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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!"
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.
I find posts made by BeauHD a little difficult to process. Is there any way to get posts made by Beau480P?
#DeleteFacebook
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.
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.