Owned and operated by Millmerran Power Partners, a partnership of InterGen (a Shell-Bechtel vehicle), Marubeni Corporation, GE Structured Finance, EIF Group and Tohoku Electric Power Co Inc, the plant can produce up to 840MW of electricity from two generating units.

 

The project involved construction of the power station, adjacent Commodore coal mine (developed and operated by Roche Mining under a $200 million contract), transmission system and 90km water supply pipeline from a sewage treatment plant north of Toowoomba.

 

Coal is transferred from the 3.6 million-tonnes-per-annum Commodore opencut mine via a 1.4km overland conveyor to the power station.

 

Millmerran is one of 20 power stations operated or being built by 54% owner InterGen. The company said Millmerran was the only power station in Australia using supercritical boiler technology and dry cooling in the generation process to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by about 10% compared with conventional coal-fired generation.

 

Coal reserves are said to be sufficient to fuel the plant for 50 years.