Coal era ushered out at Eastman Business Park

With the chug of an engine, and the clanging of steel against steel, an era at Kodak ended.

Tuesday morning, crews who work the power plant at Eastman Business Park—once teeming with gigantic operations for making film and now home to 100 different smaller companies—unloaded the very last train car of coal.

The power plant has been fired by coal for about 100 years but is switching to cleaner, less expensive natural gas.

“This place has well over 100 years of history,” said John D. Prunkl, CEO of Ironclad Energy, the parent company of RED Rochester, the enterprise that owns and operates the utility system at the former Kodak Park.

Discussions on transitioning to gas began about five years ago, Prunkl said, about the time that federal Environmental Protection Agency regulations went into effect requiring more stringent air pollution controls. The company decided switching to cleaner gas, which will cut carbon dioxide emissions by 50 percent, was more affordable than installing air pollution scrubbers, Prunkl said. The project cost $80 million.

RED Rochester brought in new gas boilers last May and one of the three coal boilers—the most modern, built in the 1980s—has already converted to burning gas. The two 1960s-era model boilers will be shut down once the last of the coal is burned. Tuesday’s carload is expected to last until the end of the week.

With media crews and a few railway enthusiasts looking on Tuesday, the crews emptied a 100-ton carload of coal. An engine pushed the coal car into an open-sided shed for unloading. But on a day when temperatures ran several degrees below freezing, the open train car of gravel-sized coal wasn’t flowing like sand through an hour glass. Icicles clung to the underside of the car, where three doors were latched shut. Workers banged on the latches with tools to get the doors open, allowing the coal to obey the laws of gravity. Some coal fell out into hoppers below the tracks. But a ceiling-mounted crane then dropped a plate of steel into the car repeatedly to encourage the bulk of the coal to break up. The process took about a half-hour.

With no coal to unload anymore, the workers will focus on different boiler operation skills, Prunkl said. “We’ve got lots of employees with 40-plus years of experience,” he said, and the company expects to lower its workforce some by natural attrition. The power plant operators have  been retrained to operate the gas system, and as they retire will retrain others. “We’re not kicking anybody out,” he said.

With changing economics and new supplies developed in Pennsylvania, gas became a more attractive option, Prunkl said. More renewable sources of energy, such as wind and solar, wouldn’t have worked at Eastman Business Park for several reasons, he said. The demands for electricity in the business park are too steady for intermittent sources such as wind and solar power. In addition, customers rely on the power plant for steam as well as electricity, and renewables don’t create steam in the generation process.

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