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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."
This. I'm tired of, for example, paying rich people to buy Teslas and take money from us. If solar and wind were better, they wouldn't need subsidies.
Understand that most of the delay and cost was due to deliberate sabotage the Obama administration. They basically sat on all coal,permits and sent them back with comments at the end of he review period to,run out funding for the projects. It was blatant sabotage, in the way that only a bureaucracy can slow roll things, and completely legal.
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.
Given the massive glut of natural gas in the USA right now, neither coal or nuclear make much sense. So long as we have active fracking operations we're going to have a massive surplus of natural gas and using anything else is just plain silly. Running our cars on the stuff wouldn't be a bad idea either, it's not some radical new thing, that's basic technology that we've had since the 1930s.
Yes there's wind and solar, but those account for only a tiny fraction of our energy supply and only when it's windy and/or sunny outside.
Fortunately this plant was designed to run on natural gas, so all they had to do was feed it that vs the whole gasification of coal step.
If we didn't have cheap natural gas that step might make sense, just like if you didn't have any oil it might make sense to turn it into a liquid fuel to run your tanks and planes with if you were somewhere in Germany around say...1942. Once upon a time fracking didn't make sense either, why do that when you can pump sweet crude out of the ground for pennies? Coal may not make sense right now but it's a plentiful fuel source and it's day may come again.
I expect they projected for gas prices that didn't happen. The Saudi oil price war has also had an effect on natural gas prices since oil can be substituted for gas in some situations. It's probably ten years back this was planned so they wouldn't see this coming and probably expected some spike in prices to keep on going forever.
Here they seem to be sticking a label of capture on a practice of pumping some carbon dioxide down wells to force a bit more gas up. "Greenwashing" an existing practice that isn't going to trap more than token amounts of carbon dioxide - so not impractical just not doing what they pretend it's going to do.
All that said it seems a bit strange to turn coal into gas in a place that's sitting near an oilfield where getting gas is pretty well a given - on top of the coal seam gas that's available in the min area as well.
At least it's nowhere near as insane as the projects to produce gas by setting fire to coal in-situ and use the incomplete combustion products. All it would take for those to get out of control is an unexpected path for air to come in from the surface part way through the burn and you've got an unquenchable fire that could burn for years (like some existing underground fires).
No the WP only uses anonymous sources to attack the current President for imagined abuses of power, not to attack the prior President for his actual abuses of power.
Sorry pal,you're talking to an engineer and I do have industry experience as scheduler. The problem of coal to nat gas (or hydrocarbon fuel for that matter) was solved in the 19th century. The plant under discussion *already* is a nat gas power plant. Lignite is not dirt, it carbon + hydrocarbons + water + ash. The volatile content is so high it's easy to convert to nat gas or other hydrocarbon and that has been done for decades. By removing the water, it becomes equivalent to high grade coal.
Claiming it's essentially a refinery and then googling oil refinery costs is stupid and irrelevant.