Kemper Coal Gasification & Storage Plant Imploded (Obama’s climate ‘centerpiece’ bites the dust)

[Elderberry]

Watts Up With That By Robert Bradley Jr. — October 13, 2021

Kemper Coal Gasification & Storage Plant Imploded (Obama’s climate ‘centerpiece’ bites the dust)

“Goodbye and good riddance to the most expensive, and the most useless clean coal facility ever built.” (Angus Harvey, below)

The quick fix of coal gasification and CO2 storage is all but dead. Projects will continue, and the subsidies will flow if Biden gets his way. But it is greenwashing and greenwasting.

The shiny star to be, Plant Ratcliffe, better known as the Kemper Project, a $6.7 billion integrated gasification power plant, was an experimental boondoggle from the start (mid-2010). The dream really ended years ago, with The Guardian reporting in March 2018:

    “This was the flagship project that was going to lead the way for a whole new generation of coal power plants,” said Richard Heinberg, senior fellow at the Post Carbon Institute. “If the initial project doesn’t work then who’s going to invest in any more like it?”

    Company officials have blamed the failure on factors ranging from competition from tumbling natural gas prices to bad weather, bad timing and plain old bad luck.

BOOM! Mississippi Power’s Kemper Project (Southern Company) was blown up by a “controlled implosion.” Amid the ruins is the technology of converting the state’s abundant lignite into synthetic gas (syngas) to feed a 582-megawatt power plant. Politics defined the project, with Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour presiding.

“If it had become operational with coal,” Wiki noted, “the Kemper Project would have been a first-of-its-kind electricity plant to employ gasification and carbon capture technologies at this scale.”

More: https://wattsupwiththat.com/2021/10/14/kemper-coal-gasification-storage-plant-imploded-obamas-climate-centerpiece-bites-the-dust/

[rangerrebew]

Obama’s multibillion-dollar coal plant that never worked implodes

10/18/2021 / By Arsenio Toledo

The centerpiece of former President Barack Obama’s project to turn coal into something acceptable to environmentalists has imploded literally and figuratively just 11 years after construction began.

Plant Ratcliffe, better known as the Kemper Project, is a $7.5 billion integrated gasification power plant in Kemper County, eastern Mississippi.

During the early years of the Kemper Project’s construction, it was hailed as the “pinnacle of technological progress.” It was supposed to be the largest “clean coal” plant in the world that would turn coal into fuel without emitting too much carbon dioxide.

If successful, it would have been the evidence environmentalists needed to not destroy America’s fossil fuel industry and leave millions of Americans without a job.

https://www.climate.news/2021-10-18-obama-coal-plant-that-never-worked-implodes.html

[Smokin Joe]

Why wasn't it successful?

That's the question.

It isn't as if there were no successful examples. The Beulah, ND Synfuels plant has been in operation for 25 years.

https://www.dakotagas.com/

[Joe Wooten]

Probably the reason it failed was that it tried to use lignite, which is little better than dirt. It is very poor coal. THe best lignite is in Texas and Texas Utilities (now Luminant) explored and leased up all the decent lignite in the early 1950's.

[Elderberry]

Piles of Dirty Secrets Behind a Model ‘Clean Coal’ Project

NY Times By Ian Urbina July 5, 2016

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/05/science/kemper-coal-mississippi.html?_r=0

A Mississippi project, a centerpiece of President Obama’s climate plan, has been plagued by problems that managers tried to conceal, and by cost overruns and questions of who will pay.

The plant was not only a central piece of the Obama administration’s climate plan, it was also supposed to be a model for future power plants to help slow the dangerous effects of global warming. The project was hailed as a way to bring thousands of jobs to Mississippi, the nation’s poorest state, and to extend a lifeline to the dying coal industry.

The sense of hope is fading fast, however. The Kemper coal plant is more than two years behind schedule and more than $4 billion over its initial budget, $2.4 billion, and it is still not operational.

Many problems plaguing the project were broadly known and had been occurring for years. But a review by The New York Times of thousands of pages of public records, previously undisclosed internal documents and emails, and 200 hours of secretly though legally recorded conversations among more than a dozen colleagues at the plant offers a detailed look at what went wrong and why.

Those documents and recordings, provided to The Times by a whistle-blower, an engineer named Brett Wingo, and interviews with more than 30 current or former regulators, contractors, consultants or engineers who worked on the project, show that the plant’s owners drastically understated the project’s cost and timetable, and repeatedly tried to conceal problems as they emerged.

The system of checks and balances that are supposed to keep such projects on track was outweighed by a shared and powerful incentive: The company and regulators were eager to qualify for hundreds of millions of dollars in federal subsidies for the plant, which was also aggressively promoted by Haley Barbour, who was Southern’s chief lobbyist before becoming the governor of Mississippi. Once in office, Mr. Barbour signed a law in 2008 that allowed much of the cost of building any new power plants to be passed on to ratepayers before they are built.

Seeing so many of the problems from the inside, at least one employee felt the need to speak up.

“I’ve reached a personal tipping point and feel a duty to act,” Mr. Wingo wrote in a 2014 email, which was among several that he sent to officials of Southern Company and Mississippi Power, the state utility that runs the plant, alleging that the company had broken federal law and engaged in corporate fraud. “Hope is not a strategy,” he added. “This is a high-profile project with many misguided enemies, so why give them free ammo?”

In their recorded conversations with Mr. Wingo, at least six senior engineers from the plant said that they believed that the delays and cost overruns, as well as safety violations and shoddy work, were partly the result of mismanagement or fraud.

[Smokin Joe]

Probably the reason it failed was that it tried to use lignite, which is little better than dirt. It is very poor coal. THe best lignite is in Texas and Texas Utilities (now Luminant) explored and leased up all the decent lignite in the early 1950's.

North Dakota and Montana also have extensive lignite reserves (the Fort Union Lignite Field), and North Dakota Lignite has been fueling the Great Plains Synfuels plant for over a quarter century. Now maybe their lignite was low grade, or maybe their plant was mismanaged, or other problems, but one of the better uses for lignite is conversion.