Bechtel, Shell to Erect Border Power Plant
A partnership of San Francisco-based Bechtel and Shell Oil has won the right to build a $400-million power plant near Mexicali in Baja California to meet rising energy demand in the U.S.-Mexico border area.
High population growth in Baja and rising industrial demand from maquiladoras, the proliferating foreign-owned plants that assemble goods in Mexico for the U.S market, are the principal reasons for the new Baja plant.
Energy consumption in Baja grew 12% last year, six times the growth in U.S. consumption of electricity. The 750-megawatt Mexicali plant project is one of three natural-gas-powered projects in the works in Baja.
A 540-megawatt facility is under construction in Rosarito Beach, 23 miles south of the border, adjacent to a highly polluting 620-megawatt fuel-oil-burning plant that is being converted to burn cleaner natural gas.
The winning Mexicali bid, announced Friday by Mexico’s Federal Electricity Commission (CFE), comes less than a week after Sempra Energy of San Diego announced it would build a 212-mile natural-gas pipeline from western Arizona to Baja, mainly to deliver fuel from U.S. and Canadian natural-gas fields to the new Baja plants.
InterGen, the Boston-based Bechtel-Shell partnership, said Friday it will build the plant in the Mexicali Valley about 135 miles east of San Diego. Mexicali is the capital of Baja California and the state’s second-leading maquiladora center after Tijuana.
The plant will generate enough power to light about 1.5 million Baja households. In the auction, InterGen beat out AES Corp. of Arlington, Va., which had proposed a much smaller plant. AES officials were not available for comment Friday.
Mexico’s FCE said the plant would be operational by 2003. It will be the last of 10 privately financed and built power stations authorized by the commission to increase capacity in the energy-short nation.
Industry sources, however, say the CFE will soon begin another round of competitive bids for more power plants, and that Baja California will likely see more such facilities in coming years. The CFE is trying to foster competition and break the state monopoly in power generation.
The nation is also trying to increase generating capacity in the energy-short nation. In Baja alone, rising consumption is creating the need for a new 500-megawatt power plant every four to five years, said Sempra Energy International’s Donald Felsinger.
The CFE also said that InterGen offered to build a 220-megawatt power plant in Ensenada, on the Baja coast about 50 miles south of Rosarito Beach.
Felsinger said the Mexicali power plant could sell some of its capacity to the California energy market after meeting contractual obligations to supply Baja.
InterGen is also developing a 600-megawatt natural-gas-powered plant in Bajio in Guanajuato state in central Mexico. It is also a partner in a natural-gas pipeline in the Yucatan peninsula.
