The Southern Co. has begun demolishing its failed attempt to create a path to “clean coal technology” at the multi-billion-dollar Kemper County integrated gasification, combined cycle project (IGCC) in Mississippi. The Georgia-based power giant set off two explosions at the site on October 9. Here’s a video of the results of the demolition.
Southern began the project to turn local lignite coal (an abundant but low-energy fuel that some refer to as “dirt that burns”) into methane to generate steam and then electricity. The utility first started touting the project in 2008, and the Mississippi Public Service Commission approved the project in 2010, and construction began that year.
The project did not go well, a familiar circumstance for Southern, having serious construction management difficulties at its two-unit, 2,000-MW Vogtle nuclear construction project in Georgia. The initial cost of the Kemper project was about $3 billion and it had some $400 million in U.S. Department of Energy funding.
Over the years, as the project ran into many problems, the costs kept increasing. When the Southern Co. subsidiary Mississippi Power Co. suspended the project in 2017, the project costs had ballooned to over $7 billion.
While coal gasification to produce electricity has a decades-old history, it has never been shown to be economical. Southern Co. made a technology bet on a new gasification technology called “transport integrated gasification” or TRIG. TRIG was developed at the joint Southern, DOE research facility in Wilsonville, Ala., along with Kellogg, Brown & Root.
The Kemper project, according to Southern, would capture 65% of the carbon dioxide it produced, and then pump the CO2 into the ground for enhanced oil recovery. But the bet on what was only a small-scale version of the technology failed, and the project cratered. In 2018, the Mississippi Public Service Commission ruled that the utility shareholders would have to absorb most of the costs of the project’s failure.
Southern Co.’s 770-MW gas-fired combined cycle generating facility at the Kemper site continues to operate.
–Kennedy Maize
(kenmaize@gmail.com)