Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Ltd., the nation's largest heavy-machinery maker, said it's in talks with the Queensland government to build a cleaner-burning, next-generation coal-fired power plant in the Australian state.
The capacity of the project, which has received approval from the Queensland government, may be as large as 500 megawatts, Mitsubishi Heavy spokesman Hideo Ikuno said Friday in Tokyo. Ikuno declined comment on a Nikkei newspaper report that the contract to build the project is worth about ¥200 billion.
Global utilities are accelerating efforts to develop and commercialize a low-emission, coal-fired generator to meet carbon-reduction goals as more than 40 percent of the world's electricity is produced from the fuel. Mitsubishi Heavy's so-called Integrated Coal Gasification Combined-Cycle, or IGCC, is used at an experimental plant in northern Japan.