NEWS RELEASE                                   SEPTEMBER 2009

Chinese Will Buy Power Plant Pumps to Move 34 Million Gallons Per Minute This Year

This year China will buy pumps for its power plants which will move more than 34 million gallons per minute of water, fuel oil, and various slurries.  The biggest application will be cooling water at coal-fired power plants.  Boiler feedwater pump purchases will be small in terms of flow but substantial in price due to the high pressures needed.  Forecasts by specific pump application have just been added to Pumps: World Markets, an online publication of the McIlvaine Company.

From the perspective of the purchaser concerned about future supply and the manufacturer who needs to anticipate demand, it is essential to determine the markets for specific pump types.  No pump supplier makes the complete range of pumps.  Therefore, segmentation of the market is necessary.  For the last two decades McIlvaine has forecast the market for four pump types in ten applications for 80 countries and sub regions resulting in 20,000 individual forecasts.  Now this number has been greatly expanded.

In the power sector, in addition to revenues McIlvaine is forecasting pump units and flow for many different pump applications.  Separate forecasts are made by fuel type (nuclear, coal, oil and gas).

In China the coal-fired boiler market is growing rapidly.  By 2020 China will be operating three times as much coal-fired capacity as the U.S.  The number of combined cycle gas plants is relatively small.  The nuclear base is low, but there are ambitious long-term plans.  China is also investing heavily in wind and solar where lubrication pumps for wind turbine gear boxes and solar panel rotation are needed.

Boiler feed pumps and condensate handling pumps operate at high pressures and medium flows, and result in major expenditures for plant owners.  Pump life is 20 years.  The replacement market is not large in comparison to the new boiler market in China, but replacement is the bigger share of the market in Europe.

Power plant cooling water requirements are so large they exceed the combined requirements of all industrial and municipal applications combined.  In China, there is some movement toward dry cooling which reduces the potential market.  In the U.S., the trend away from once through cooling toward recirculation has been a boost to the market.

The big slurry pumps used in flue gas desulfurization have generated a $100 million dollar market which has been served by a few international companies.  Now several Chinese pump companies have also entered this market.

McIlvaine plans to expand pump forecasting to cover hundreds of additional specific applications and to provide segmentation for many different pump types.  The number of continually updated forecasts now exceeds 40,000 and it is expected that this number will rise rapidly.