Another Clean Coal Power Project on the Brink of Failure

[Geee]

Heartlander:

Kemper County Mississippi is both one of the poorest places in America, and home to one of the most expensive power plants ever built, Mississippi Power's 582 megawatt clean coal power plant with carbon capture.

 

For Southern Company, owner of Mississippi Power, the federal government and the state of Mississippi, Kemper County Energy Facility was intended to be the showcase for multi-decade dream of “clean coal,” using technology to gasify coal for cleaner burning and capture its emissions for use in other purposes or stored underground. If the Kemper plant opens, in fact, there will be nothing else like it in the world: The coal will come from an adjacent mine dramatically reducing shipping costs and instead of releasing millions of tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, it will capture 65 percent of that greenhouse gas and pipe it to an aging oil field, enhancing oil production by as much as 2 million barrels a year.

 

Unfortunately for Southern Company, taxpayers, Mississippi ratepayers and clean-coal boosters among both Republicans (President's Reagan and George W. Bush both pushed funding for clean coal) and Democrats, the Kemper clean coal plant, despite commitments to begin operating in 2013, has yet to generate any power and is way over budget.