Proposed in 2006, Southern Company’s (“Southern”) Kemper County Power Generation Facility (“Kemper”) was initially viewed as a flagship demonstration project for “clean coal” technologies like carbon capture and sequestration (“CCS”). Eleven years on, Southern has announced it is “immediately suspending start-up and operations activities” on the gasifier units and the facility “will continue to operate using natural gas pending the Mississippi Public Service Commission’s decision on future operations.”
The 582 MW plant was designed to convert lignite coal into a synthetic gas with a CCS system capturing more than half of the emissions. Since 2012 however, Kemper has faced years of cost-overruns and construction delays. In response, regulators passed a motion in June directing Kemper to operate as a combined-cycle natural gas plant. The motion also ordered the removal of risk from ratepayers for the “lignite coal gasifier and related assets”.
Ongoing issues with Kemper continue to raise concerns regarding the viability of “clean coal” branded technologies like CCS as well as why captive ratepayers should bear financial responsibility for rate-based technologies with no guarantee of success. In 2014, Mississippi enacted legislation to pass on $800 million of Southern’s costs to state ratepayers. Total costs for the facility have reached almost $7 billion, more than double the projected budget. In addition, U.S. taxpayers have also borne costs for Kemper since the Department of Energy (DOE) provided $382 million in grants for construction of the facility.
Despite Kemper’s problems, Secretary of Energy, Rick Perry, continued promoting “clean coal” as part of an “all of the above” strategy during the Energy Information Administration’s conference in June. In his remarks, Perry cited the Texas based Petra Nova coal plant, which was successfully retrofitted with CCS technology in 2017.
There are other Carbon Capture Systems waiting to be tested and certified. Sidel Global has an affordable, and patented Carbon Capture Utilization System that will transform the CO2 out of… Read more »
We really need to dissect the issues here. The Kemper ‘clean coal’ project was more technology challenged by their attempt to gasify coal in the large volume required than the… Read more »
There’s no question that the Kemper facility has been a colossal boondoggle. It should have been an easy scale-up from pilot plants and smaller coal gasification facilities that have operated… Read more »
The Kemper plant is based on chemical capture of CO2 which is expensive (both for Capex and Opex), is big, and it takes a lot of energy to operate. While… Read more »
The failures of CCS technology development over the past decade might be due to the intrinsic difficulty of finding a way to divert CO2 waste streams from the atmosphere to… Read more »
I certainly agree that capturing carbon from production of Portland cement and steel will be important. Roughly half a tonne of CO2 is released from calcining of limestone for every… Read more »
[…] Last week, Southern Company and Mississippi Power announced that they would be turning their clean coal power plant project into a natural gas power plant. […]