Southern Research fighting fossil fuel pollutants with Birmingham facility

Above: A researcher adjusts the combustor controls at Southern Research’s Mercury Research Center. (John Herr/Alabama NewsCenter)
Imagine a miniature power plant in the middle of a major city where scientists are discovering new ways to burn fossil fuels more cleanly.
Now picture Southern Research’s Mercury Research Center (MRC).

Project manager Laura Berry takes a reading at Southern Research’s Mercury Research Center. (John Herr/Alabama NewsCenter)
Located in downtown Birmingham, the MRC works to find new processes to take mercury and other pollutants out of flue gas from coal combustion and keep it out of the atmosphere. It does so by simulating real-world conditions at a coal-fired power plant.
“This is a unique facility,” said John Cover, operations manager of the MRC’s combustion research facility. “It is representative of what would happen in a utility-scale boiler.”
“It’s great because it’s very small,” said Laura Berry, Southern Research senior project leader. “We have a lot of flexibility in being able to test a lot of things in a relatively short amount of time.”
The MRC’s hub is a 30-foot-tall, 1-megawatt-equivalent furnace that makes flue gas from burning coal, biomass, natural gas or other combustibles.
“If we can mill it, we can burn it,” said Berry.
The gas is analyzed by three “very sophisticated and expensive” continuous emission mercury monitors.
“Our monitors see everything very quickly, and in turn they also recover very quickly when we stop the testing,” said Berry. “So we’re able to get really good comparisons on additives and products.”
The Mercury Research Center was launched in 2005 at Plant Crist, a Gulf Power facility near Pensacola, Fla. In 2015 it was relocated to the Southern Research facility in Birmingham, where it began operations in August.
It’s a fitting home for innovation. The Southern Research Institute was created in 1941 by Tom Martin, then-president of Alabama Power, as an independent network dedicated to scientific discovery and technology development. Martin also saw it as a vehicle to make industry in the South more competitive.
The Mercury Research Center is making progress on both fronts.

Operations manager John Cover at the Southern Research Mercury Research Center. (John Herr/Alabama NewsCenter)
“It gives potential vendors an opportunity to test out their products ahead of going to the utility and trying to market it to the utility itself,” said Cover. “It saves time and money both for the vendor and for the utility.”
“It really is unlike any other facility that I’m aware of as far as its size and its capability for monitoring,” said Berry.
All of this occurs within a nondescript three-story building surrounded by bins of coal.
“We have our own air permit with the Jefferson County Department of Health,” said Berry. “We also have our own pollution control devices” including a baghouse, a caustic scrubber and an electrostatic precipitator to remove fine particles from the air.
The MRC contracts with businesses looking for energy solutions. It also works closely with Southern Company, and has shared its findings with industry groups such as the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI).
“We have used the Mercury Research Center to refine the technology choices we’ve made,” said Jeff Wilson, emissions controls R&D manager for Southern Company Services. “Going forward, it will continue to be a resource that will allow for technology development and improvement.”
“Every time we do some combustion research, we learn a little bit more about mercury and the mechanisms by which it is captured,” said Berry.