SOUTHERN, KBR LOOK TO MARKET GASIFICATION TECH USED AT KEMPER

Tamar Hallerman
GHG Monitor
11/2/12

Southern Company said this week that it will begin marketing the coal gasification technology used at its subsidiary’s Kemper County carbon capture and storage facility currently under construction in eastern Mississippi. Through its subsidiary Southern Generation Technologies (SGT), the Atlanta-based utility giant said it has entered into a cooperative agreement with the Houston-based engineering and construction contractor KBR to market its Transport Integrated Gasification (TRIG) technology to power companies globally, especially those that utilize low-rank coal.

Under the agreement, KBR will acquire the global licensing rights for power generation projects, which will allow the former Halliburton subsidiary to market and manage the integrated gasification and combined cycle technology to utilities abroad, Southern said. KBR already owns the rights to TRIG’s industrial applications. Meanwhile, Southern said it will provide its engineering and technical know-how, as well as ongoing R&D, to companies interested in utilizing the technology. “This new collaboration between KBR and Southern Company will utilize the respective strengths of each organization to deploy commercial TRIG licensed processes worldwide and accelerate the adoption of TRIG in the marketplace,” Bill Utt, KBR chairman, president and CEO said in a statement. “It brings to bear the best of KBR’s global technology sales and delivery focus and Southern Company’s technology and operations experience to deliver the most comprehensive, innovative, low-rank coal gasifier and IGCC combination available.”

TRIG Developed in 1990s at DOE Facility

The technology was developed jointly by Southern and KBR in the 1990s at the former Power Systems Development Facility operated by the Department of Energy and Southern Company in Wilsonville, Ala. SGT President and CEO Kerry Bowers said that KBR contributed intellectual property traditionally used in its petroleum refining operations, which, combined with coal technologies from Southern, evolved into TRIG over the course of a decade. The technology sends coal that is not initially converted into syngas back for a second round of gasification, allowing for more coal-to-gas conversion to take place at a lower temperature than other gasification technologies on the market, Southern said. The process also uses a dry feed and does not create a slurry in the feedstock, which means higher efficiency for lower-grade feedstocks such as sub-bituminous and lignite coals, which have high moisture and ash contents and are often considered uneconomical.

TRIG’s flagship application is at Mississippi Power’s 582 MW, $2.88 billion Kemper County facility currently under construction in eastern Mississippi. That facility will eventually utilize coal from an adjacent lignite mine. The technology’s only other application is at a small facility currently under construction in China and operated by the Tian Ming Electric Power Company. Bowers said in an interview this week that partnering with KBR can help expand the technology’s scope beyond what Southern could have accomplished on its own. “While Southern had the exclusive rights for power generation and it was always in our long-range plans to consider marketing TRIG technology through some vehicle, frankly we’re not a global sales and marketing company—we’re a southeast U.S. power company,” he said. “We had some casual inquiries about TRIG from third parties, but we weren’t very well positioned to be a global marketer.”

Bowers said that under the partnership TRIG could soon see more applications in places like southeast Asia. “We’ll be going to places where low rank coal is available and power demand is needed, so you can figure that Asia—China and India for certain—will be target areas of focus,” he said. “But frankly we’re looking at anyplace else where there’s low rank coal reserves, and that covers a large part of the globe. KBR’s global sales force will fan out from that focal point over the next few months to kind of take the temperature of power companies in those regions.” Bowers added that the partners will also look to develop TRIG with a carbon capture component to any companies that are interested. “Wherever our clients lead us is where we’ll go,” he said.