Renewables Will Be Our Focus for the Future

David Milner, Sales and Business Development Director for Sub-Saharan Africa and Türkiye at Babcock & Wilcox, answered our questions for Business Diplomacy readers.

1- Could you tell us about Babcock & Wilcox?

We are an American company based in Akron, Ohio, and was founded in 1867. We have been operating in Türkiye for a while. Since 2010, when the market calmed down, we reduced our activities in Türkiye, but now our intention is to return to Türkiye and offer as many products and solutions as we can.

2- Could tell us about your worldwide activities in the field of energy and environment?

B&W has three main focuses. The first is thermal technologies. This consists largely of coal-fired power plants and we have a long track record in their supply. The second area of focus is the process of cleaning the gases from thermal combustion processes. We have a range of technologies for the treatment of flue gases to remove sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, and particulates. This is the focus of our environmental pillar. In Türkiye, Babcock &Wilcox already has flue gas desulphurization plants installed in some large coal power plants.

The third is renewables and that will surely be our main focus for the future. Thermal was our past, the environment is our present, and renewables is our future.

3- What does the Turkish market mean to you? What are the products and services that you intend to launch here?

Our main focus in terms of renewable resources is biofuels and waste-to-energy conversion. We are seeing that there is not much forestry in Türkiye. Therefore, the typical application for forest waste, that is biofuel, is not such a big opportunity for Türkiye. However, there is a great opportunity to generate energy from waste. Istanbul already has a waste to energy power plant.

This is quite large, but a representative from the City of Istanbul told us that this power plant can only receive 15 per cent of the waste in Istanbul. So, 85 per cent of the waste still goes to landfills and we believe we can offer solutions for this remaining 85 per cent. In addition, we have some new technologies that we will introduce in the next year or two that will enable us to generate hydrogen, steam, and electricity using existing resources such as coal in Türkiye without emitting any CO₂.

4) What are the trends you follow around the world in renewable energy and sustainable energy production?

Solar energy and wind are, of course, significant trends. As a matter of fact, we have a solar energy division at our company in the USA and we also have a partnership with an American company that provides an alternative technology to lithium-ion for battery storage. The problem with these technologies is that they are not baseload, and we cannot guarantee their availability. Therefore, the world is looking for additional renewable technology on a larger scale to provide these baseloads. Over the last five years, we have detected a rapid decline in the demand for conventional boilers for coal-fired power plants. So, we had to reallocate all the resources that we had allocated into other technologies. Everyone is racing for green hydrogen, blue hydrogen, and fuel cells as a way to provide baseload power capacity. There is no winner in this race yet. There are many competing technologies and everyone is looking forward to seeing which technology will win the race.

David Milner / Sales and Business Development Director at Babcock & Wilcox