https://www.eenews.net/stories/1060056520
CARBON CAPTURE
Post-Kemper question: Is 'clean coal' dead?
[If only. However, I think we can safely assume that the fossil fuel
industry will continue to extract taxpayer money from inept governments
to maintain the charade that coal-fired energy production can be
'clean'. IF you don't think so, read this industry article putting
lipstick on that particular pig.]
Christa Marshall, E&E News reporter
Greenwire: Friday, June 23, 2017
The possible end of Southern Co.'s flagship "clean coal" project in
Mississippi isn't the death knell for carbon capture and sequestration
technology, industry analysts say.
Instead, the problems at the Kemper County Energy Facility — which state
regulators want to turn into a natural gas plant after years of delays
and cost overruns — resulted from a unique series of events and a coal
gasification system that was scaled up too fast.
[Emmmm, the failure of multiple government-funded 'clean-coal'
initiatives belies the idea that this is a unique situation.]
The plant's equipment to capture and store carbon dioxide didn't cause
its current challenges and is still an option for coal and other fossil
fuels, said Erin Burns, a policy adviser in the clean energy program at
Third Way, a centrist Democratic think tank.
"This is absolutely not the death of CCS," she said.
[Sadly, most likely true.]
A string of CCS successes this year, including the launch of the world's
largest retrofit of a coal plant with carbon capture technology, make it
clear the technology works, she said. Other large projects have opened
in the Middle East and Illinois this year to trap CO2 from steel and
ethanol manufacturing.
Still, both critics and boosters of making coal cleaner in a world
worried about climate change have been looking to Kemper as a model for
future development. For many, Kemper was at least part of the future of
coal.
That's why so many observers were shocked when on Wednesday the
Mississippi Public Service Commission asked Southern Co. subsidiary
Mississippi Power to find a settlement within 45 days that would abandon
the Kemper plant's coal and CCS operations (Energywire, June 22).
The PSC said it was seeking a solution that would "eliminate ratepayer
risk for unproven technology." Under the framework, Kemper would operate
solely on natural gas, a fuel that has already been running the plant
for years.
In a statement, Mississippi Power emphasized that no final decisions
have been made, and that discussions with the PSC are ongoing.
"The PSC provided several guidelines to consider for the negotiations,
including the possibility of the project only operating as a natural
gas-fueled combined cycle plant. We look forward to reviewing the
order," the company said.
Kemper, with a price tag now around $7.5 billion, has been under
construction since 2010. Developers envision gasifying lignite coal into
synthetic gas and capturing 65 percent of the resulting CO2 emissions.
Unique case
If fully operational, it would be the second U.S. coal plant to capture
the majority of its carbon emissions, after NRG Energy Inc.'s Petra Nova
project in Texas, which launched this year.
Most of the recent setbacks for Kemper centered around its two
gasifiers, which turn lignite coal from a mine near the plant into
synthetic gas.
In January 2016, for instance, Mississippi Power said one of the
gasifiers got hotter than anticipated during testing, causing cracks in
the lining. The plant has operated approximately 200 days on lignite,
said the company.
What's significant is that the gasifiers are separate from the carbon
capture or "clean coal" portion of the plant, said John Thompson,
director of the fossil transition project at the Clean Air Task Force.
The capture unit involves an antifreeze-like solvent called Selexol to
strip CO2 that has been in use in other facilities since the 1960s.
"The capture equipment was actually the most mature part of this plant,"
Thompson said.
The same cost overruns and delays would have occurred even if Kemper had
never tried to use CCS, he said, noting that coal gasification in
general has been done successfully elsewhere with different technology.
In Mississippi, Southern was trying out its new transport integrated
gasification (TRIG) technology, designed to be a model for gasifying
"low-rank" lignite coals, which are common in countries like India.
Southern's experience differed from others in the sense TRIG was not
tested extensively at commercial scale before being tried at a power
plant. The gasifier was used at a testing center, but at a size about
one-hundredth that of Kemper.
"They went from the pilot plant level to, like, 600 megawatts. People at
the time thought they were way too ambitious. And it's been proven out,"
said Massachusetts Institute of Technology carbon capture expert Howard
Herzog.
