Business

ISAB Energy

The subsidiary ISAB Energy (51% ERG, 49% IPM) is one of the world’s most efficient generating plants with a capacity of 528 MW.

Set up in 1993, and ISO 14001-certified, it owns the IGCC plant [Integrated Gasification Combined Cycle], which is Europe’s largest and the third largest in the world.

Since 2000 it has been generating electricity using the raw material of asphalt, the last residue of the ISAB Impianti Sud Refinery’s process.

Its atmospheric emissions comply with the strict local environmental constraints, making the IGCC plant one of the cleanest systems of energy production today.

The setting up of IGCC involved an investment of more than a billion euro with a construction area covering 100 hectares adjacent to the ISAB Impianti Sud Refinery to allow the heat treatment residues from crude-oil processing to be exploited.
This raw material produces 4 billion kWh/year of electric power, which are sold to Gestore Sistema Elettrico GSE under the agreement CIP6/92, a twenty-year contract for the supply/purchase of the energy produced.

The management of the IGCC plant is entrusted to ISAB Energy Services [51% ERG], which was established in 1995 to perform the operation and maintenance side of the business.

ERG Power

ERG Power [100% ERG] is the company which, from 1 January 2010, owns the Centrale Nord plant, with a capacity of 480 MW, including the combined-cycle repowering plant fuelled by natural gas, which gradually entered into service between 2009 and the first few months of 2010, and the pre-existing counter-pressure SA1N plants.

The project has been developed in parallel with repowering of the site’s power stations, which has involved substitution of the existing CTE (condenser thermoelectric) plant with the new CCGT (combined-cycle gas turbine) plant fuelled with natural gas with capacity of 480 MW.

The new CCGT power station obtained a 12-year EUR 330-million project financing which confirms the project validity. The electricity produced is partly fed into the Italian national grid and in part used to fuel the multi-company site’s plants.

ERG’s investments in the thermoelectric segment, using the best available techniques (BATs), have a twofold objective, i.e.

• improve energy efficiency
• reduce operations’ environmental impact.
  
  Operation of the CCGT, together with the SA1N/3 unit, by modifying the site’s original thermoelectric set-up is in practice helping to achieve the Group’s energy-efficiency objective. It is also yielding an environmental benefit as it has reduced the main pollutants (SOx, NOx and dust) by between 60% and 70%.

Regasification terminal - Ionio Gas