The Kemper Clean Coal Plant: Great Story In The Wall Street Journal On Clean Coal Technology

This story is now tracked here. 

Link here: the cost of "clean coal."

Some data points and notes from the article:

Mississippi Power Co.'s Kemper County plant here, meant to showcase technology for generating clean electricity from low-quality coal, ranks as one of the most-expensive U.S. fossil-fuel projects ever—at $4.7 billion and rising. Mississippi Power's 186,000 customers, who live in one of the poorest regions of the country, are reeling at double-digit rate increases.

Meanwhile, the plant hasn't generated a single kilowatt for customers, and it's anyone's guess how well the complex operation will work. The company this month said it would forfeit $133 million in federal tax credits because it won't finish the project by its May deadline.

One of just three clean-coal plants moving ahead in the U.S., Kemper has been such a calamity for Southern that the power industry and Wall Street analysts say other utilities aren't likely to take on similar projects, even though the federal government plans to offer financial incentives.

Southern recently took $990 million in charges for cost overruns approaching $2 billion.

And this is amazing:

Southern last year decided against purchasing a 10-year-old gas-fired plant in Jackson, Miss., that would have generated about as much electricity as Kemper. Another company bought it for $206 million, billions less than Kemper will cost.

The Obama Legacy:

Rising on what was once farmland here, the 582-megawatt Kemper plant is designed to convert a low grade of coal, lignite, into clean-burning syngas, which is similar to natural gas. As part of that process, the plant will strip out and capture 65% of the carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas, that would have been released into the atmosphere by burning coal. Turning coal to gas before burning it, or gasification, has proved necessary for capturing CO2 because efforts to cull it from plants that burn coal haven't been practical.

Keeping CO2 out of the atmosphere is a goal of the Obama administration's since greenhouse gases have been implicated in climate change. The government last month set limits on CO2 emissions from new power plants and cited Kemper as evidence that power plants could meet the new standards.

Some of the poorest people in the US, those who can least afford it, are now seeing first-hand what the "war on coal" means to them. As noted at the beginning of the article:

Mississippi Power's 186,000 customers, who live in one of the poorest regions of the country, are reeling at double-digit rate increases.

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From Wiki

As of October 4, 2014:

The Kemper Project, also called the Kemper County Energy Facility, is an electrical generating station currently under construction in Kemper County, Mississippi. 

The station is scheduled to open in May 2015, more than a year behind schedule, at a cost of $5.53 billion, making Kemper one of the most expensive power plants per kilowatt in the United States.

Kemper will use a technology known as "transport integrated gasification" (TRIG) to convert lignite coal—mined on the Kemper site—into natural gas. The natural gas will then be used to power turbines to production electricity, which will be shipped to customers. The integrated gasification combined cycle used at the plant will utilize clean coal technologies.