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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!"
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.
"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.
I find posts made by BeauHD a little difficult to process. Is there any way to get posts made by Beau480P?
#DeleteFacebook
If they spent 4 billion on moving people out of Mississippi, they could have eliminated poverty in the state.
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.
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.
A slim hope to be sure, but one a few of the most enterprising could have leveraged into a better life. But even assuming it didn't work for any of these people, the lot of them will end up on some sort of welfare no matter who was elected. At least Hililary and her voters would have supported keeping that at humane levels. Now they are beyond screwed. If long shot loans and training programs aren't good enough, how is total of opportunity and the loss of healthcare better?
American lignite is mined in Mississippi, Louisiana, North Dakota, Texas, and Wyoming. None of those are swing states.
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.
"Clean coal" sounds about as appropriate a term as "clean diesel", i.e. all wrong, a lie.
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...
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?
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
Fully licensed blockchain psychiatrist
I actually think the economic and moral divides that drove the last election are surprisingly comparable to the societal changes which led to the civil war. America had prospered greatly on the backs of slave labor and the largest percentage of those profits where amassed in the north. The industrial revolution allowed northern states to use that wealth to divest themselves of the morally repugnant tradition of slavery. This freed people from needing slavery to maintain their way of life leading to the abolitionist movements and eventually to the civil war. Outlawing slavery in the north was low hanging fruit with little cost to society at large.
The southern states which had a far smaller share of those profits couldn't invest in that same Industrial infrastructure and so couldn't move past slavery without sacrificing their quality of life and destroying the southern economy.
In much the same way profits from coal, oil, and gas have been concentrated mainly in the north eastern cities while the Appalachian states with those resources have no real profit to show from a century of extraction (both of the resources and the profits). They have been unable to leverage the extreme profits from those resources to modernizes and have been left in a place where loosing coal jobs will likely destroy what economy they have left.
This creates a divide where wealthy areas are able to see how damaging coal can be and move beyond it with little cost to themselves and are trying to push coal states in the same direction without any thought to the human cost in those states.
If we learn any lessons from the civil war and the last election it's that we must as a country provide the resources those states need to move past their (literal) dependence on coal or we will face farther division and possibly in the end civil war.
The perversity of the Universe tends towards a maximum. - O'Toole's Corollary
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
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....
The irony being this is the exact attitude I'm talking about. You live in an area where the money made on the backs of these states has allowed your state to move forward. Now you are free judge the very people those states are responsible for holding back for continuing the only opportunity available to them. Enjoy your superiority.
The perversity of the Universe tends towards a maximum. - O'Toole's Corollary
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