In mid-October, I was down in Guayaquil, Ecuador once more, working with my friends & colleagues at Efficacitas. Back in one of my first postings, I described a pollution control effort we did at a power plant in northern Ecuador, and this time we’re doing a very similar project for a facility in Guayaquil. It was really great to see Juan Carlos Blum (the firm’s General Manager, and one of my former students); Mario Patiño-Aroca and Jorge Duque-Rivera, engineering professors at ESPOL (and officers in the firm); as well as their very talented staff (mostly mechanical engineers by training — but they’ve decided to let in a few chemical engineering-types too!).

Ecuador sugar mill

I had a chance to visit the power plant site, as well as that of another Efficacitas client, a sugar mill in the nearby countryside using bagasse in a CDM project. I hadn’t been in such a bagasse-burning plant since my days teaching energy management at the University of the West Indies in Kingston, Jamaica in the early 1980s, & so it was really fun to see how much the technology has changed. And of course, it wasn’t all work – we also headed over to the Pacific coast at Playas for a wonderful seafood feast – courtesy of Prof. Patiño (pictured on the right with his son, Gustavo, & Juan Carlos on the left).

At the beach in Playas

One of the interesting factors in our study is the potential role of Chinese vendors for flue gas desulfurization (FGD). Given the massive investment that China has been making in FGD, they have significantly begun to affect the worldwide marketplace for such equipment – especially since they have managed to drive costs down dramatically (most estimates put the cost reduction at about 50% within China, although anecdotally I have heard even lower numbers). There have been numerous concerns about equipment quality associated with such significant cost reductions, however, so our project work in Guayaquil should be both interesting and challenging!