Abby L. Harvey
GHG Monitor
10/17/2014
Southern Company is “committed to keeping coal viable into the future,” and that means investing in innovations such as carbon capture and storage and plant efficiency improvements to create cleaner coal electricity, Southern Company Chief Operating Officer Kimberly Greene said this week during the fall meeting of the National Coal Council, an advisory board to the secretary of energy. In making these investments the company hopes to keep coal in the mix of an “all-of-the-above” energy sector. “The all-of-the-above, I think that’s something that a lot of people were talking about even before it was cool, and certainly something that our company and others really believe in deeply as the best way to meet those obligations that we have to our customers,” Greene said. “We embark at Southern Company at trying to maintain the ability to use all of those energy resources for the foreseeable future.”
Southern Company is currently in the process of building the Kemper County Energy Facility, a new-build coal plant located in Mississippi which will employ a custom gasification system and CCS technology to produce electricity from low rank coal with carbon emissions roughly equal to that of natural gas. The Kemper project has been plagued by cost overruns and delays, with the current estimated total cost at approximately $5.6 billion. The project was due to launch this year but the launch date is now scheduled tentatively for the second half of next year.
Greene defended the project and noted its first-of-a-kind status. “That facility is a state of the art facility and one that we are very proud to be a part of. Now, those of you who’ve read about it in the headlines know it’s over budget and past schedule … nothing worth having is easy, nothing worth doing for the first time and being the leader in is easy. I’m proud to say that Southern Company has persevered over the years,” she said. “We recognize that we’re going to get through this and while it’s hard today, we’ll look back a few years from now with pride.”
Southern Looking to Share Knowledge Learned on Kemper
Greene did not note any concrete plans by Southern Company to build future plants like Kemper, but stressed that the company has been working through several memoranda of understandings to share knowledge gained from the project with companies abroad. “We would like to find other opportunities to use this technology within our service territory, but we are also partnering with the other major contributor to the technology and that’s KBR, Kellogg, Brown and Root, and together we are actually partnering to work with countries like China, Poland, India, where there are large needs for electricity. They’re looking for clean coal. We actually signed a couple MOU’s so we’re very optimistic that this technology will be very successful in the future,” Greene said.
Proposed Regulations Present Threat to Coal, Exec. Says
The Environmental Protection Agency’s proposed carbon emission standards for new and existing coal-fired power plants present a threat to the future of the coal industry, Greene said. The EPA’s proposed regulation for new-build plants would essentially mandate the use of CCS on all new-build coal-fired power plants while the proposed regulation for existing plants sets emission reduction goals for each state and requires the states to develop action plans to meet these goals. “When we’re talking about some of the headwinds that coal is taking … certainly not the least of which are some of the environmental regulations that we see in front of us, they threaten to remove coal from the energy mix rather than work to find a way, over a reasonable period of time, to innovate and make the continued use of coal [possible],” Greene said. “Certainly EPA’s new source performance standards eliminate coal as a future generation option and the proposed greenhouse gas emissions guidelines for existing sources is an overreach in our minds by EPA. We’ve seen the proposal as unworkable and increasing electricity prices and hurting reliability.”
