Work starts on First Gen’s 414-MW plant

Business Mirror

14 Jan 2014 

 

Written by Roderick L. Abad

FOLLOWING the signing of its partnership agreement with Siemens Group in mid-December 2013, First Gen Corp., through its wholly owned unit First NatGas Power Corp. (FNPC), broke ground on Tuesday its 414-megawatt (MW) plant in Santa Rita, Batangas.

President Aquino graced the groundbreaking rites of the San Gabriel combined cycle power plant (San Gabriel Project), with Energy Secretary Carlos Jericho L. Petilla and other government officials.

The company’s top executives, led by First Gen Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Federico R. Lopez and President and Chief Operating Officer Francis Giles B. Puno, were also present during the ceremony.

“As the transformation of those fishponds 20 years ago ushered natural gas into our country’s fuel mix, [Tuesday’s] groundbreaking will, in another sense, be quite trailblazing,” Lopez said in a statement.

The inaugurated facility, he added, is the first of three additional plants to be constructed within the site as they aim to build an additional 1,342 MW until 2019.

“That will bring our total capacity of LNG [liquefied natural gas]-fired plants to more than 3,000 megawatts by then,” the chairman and CEO said.

Through FNPC, First Gen signed an equipment supply contract on December 16 with Siemens AG and a construction-services contract with Siemens, Inc. for the engineering, design, procurement, construction and completion of the San Gabriel project.

The plant is expected commercially operate in 2016 to sell electricity to the Luzon grid.

Initially, it would use Malampaya gas and, eventually, operate on regasified liquefied natural gas in the future, along with the other two additional units in the pipeline.

With an estimated cost of $600 million, the San Gabriel Project will be funded by an export credit agency-covered loan and the proceeds of First Gen’s recent $300-million Reg-S bond offering.

Under the agreement, the project will use Siemens’ SCC6-8000H gas-turbine technology proven to have over 60 percent combined-cycle efficiency, as well as enjoy operations and maintenance synergies with the adjacent 1,000-MW Santa Rita and 500-MW San Lorenzo Combined Cycle Natural Gas-Fired Power Plants.

First Gen is among the biggest Filipino-owned independent power producers in the country, with a plant portfolio of around 2,763-MW of generation assets that mainly use indigenous, clean and/or renewable fuels.

Apart from San Gabriel, it also fully owns the Santa Rita and San Lorenzo power plants, of which Siemens also served as the contractor.

In the first nine months of 2013, both plants contributed $943.2 million or 66.5 percent to First Gen’s consolidated revenues of $1.4 billion.   source

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In Photo: President Aquino speaks during the groundbreaking ceremony of the San Gabriel power plant project in Barangay Santa Rita, Batangas City, on Tuesday. First Gen Corp., which operates the power plant, is the leading clean and renewable-energy company in the Philippines. (Malacañang Photo Bureau)