Carbon Capture Plant – Delays, High Costs, and Big Overruns

Scientific American:

The Kemper County Energy Facility—which envisions grabbing 65 percent of the CO2 from a 582-megawatt gasification power plant here—is nearing completion, with hundreds of construction workers on-site. It has enough piping to stretch across much of the state, constructed conveyer belts as tall as buildings and an operating coal mine, where massive trucks ferry unearthed lignite coal to a storage dome.
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Southern also is developing another technology—TROC (Transport Oxy-Combustion)—that “is in its early stages” but may be able to capture CO2 at a higher percentage than Kemper’s technology.

Yet Kemper has been plagued by cost overruns, rising from less than $3 billion to $5.5 billion today and putting pressure on Southern’s stock. UBS released a note in May, for instance, downgrading Southern to “sell,” noting ongoing discussions with Mississippi regulators on whether the plant’s spending was prudent.

Extreme weather contributed to cost problem
Electricity rates have increased 18 percent because of Kemper, and the result of the prudency review before the Public Service Commission could force the utility to absorb more of the costs (ClimateWire, April 30). The sale of the CO2 and other byproducts will offset costs for ratepayers.

For critics like Miller, it doesn’t make sense to build a plant that some claim won’t be able to produce power and capture CO2 at planned rates. “Just because it’s built doesn’t mean it’s going to work as planned,” he said, citing an analysis by Element VI Consulting, a group co-founded by a former Sierra Club counsel. Other environmentalists also criticize the idea of reducing emissions from one fossil fuel to release more of another via oil recovery.

Yale Climate 360:

For more than 40 years, companies have been drilling for carbon dioxide in southwestern Colorado. Time and geology had conspired to trap an enormous bubble of CO2 that drillers tapped, and a pipeline was built to carry the greenhouse gas all the way to the oil fields of west Texas. When scoured with the CO2, these aged wells gush forth more oil, and much of the CO2 stays permanently trapped in its new home underneath Texas.

More recently, drillers have tapped the Jackson Dome, nearly three miles beneath Jackson, Mississippi, to get at a trapped pocket of CO2 for similar use. It’s called enhanced oil recovery. And now there’s a new source of CO2 coming online in Mississippi — a power plant that burns gasified coal in Kemper County, due to be churning out electricity and captured CO2 by 2015 and sending it via a 60-mile pipeline to oil fields in the southern part of the state.

 The Mississippi project uses emissions from burning a fossil fuel to help bring more fossil fuels out of the ground — a less than ideal solution to the problem of climate change. But enhanced oil recovery may prove an important step in making more widely available a technology that could be critical for combating climate change — CO2 capture and storage, or CCS.

As the use of coal continues to grow globally — coal consumption is expected to double from 2000 to 2020 largely due to demand in China and India — some scientists believe the widespread adoption of CCS technology could be key to any hope of limiting global average temperature increase to 2 degrees Celsius, the threshold for avoiding major climate disruption. After all, coal is the dirtiest fossil fuel.

“Fossil fuels aren’t disappearing anytime soon,” says John Thompson, director of the Fossil Fuel Transition Project for the non-profit Clean Air Task Force. “If we’re serious about preventing global warming, we’re going to have to find a way to use those fuels without the carbon going into the atmosphere. It seems inconceivable that we can do that without a significant amount of carbon capture and storage. The question is how do we deploy it in time and in a way that’s cost-effective across many nations?”