Flue-Gas Desulfurisation (FGD) Programme at Bełchatów Power Plant

A long-running pro-environmental programme at Bełchatów Power Plant (Rogowiec, Kleszczów municipality, Łódź Voivodeship), the largest lignite-fired thermal power plant in Poland, today part of PGE Górnictwo i Energetyka Konwencjonalna S.A. within the PGE Group. It was at Bełchatów that Poland's first flue-gas desulfurisation (FGD) installation was commissioned in 1994, carried out as part of the government's "Programme for SO2 reduction in the power industry". A wet limestone-gypsum method was used, with a desulfurisation efficiency of over 95%, meaning the resulting gypsum is a fully marketable commercial product. The first installations covered units 1 and 2, and in subsequent years FGD was expanded and modernised on further units (including units 3 to 6 and 8 to 12) and on the largest, 858 MW unit commissioned in 2011. Bełchatów Power Plant allocated a total of approximately PLN 9 billion to pro-environmental investments, of which flue-gas desulfurisation was the pioneering and flagship element (as of 2020, PGE data). Thanks to the technologies applied, from the 1990s to 2020 sulphur dioxide emissions were reduced by more than 89%, nitrogen oxides by 45%, and particulates by 97%. The approximately PLN 9 billion figure is the cumulative nominal outlay on all pro-environmental investments over the entire period, not the cost of a single installation, nor a value expressed in constant prices of a single year.