The $18 million project was designed and overseen by environmentally friendly power station developer Envirogen, which has established and operated similar plants at the Teralba, Tahmoor and Oaky Creek mines.

Envirogen CEO Jeff Rice told International Longwall News each station is developed on a stand-alone basis whereby the mines are paid for the gas consumed and electricity produced by the power station is sold into the local grid under long-term contracts with electricity retailers.

The Tahmoor plant was commissioned in February 2004 and now supplies 7MW of energy while Teralba, which came online in June 2004, has a 6MW capacity.

The largest plant owned by Envirogen is at Xstrata's Oaky Creek Coal Mine, where 12MW is generated from waste coal mine gas which will soon be expanded to 20MW production.

Rice said each station uses multiple containerised Jenbacher 320 gas engines that have a 1MW capacity.

Each engine has a different gas delivery system taking waste mine gas from the gas wells that are drilled by the coal mine. In the case of Oaky Creek there is over 20km of polyethylene gas pipeline required to deliver gas from the mine well heads to the power station.

Rice said the company has received a $6 million grant from the Department of Energy and Water under its Greenhouse Gas Abatement program to partially fund the Glennies Creek plant. It was previously granted $13 million to build the Teralba Colliery and Oaky Creek projects and upgrade the Tahmoor Power station.

He said the development of these projects is a win-win situation where real carbon abatement is achieved whilst utilising a waste energy resource to generate electricity and the coal mine receives some monetary benefits for providing the gas.

Rice said Envirogen is looking to additional technologies to make optimum use of waste coal mine gas and in one instance has joined with the CSIRO on a project that will concentrate on improving waste coal mine gas capture for use in generation.