A long standing customer saw an opportunity to use exhaust gases from a steelworks as the fuel gas  for a set of large gas turbines it proposed to install in a power plant.  There were two suitable waste gases: one was cheap and plentiful but of low calorific value from the blast furnace containing 10/mg m3 of particulates; and the other was more valuable but of higher calorific value from the coke ovens containing 50 m/m3 of tar. The limit for both if they were to be used as fuel was 1 mg/m3.

Jord combined its skills in heat transfer and clean air technology to develop process solutions tailored to meet each duty. A WESP was used to remove 90% of the particulates from the blast furnace exhaust. However there was risk that droplets might condense from the saturated gas leaving the WESP as it cooled in the downstream ducting leading to the gas turbines. These droplets could damage the turbine. To remove that risk, Jord designed a gas cooler which could be inserted between the electrostatic fields of the WESP. The first field cleaned the gas sufficiently not to block the gas cooler and the second field removed any water droplets that condensed after the gas was cooled.

A specially configured vertical cylindrical WESP with heat plates was used to remove 98% of the tar from the coke oven gas.

The combined solution was so successful in turning an environment headache into an energy opportunity that the end user ordered a duplicate system soon after the first system was commissioned.