Novel Mercury Oxidant and Sorbent for Mercury Emissions Control from Coal-fired Power Plants Joo-Youp Lee & Yuhong Ju & Sang-Sup Lee & Tim C. Keener & Rajender S. Varma Received: 14 February 2007 / Revised: 12 July 2007 / Accepted: 6 August 2007 / Published online: 27 October 2007 # Springer Science + Business Media B.V. 2007 Abstract The authors have successfully developed novel efficient and cost-effective sorbent and oxidant for removing mercury from power plant flue gases. These sorbent and oxidant offer great promise for controlling mercury emissions from coal-fired power plants burning a wide range of coals including bitumi- nous, sub-bituminous, and lignite coals. A preliminary analysis from the bench-scale test results shows that this new sorbent will be thermally more stable and cost- effective in comparison with any promoted mercury sorbents currently available in the marketplace. In addition to the sorbent, an excellent elemental mercury (Hg(0)) oxidant has also been developed, and will enable coal-fired power plants equipped with wet scrubbers to simultaneously control their mercury emissions as well as their sulfur oxides emissions. This will work by converting all elemental mercury to an oxidized form which will be removed by the wet scrubber. This will result in significant cost savings for mercury emissions control to the atmosphere, and will help in keeping electric costs low. The sorbent and oxidant will benefit from the utilization of a waste stream from the printed circuit board (PCB) industry, and would thus be environmentally beneficial to both of the utility and electronics industries. The sorbent also demonstrated thermal stability up to 350°C, suggesting a possibility of an application in pulverized coal-fired power plants equipped with hot-side electrostatic precipitators and coal gasification plants. Keywords Clean coal technologies . Coal-fired utility plants . Fixed-bed test . Mercury emissions control . Oxidant . Sorbent 1 Introduction On March 15, 2005, US EPA announced the Clean Air Mercury Rule (US EPA 2005) to permanently limit mercury emissions from coal-fired power plants. The first-phase cap is 38 tons annually beginning in 2010, with a final cap set at 15 tons starting in 2018, resulting in nearly 70% reductions from 1999 emis- sion levels. Sorbent injection is one of the most promising technologies for application to the utility industry as virtually all coal-fired boilers are equipped Water Air Soil Pollut: Focus (2008) 8:333–341 DOI 10.1007/s11267-007-9146-6 J.-Y. Lee : S.-S. Lee : T. C. Keener (*) Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, OH 45221-0071, USA e-mail: Tim.Keener@uc.edu Y. Ju Analytical Science, Pacific Core R&D, Dow Chemical (China) Investment Co., Ltd. Shanghai Branch, 24/F Aurora Plaza, 99 Fucheng Rd, Shanghai Pudong 200120, China R. S. Varma Sustainable Technology Division, National Risk Management Research Laboratory, U. S. Environmental Protection Agency, MS 443, 26 W. Martin Luther King Drive, Cincinnati, OH 45268, USA