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Kemper Gasification
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Grant Hauber
Blue hydrogen and carbon capture utilization and storage (CCUS) are distractions from rapid decarbonization
As we enter the political-economic maelstrom that will surely manifest during the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) 26th Conference of Parties (COP26), it is important to focus on the primary task at hand. It is not merely decarbonization of the world’s economy that is the need of the hour, it is its […]
David Schlissel
Kemper plant is a cautionary tale of runaway costs and failed promises
Two explosions rocked the Kemper power plant on Saturday as can be seen from footage posted on Twitter. The images dramatize the demise of a “clean coal” project that eventually ballooned in cost from an estimated $3 billion to $7.5 billion. Driven by hubris and greed, and despite repeated warnings about the risks involved in […]
IEEFA
Energy and Policy Institute: – The Department of Energy increased its share of the costs to study a carbon capture proposal at the San Juan Generating Station in the final week of the Trump administration. – Enchant has focused its spending on lobbyists for additional subsidies from Congress, federal agencies, and the state of New […]
Dennis Wamsted, Seth Feaster and Karl Cates
Giveaways to economically unviable schemes in Illinois, Mississippi, New Mexico, North Dakota, and Wyoming
Word that the U.S. Department of Energy is doling out more than $100 million to support five experimental carbon capture projects sends a clear signal on how out of step the agency is and how the coal industry remains a robust lobbying force despite its fading role in the U.S. electric sector. The DOE, as […]
IEEFA
OilPrice.com: Coal usage continues to fall, and the coal industry wants to do something about that. So does the Trump administration. Their proposed solution to the problem of waning coal usage is carbon capture and sequestration (CCS)—a technology that has been around for a long time. The basic idea behind CCS is to remove the […]
Karl Cates
Cautionary Tales from Illinois, Indiana, and Mississippi
The history of coal-gasification experimentation for electricity production doesn’t bode very well for further efforts along those lines. In fact, it serves as a warning, specifically for stakeholders in a well-known aging coal-fired plant now being talked about in some circles as a candidate for just such an experiment. That supposed contender for coal gasification […]
IEEFA
The Guardian: Kemper, its managers claimed, would harness dirt-cheap lignite coal – the world’s least efficient and most abundant form of coal – to power homes and businesses in America’s lowest-income state while causing the least climate-changing pollution of any fossil fuel. It was a promise they wouldn’t keep. Last summer the plant’s owner, Southern […]
IEEFA
S&P Global Market Intelligence: Mississippi Power Co. informed Liberty Fuels Co. LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of North American Coal Corp., to permanently cease all mining and delivery of lignite as part of the utility’s decision to suspend the coal gasification portion of its controversial generation project in Kemper County, Miss. Liberty Fuels was the […]
IEEFA
Bloomberg News: Tom Fanning is the only energy executive in America willing to bet billions on nuclear power. The chief executive officer of utility giant Southern Co. is renowned for his boundless optimism, which he generously spreads around. He’s chair of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, co-leader of one industry group and a former […]
IEEFA
Charleston Post and Courier: Over the past decade, state legislatures across the country rewrote rule books for how power companies pay for new power plants, shifting financial risks away from electric companies to you and everyone else. This rule change ignited a bonfire of risky spending — $40 billion so far on new power plants […]
IEEFA Report: Costly and Unreliable, Two Multibillion-Dollar American Coal-Gasification Experiments Prove the Case Against Such Projects
‘Important and Painful Lessons’ in Southern Company’s Kemper Failure in Mississippi and Duke Energy’s Edwardsport Experiment in IndianaSept. 7, 2017 (IEEFA.org) — The Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA) today published a report describing how coal-to-gasification technology for electricity-generation purposes remains commercially unviable. The report—“Using Coal Gasification to Generate Electricity: A Multibillion-Dollar Failure”—concludes that two long-running marquee American Integrated Gasification Combined Cycle (IGCC), projects, Duke Energy’s Edwardsport plant in Indiana […]