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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.
I cannot comprehend how what I see could cost a significant fraction of $1 billion, let alone several. For $300M, you can R&D, build, launch and operate a rover on fucking Mars! What the hell? I think this whole thing was just a huge scam and the players made their bucks off us.
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.