glennk419 wrote:What no one has mentioned here is that the plant already has the ability to burn oil and one of the two oil fired units is already outfitted with a scrubber. The coal unit (Unit 1) is going to shut down regardless, what's the issue with continuing to use oil in Units 2 and 3 and possibly building an additional storage tank or two on the old coal yard? I know that gas is cleaner and relatively cheap right now but installing a scrubber on the second unit might also have some merit. The plant has been online quite a bit in what is normally the light demand season ( I know, Oyster Creek is currently down) but that at least shows that the plant still has a place on the grid.
I also wish they would have kept the golf course open. 
To have a chance to get the required NJ emissions permits, more than scrubbers would be needed; would need selective catalytic reduction (“SCR”), “baghouses” and activated carbon injection. These with scrubbers would address the 4 Ps: NOx, SO2, mercury and particulates. Probably would require in the neighborhood of half a billion dollars for the emissions control alone which would make it next to impossible to recover the capital cost in the competitive wholesale power market.
I believe that only one unit is currently capable of burning oil, though generally coal units can be converted to oil. Oil is too expensive a fuel to be able to bid energy into the wholesale electric market other than a few hours a year when the location marginal prices per MWH at the bus go into the several hundreds of dollars. Oil also requires substantial emissions control equipment to meet NJ air quality standards. Only a minimal amount of generation in the USA is oil-fired for those reasons. There are several oil fired peakers in NJ aggregating several hundred megawatts that will be retired in NJ in the next 2 or 3 years because of the fuel price and the need for emissions control making then uneconimic.
The very cold weather recently had all available capacity called into the PJM dispatch so the plant would have run for that. That's eased off now, and certainly Oyster Creek being offline raised locational marginal prices and the station may have also been ordered on for reliability, which lets it run outside the regular bid process.
