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Charlotte Amalie
Friday, March 29, 2024
HomeNewsArchivesAlpine Exec Launches Dialogue Over Community Concerns

Alpine Exec Launches Dialogue Over Community Concerns

Don Hurd, executive vice president of Alpine Energy Group, answers questions from members of the St. Croix Chamber of Commerce.Alpine Energy Group Executive Vice President Don Hurd said he wasn’t surprised when controversy erupted after the deal with the V.I. Water & Power Authority was announced for Alpine to build two plants in the territory to produce energy from garbage.
Radio callers have talked of little else in the months since the August announcement, and community groups and individuals have held meetings to challenge the plan.
Hurd said he has seen it before in other communities where similar projects have been launched. And with enough dialogue and discussion, most of those concerns can be allayed, he said.
"Some folks will never agree, and some folks will have no problem," he said Thursday night after a presentation to the St. Croix Chamber of Commerce Business After Hours meeting. "And in the middle are the majority of people who need to know more. It’s about being able to sit down and have a good dialogue."
That was why Alpine hosted the Thursday evening get-together—and why Hurd is planning a series of community meetings around the territory to spread the word that the Alpine project will be good for the Virgin Islands.
Thursday he gave a presentation on how the $440 million project will work—from the trash-handling facilities where the islands’ waste will be shredded to the "thermal oxidizer bubbling bed."
"It’s a furnace," Hurd said matter-of-factly of the bubbling bed. One in which fuel will be burned at nearly 1,600 degrees, making steam that will turn a turbine to generate electricity.
The garbage fuel usually will be augmented with pet coke, a fuel derived from petroleum production. Its high sulfur content creates problems from an environmental standpoint, but Hurd said the plant will use, in fact will be required to use, the best available control technologies to minimize any discharge.
"What you’ll see out of the stacks is nothing," he said. Neither steam, nor smoke, nor dust, Hurd asserted. "Nothing."
Hurd added that, when possible, Alpine will substitute other materials, such as woody plant matter and chipped tires, instead of pet coke. Those are "fuels of opportunity," he said. When they’re available at an economic price, they’ll be used. Pet coke and trash are the primary fuels because "they’re available all the time."
Power produced by the two plants – one to be built on St. Thomas and one on St. Croix – will be purchased by WAPA at a rate cheaper than the authority itself can produce. That power will replace WAPA power generated by burning foreign oil. In fact, he promised, the Alpine plants will have emissions less than half the emissions from WAPA’s generators for the same amount of electricity.
The company is also working to establish educational partnerships and other community connections, he said. Welding students at the Career and Technical Education Center at the St. Croix Education Complex are building a scale model of the thermal oxidizer bubbling bed that will be on display at the Agriculture Fair next February.

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