One of the first things Frontier did after taking over the Bruce Mansfield coal-fired power plant in Shippingport was to get rid of the pile of coal on the ground.
It had been stacked 60 feet high when the plant was running but was now more nuisance than fuel since the 2,500-megawatt facility shut down in 2019.
Frontier Group of Companies, a redevelopment firm based in Buffalo, N.Y., that specializes in brownfields, bought the place in August 2022. Whatever the site’s future held, the company knew, it wouldn’t involve coal.
It emptied the 45-acre coal yard of the black piles, then seeded the ground with grass that is now several feel high. This was to be the first act of rebirth for the nearly 50-year-old relic. The sign at the entrance was replaced with new ambition: Shippingport Industrial Park.
Then things on the ground kind of stopped: Nothing has been demolished or even scoured for parts.
That in and of itself isn’t unusual. Even as 30% of all coal capacity installed in the U.S. shut down in recent years, few facilities have been erased from the landscape. In Pennsylvania, even demolished coal plants, which took years to be reduced to flat ground, have yet to be resurrected with new uses.
But Frontier expects that Bruce Mansfield’s resurrection could be, at least in part, as a power plant — maybe even a dedicated source of energy for the other companies that will populate the industrial park.
“What has really been of interest with regards to our site is using hydrogen and natural gas as a dual fuel to generate power,” said Pat Ford, Frontier’s director of external affairs.
He said that when Frontier performed a market analysis of the site, it found a lot of interest in retaining “the bones” of the power plant.
‘A model location’
When Frontier, a family-owned business, buys an old industrial site, it inventories what it has and who might want it. That includes doing a market study that usually takes between 18 months and two years, Mr. Ford said.
“We are at that point now,” he said recently.
“Some of the sites that we acquired during the same period have been taken to the ground,” Mr. Ford said. Concrete pads are being poured at those sites, perhaps for warehouses or manufacturing.
But the company believes the “best productive use” for Bruce Mansfield, and several properties in Texas, involves onsite energy generation.
In January, the Department of Energy granted $100,000 to the Beaver County Corporation for Economic Development to assess what physical and workforce infrastructure is needed to redevelop Bruce Mansfield. The organization focused on the workforce part, and Frontier looked at how the interest it was getting from companies that might locate there matched with the site’s offerings. A final report is due in December.
Lew Villotti, president of the economic development corporation, is still getting used to calling the site the Shippingport Industrial Park.
“I’m trying it out,” he said.
A lot of interest is coming from energy intensive industries, such as data centers and manufacturing, he said. With a firehose of federal funding for energy technologies, Mr. Villotti said a lot of companies are looking for sites to pilot something new.
“At some point over the last 18 months, I have seen everything from hydrogen to fusion,” he said.
“What I do, if they’re knocking on our door, I say, ‘You can tell an energy story here,’” he said. “If you’re using this as a test location, it’s a model location.”
‘We are extremely patient’
The site is 20 miles from Pittsburgh International Airport, alongside a river with barge access, on a rail line and close to an Interstate highway.
But it also has the right word salad for the times: shuttered coal, brownfield, manufacturing renaissance, energy, redevelopment.
Mr. Ford said the industry clusters interested in the site include automotive parts manufacturers, transportation logistics, value added metals (“because of the muscle memory of the labor force in the area”), data centers and energy generation.
Spanning more than 600 acres, the site has enough room for a mix of those uses, Mr. Ford said.
The company’s big success story so far has been the redevelopment of the former Weirton Steel mill in West Virginia. Frontier acquired the 1,300-acre site from ArcelorMittal in 2017 and celebrated the arrival of Form Energy, a battery manufacturer, in May 2023.
It took every bit of those years to prepare the site, Mr. Ford said.
“We are extremely patient and it sometimes takes anywhere from three to seven years to get that site ideally situated for that first project — that big first tenant.”
With Bruce Mansfield, Mr. Ford projected that Frontier will know the outline of the site’s future sometime next year.
Having power onsite is a big selling point. Not only is electricity getting more expensive, but worries about potential shortages because of power plant retirements, growing power demand and extreme weather are top of mind.
The most recent PJM Interconnection capacity auction — an annual event where the grid operator secures commitments from electricity generators to be available three years with payments settled by the auction — yielded a record high price per megawatt. ($269.92 per megawatt per day, up from $28.92 during the last auction). High capacity prices indicate a shortage and can be a signal to build more generation, since for many power plants the payments they receive just for being available are a big chunk of their revenue. Experts predict next year’s capacity auction may be even costlier.
That means a business that is looking to put more megawatts on the grid in the next few years is in a better place now than it might have been a few years ago, when companies entertained repowering coal plants to run on natural gas but often deemed it uneconomical to proceed.
The last man standing
If Frontier believes the bones of the power station are among the site’s valuable assets, Bob Richardson is the lone orthopedist left in the joint.
A 20-year veteran of Bruce Mansfield, Mr. Richardson retired as an operations manager in September 2019, two months before the power plant officially shut down.
“I was literally retired three months,” he said.
Energy Harbor, which was created after 2018 bankruptcy of First Energy Solutions to operate its coal and nuclear power stations, hired him to oversee the closing.
“It was going to be for six to eight months,” he deadpanned.
Five years later, he’s still there — the last man standing, now as site supervisor for Frontier.
He knows the bones of the plant. There are rusted pipes and peeling paint all over the site, but Mr. Richardson said the GE turbines are solid and would not require any major surgery to run on gas instead of coal.
“Watch your step,” he cautions a visitor, stepping over uneven tiles on the floor of the vast turbine room, where the ground has “heaved and settled” in the years since the machines last hummed.
There was no light in the room — or in the rest of the building, which once housed offices and cubicles and now looks like a set for some post-apocalyptic movie. It’s as if one day, a corporate rapture stripped all life from the site but left behind binders and index cards, flat screen televisions, computer screens, fire extinguishers, and the glass-ensconced shovel presumably used to break ground on the Bruce Mansfield plant in the summer of 1970.
It hangs on the wall opposite a 1976 plaque commemorating the power plant’s namesake, who had recently retired as president of Ohio Edison, one of five utilities in a cooperative that built the $1.3 billion coal plant and the Beaver Valley Nuclear plant next door to it.
Frontier buys plants “as is,” Mr. Ford said, adding that every company that unloads a shuttered power station or steel mill seems to walk away in a clean break, leaving such mementos behind.
But Frontier saves them, incorporating these symbols of the past into the future use of its sites.
“We do not erase the important of these sites,” Mr. Ford said. “And we remind people of their industrial heritage.”
The golden shovel will still be there in Bruce Mansfield’s next life, he said.
First Published: September 15, 2024, 5:30 a.m.
Updated: September 16, 2024, 7:59 a.m.