Coal's woes
Kemper also ran into other issues not related to CCS, such as labor
challenges and expiring Department of Energy grants. It didn't help that
a consistent drop in natural gas prices after the plant's groundbreaking
seven years ago made the idea of turning coal into gas less of a viable
concept.
[However, with fracking and other technologies now available for
extracting more natural gas at lower cost, this is an economic reality
which takes coal out of the picture, CCS or not. Further, pricing since
2016 for large wind turbines and even solar electricity generation -
with storage - make coal financially noncompetitive, even if taxpayers
pick up the tab for the CCS piece.]
Kemper's fate also may have been sealed before it ever broke ground. In
an interview last year, Southern CEO Tom Fanning said the one thing he
would change about the project was committing to a fixed price for
customers with only 10 percent of the plant's engineering work completed.
"If we had taken more time to do more engineering ... we would have
circumvented a lot of the problems that we incurred," Fanning said.
Critics of CCS have long said that Kemper was a huge waste of funds that
could have been directed to other clean-energy solutions.
In a report last year, Friends of the Earth and Taxpayers for Common
Sense said Kemper is "a stark reminder of why carbon capture and
sequestration is a waste of our tax dollars and a false solution to the
climate crisis."
Whether the plant's woes will hurt support for CCS policy is an open
question. Thompson and other CCS supporters say advancing carbon capture
and putting new incentives in place for it is critical for climate
change because of the world's ongoing reliance on coal.
Supporters on Capitol Hill are pushing for an expansion of existing tax
credits to provide more certainty to developers, among other incentives
(E&E Daily, Dec. 6, 2016).
Problems for Southern
Kemper was a potential model in places like China, which has a lot of
facilities that are gasifying coal to make chemicals and venting the CO2
into air, said Thompson.
But Petra Nova, which began operations on budget and on time, is perhaps
the more relevant model for CCS because of its status as a retrofit,
according to many analysts. That is especially relevant in the U.S.,
which is not building new coal plants, much less coal gasification plants.
While gasification has worked elsewhere, it has "totally soured" as a
concept for the power sector, according to Herzog. You don't need to
gasify to do CCS, he said.
"Look at Petra Nova," he said. In addition to not gasifying coal, Petra
Nova completed 90 percent of its conceptual design before it began
construction.
Regardless of what Kemper may mean for CCS in general, it does mean a
lot for Southern, which could be left with a CO2 pipeline, coal mine and
gasifier system to nowhere in a natural-gas-only scenario.
Issues that have to be addressed include an existing contract with
Denbury Resources Inc. to use Kemper's CO2 in enhanced oil recovery.
[So, as I said before, this is not a carbon sequestration project in any
case, it's an EOR project.]
The utility signed several memorandums of understanding in recent years
to explore the use of its TRIG technology at overseas projects. In
December 2015, for instance, Southern penned a letter of intent with a
South Korean company to evaluate the deployment of TRIG at a new
1,000-MW power plant.
One thing that might not be an option if the plant becomes gas-only is
use of the existing carbon capture infrastructure. Selexol typically is
used when the CO2 concentration in flue gas is high, which is much more
suited to coal than natural gas, according to Thompson.
He called for an investigation into all the factors that led to this
point. "There really needs to be an analysis of what went wrong,"
Thompson said.
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http://dailysignal.com/2017/06/23/coal-america-already-clean-clean-coal-boondoggle-needs-end/
Coal in America Is Already Clean. Why ‘Clean Coal’ Is a Boondoggle That
Needs to End.
["Coal in America is already clean." I call shenanigans. If you don't
count the GHG emissions, other air pollutants, water pollution, thermal
pollution, mine tailings, mountain top decapitation, filling of streams
and rivers with waste from coal removal, then perhaps we can get to some
tortured definition of 'clean' to give coal industry standard practices
the cover they desire.]
Nicolas Loris / June 23, 2017
Nicolas Loris, an economist, focuses on energy, environmental and
regulatory issues as the Herbert and Joyce Morgan fellow at The Heritage
Foundation.
