Abby L. Harvey
GHG Monitor
4/10/2015
Mississippi Power reported a new round of cost over-runs at their Kemper County Energy Facility in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission late last week, though at a much smaller level than had been the trend in recent months. The company reported a total over-run of $8 million, significantly less than the $26 million in over-runs reported at the end of February. “It is a first-of-its-kind facility so I certainly wouldn’t want to sit here and say that this is part of some sort of downward trend or anything like that,” Kemper Communication Manager Lee Youngblood told GHG Monitor this week. “We just don’t know as we test these systems, as we pressurize it, we may have for instance a seal over here that we find needs to be upgraded and this happens, by the way, regularly.”
The project’s current price tag sits slightly more than $6.2 billion. Once completed, the facility will utilize Mississippi lignite, a low-rank brown coal, to produce electricity. The plant will employ a custom integrated gasification combined cycle (IGCC) system and carbon capture and storage technology to produce electricity from the coal with carbon emissions roughly equal to that of natural gas. After several reported delays, the plant is currently expected to reach full operation in 2016, Youngblood said.
Construction Nearly Complete
The project is nearing the completion of the construction phase and startup activities have begun. The recently reported overrun is due to these start-up activities, Youngblood said. “We’re in the startup phase now essentially. Construction has just ticked over from 98 to 99 percent complete … so construction is basically done,” Youngblood said. “There are literally hundreds if not thousands of different systems out here in this plant and some of those pipes, some of those systems … have been sitting there for a couple years now. In startup what you do is you go through there and make sure those things are ready to pressurize, ready to operate under operational conditions. … Of course as we go through that phase if you see an issue you have to address it.”
Several Milestones Yet to Be Met
While several milestones have been met, including the first fire of the plant’s gassifier last month, there is a lot left to be done. “When we did it here last month it went off without a hitch, I mean the startup burners lit no problem and now we’re on to the next milestone,” Youngblood said of the gassifier firing. “The next milestone … will be within the next couple of months or so we will put sand into the gassifier and that sand will serve several purposes but primarily it serves to show how the solids behave like a liquid inside the gassifier. … It also shows you how heat will be dispensed and so on and so forth. It’s essentially a dress rehearsal for the lignite feed which we expect in the early fall of this year.”
The plant has been producing electricity since August 2014 running on natural gas. Eventually, the plant will run on syngas created from the lignite coal, expected to begin this fall. Shortly following the production of quality syngas, the gas clean up portion of the plant, including the carbon capture technology, will be tested. However, the production of syngas and an increase in the quality of that syngas must occur before the gas clean up area can come online. “On this schedule we’ll be making our first syngas … from lignite into the last quarter of this year. … I know it’s been a long process, but again it’s the first time that we’ve had all these kind of system tied together,” Youngblood said. Once the plant starts feeding lignite they will begin to produce syngas. That syngas will not be of a quality to feed into the combustion turbine however and will likely be flared off initially. “Quality syngas is essentially a different milestone than just producing syngas,” Youngblood said. ”It’s not going to be something that’s long and drawn out from what we expect but in that sense, essentially that part will be first before the clean-up area.”
