid rain.

Moatize coal is only 0.6 per cent sulphur, and Jesue claimed that the FGD used would be "90 per cent efficient".

The power station will use bag filters to remove light ash from the exhaust gases. These filters are "84 per cent efficient", said Jesue. The waste from the power station is largely ash and gypsum, which can be sold to cement factories, and can also be used in construction.

Power stations use a great deal of water, but Vale says this will be no problem given the proximity of one of Africa's largest rivers, the Zambezi. The power station requires half a cubic metre of water a second - but even in the dry season the Zambezi flows past Moatize at the rate of 2,000 cubic metres a second.

Jesue said the water will be returned to the Zambezi, but only after it has been treated and meets World Bank standards for releasing waste water into rivers.

Construction of the power station is expected to begin in March 2010, and the first units, producing 600 megawatts, will be operational in December 2012. Between them, the mine and the power station use about 100 megawatts, which leaves 500 megawatts that Vale plans to sell to the Mozambican electricity company, EDM. Given Mozambique's electricity surplus, this power will certainly be sold on to other countries in the region, probably to South Africa.

A second public consultation meeting will be held in Tete on Tuesday, as part of the Environmental Impact Study that Vale must submit to the Mozambican Environment Ministry. Vale has hired the South African company Golder Associates to conduct the study. This is expected to result in the government issuing an environmental licence for the power station by October.

Pf/ (576)