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$7.5 Billion Kemper Power Plant Suspends Coal Gasification (arstechnica.com)
romanval writes: A coal gasification plant in Mississippi is iswitching to natural gas after 5 years of delays and $4 billion cost overrun. Megan Geuss writes via Ars Technica: "The Kemper County plant was supposed to be a cutting-edge demonstration of the power of 'clean coal,' and, despite running five years late and more than $4 billion over budget, Kemper was able to start testing its coal gasification operations late last year. The plant used a chemical process to break down lignite coal into synthesis gas, or 'syngas,' which was then fed into a generator. The syngas burns cleaner than pulverized lignite coal does. In addition, emissions were caught by a carbon capture system and delivered to a nearby oil field to help with oil extraction. That, Southern and Mississippi Power said, would reduce the greenhouse emissions of burning lignite by up to 65 percent. But with only 200 days of gasification operations under its belt, Kemper identified more issues with its technology, including design flaws that caused leaks and ash buildup."
In 30 years of power plant engineering, this is no surprise to me. Coal gasification has been tried many times but it cannot pay for itself.
CO2 capture is just as bad. Stop screwing around and get on board with natural gas, nuclear, solar and wind. Dump coal and dump Trump.
Monorail!
"A small town with money is like the mule with a spinning wheel. No one knows how he got it and danged if he knows how to use it!"
It's Trump's "energy week" y'all! MAGA is on!
It is a shame this could have been a show stopper for Mississippi. This what you get when go with the lowest bid. Plan enough for no design flaws to exist.
If they spent 4B on solar, they probably could have powered the planet. Oh well.
Depending on the power plant connected to the coal gasification facility they can either switch immediately to natural gas or do so after some minor part replacement.
Look at the top. See where it says "Posted by BeauHD?"
This is Slashdot now. Political hit pieces, celebrity gossip, and pseudo-science.
"Clean coal..."
It will be interesting to see how much of the ~$7.5 billion is allowed in the rate base. Southern presumably eats the rest. Mississippi power only has about 186,000 customers, so there are not many to spread out the costs. By switching it to a conventional gas plant, it will work, but it will be the most expensive one ever.
that plant already burns nat gas, so the answer is they really don't do anything other than stop building extraneous bits
How many solar panels and batteries do you think they could have gotten for $4 billion?
Just sayin'.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
kinda screw everything up. It means that a very, very small number of Americans in swing states actually decide who gets to be president. So appealing to their desire to keep their old jobs (a reasonable one) works. It didn't help that Hilary's only contribution was to offer them slightly better terms on student loans for a college they couldn't afford to attend and a degree they couldn't get when they were 20.
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Many of these large infrastructure projects are built on a cost plus basis. Public Utilities Commission will offer a rate increase to repay the "loss". Customers lose, company, not so much..
I find posts made by BeauHD a little difficult to process. Is there any way to get posts made by Beau480P?
#DeleteFacebook
In this case they've been doing their "minor part replacement" is 5 years late and $4 billion over budget. They could have built a natural gas only plant with the same capacity for $700 million.
No, you need Beau4K to get a clearer picture. You may need to update your hardware, though.
How much federal grant moneyed they take in spending so much on clean coal? Why would anyone waste so much money on lignite, Brown coal.
Wait you aren't getting Beau4kHDR posts in your feed? You must be running an inferior operating system that does not include "loss of all privacy and media ownership rights" DRM support. Stop being a filthy freeloading moocher holding the rest of us and our disposable incomes back from enjoying the best experience the least imaginative content creators in the world have to offer.
The obvious problem was their gasification gear was only tested at a small scale before committing to building all (as in multiple) the full size gear in one go "to reduce costs" (AKA the parallel dev that also burned the F-35 joint strike fighter) which means all the problems of running at full scale weren't worked out ahead of time on full sized prototype equipment. If they had built one set of full size prototype gear to inform the manufacturing of the rest of the gasification equipment, and a less aggressive schedule (BUT MY PROFIT!!!!!11lol), it probably would have worked out.
ADA requirements mandate that you to use BaeuBraille you selfish clot.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
... design flaws that caused leaks and ash buildup.
I think this was an attempt to re-purpose existing supply chains and factory but a full-scale renovation was wrong. Kemper County should have built a house-sized prototype first. Then they wouldn't be stuck with a "We've already started, we've got to finish" project that will take more money to fix.
... $4 billion ...
That could have been a worthwhile investment in wind and solar technologies.
Turds > Trump
Some jackass over on the "Defecting From the Grid" story is squawking about Al Gore (because, like, Al Gore) and how trivially easy it is to deliver power via "clean coal", and how solar is too complicated and prone to failure.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
"Clean coal" sounds about as appropriate a term as "clean diesel", i.e. all wrong, a lie.
Believe me, it's gonna be great! Trust me.
There are less that 1.2 million homes in Mississippi. The $7.5B cost of this facility could have put solar power in about 30% of them.
Don't worry. Trump is going over there personally to straighten things out.
No sig today...
This plant was a terrible idea long before it made it on to the drawing board. "Clean Coal" is a myth. It barely makes sense scientifically, and it really don't make sense economically. When clean coal power plants were dreamed up, one of the people in the room wasn't paying attention when everyone agreed that it would be a marketing campaign and under no circumstances should anyone actually try to build one.
It's almost every other article nowadays, with 'Climatedot', what a joke this website has become.
www.climatedepot.com
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How does a coal gasification plant switch to natural gas? It doesn't. You close the coal gasification plant and the power generation station switches from coal gas to natural gas.
Who the fuck lets these illiterate morons publish shit?
So what? Presumably, the one plant had both types of equipment. You must have been desperate to go on a rant today. I've been there.
Am I the only one that came in here looking for a Factorio blueprint?
Coal isn't coming back, no matter what Trump says or does. Clean coal has been hyped for decades now and it's like the yeti. Everyone has heard of it but no one has seen it.
Oh sure, some "interesting characters" claim to have seen it, but mysteriously, when called upon to show it to others, or produce pictures, or explain exactly what it is and how it works, they can never do so.
Clean coal is a fantasy and little more than a monorail scam at this point. Coal is dirty and will remain so.
So, for the cost of this failed, ridiculous, experiment, we could have nearly completed development of Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor technology and done away with hydrocarbon plants altogether. Puke.
408p should be enough for anybody
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I guess that makes sense. Instead of turning coal into a gaseous fuel, competing with natural gas pulled straight from the ground, turn coal into a chemical feedstock, and avoid sending a hydrocarbon to a refinery to turn into a feedstock.
Coal gasification is still a thing? Are you serious?! We used to have that in Northern Ireland, every town had its own gasworks with gas piped into homes. It was shut down in the 1980s by Thatcher because it was so uneconomical.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
This guy fucks.
Are you sure it's not Bewick's or Whooper?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Sigh....."moot"......long damn day, before a weekend.....sigh....
Sounds like the furnaces are designed too small for the quality of fuel - leaks and ash buildup were issues at a lot of the original large plants of the 1960's and early '70's. Once they started using a better quality of fuel a lot of those issues disappeared