[Source Watch on The Heritage Foundation
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Heritage_Foundation
"The Heritage Foundation launched a news site, "The Daily Signal", on
June 3, 2014. According to its website, the site will provide "policy
and political news as well as conservative commentary and policy
analysis" and aims to be "accurate, fair and trustworthy."[4] The
Washington Post reported the site started with an annual budget of $1
million and a staff of 12, most "drawn from news organizations with
conservative leanings" including The Washington Times, the National
Review, Fox News, and the Washington Examiner" - witness this article.
The article includes this statement: "Carbon dioxide is a colorless,
odorless, nontoxic gas that does not have any direct human health
impacts." I disagree, yet perversely I agree with this: "It’s time to
end carbon and capture sequestration programs within the Department of
Energy."]
A power plant once heralded by the Obama administration as the poster
child for clean coal is now on its deathbed.
The plant hemorrhaged billions in cost overruns despite being heavily
subsidized by the federal government. Mississippi regulators are ready
to pull the plug.
Southern Company’s Kemper County Energy Facility had intended to use
carbon capture and sequestration technology to gasify the coal, but
instead, the plant has been running on natural gas since 2014.
The Mississippi Public Service Commission has unanimously passed a
motion that the plant should only use natural gas moving forward.
The Obama administration touted the Kemper plant as a leading example of
how a power plant would operate under climate change regulations for new
power plants.
The regulations set new standards for carbon emissions that power plants
could only meet by using carbon capture and sequestration technology.
This would effectively have banned new coal-fired power plants from
being built.
But carbon capture and sequestration technology poses its own obstacles.
There is in fact no credible basis to state that it is adequately
demonstrated proven technology, since no large-scale power plant in the
United States currently uses it.
Yet it seems as though politicians and regulators in Washington may have
watched “Field of Dreams” one too many times.
Adapting from the famous line, “If you build it, they will come,” the
Environmental Protection Agency and Department of Energy urged with
regard to coal, “If you regulate and subsidize, the technology will come.”
In fact, former EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy claimed, “Rather than
killing future coal, [the new rules] actually [set] out a certain
pathway forward for coal to continue to be part of a diverse mix in this
country.”
In the EPA’s regulatory impact analysis for the proposed New Source
Performance Standards for new power plants, the EPA wrote:
The EPA intends this rule to send a clear signal about the current
and future status of [carbon capture and sequestration] technology.
Identifying partial implementation of [this] technology as the best
system of emission reductions for coal-fired power plants promotes
further development of [carbon capture and sequestration], which is
important for long-term CO2 emission reductions.
From the subsidy side of the equation, former Energy Secretary Ernest
Moniz chimed in, stating that “[s]ince the beginning of the
administration, [the Department of Energay] has invested around $6
billion to advance clean coal technologies—particularly in carbon
capture, utilization, and storage—that substantially reduce carbon
emissions.”
Years and billions of dollars in cost overruns later, the fact remains
that carbon capture and sequestration is a taxpayer-funded boondoggle.
Southern Company’s Kemper plant in Mississippi, a stimulus handout
recipient, has been plagued with delays and cost overruns.
The estimated cost, initially projected at $2 billion, now stands at
$7.5 billion, making it the most costly coal-fired electricity
generating unit in U.S. history and causing Moody’s Investors Services
to downgrade Mississippi Power’s ratings in March 2017.
Two years ago, Mississippi Power applied for a 41 percent rate increase
to offset construction costs.
One issue at hand is the definition of so-called clean coal.
Many environmental activist organizations believe clean coal is
oxymoronic. That’s simply not the case. Regulations required coal-fired
power plants to install scrubbers that significantly reduce the
pollutants like soot and chemicals that have adverse public health
impacts and environmental costs.
Technological improvements have improved efficiencies of power plants,
reducing emissions. Overall, the pollutants known to cause harm to
public health and the environment have been declining for decades.
The definition of clean coal commonly used today includes coal without
any carbon dioxide emissions. Carbon dioxide is a colorless, odorless,
nontoxic gas that does not have any direct human health impacts.
Our coal-fired generating units in the U.S. without carbon and capture
sequestration do not run like those in China. Coal in America is already
clean.
The failure of the Kemper plant should raise a giant red flag for
policymakers, regulators, and White House officials. Appropriators
should not throw good money after bad. It’s time to end carbon and
capture sequestration programs within the Department of Energy.
The EPA should roll back Obama-era regulations for new power plants and
emphasize that carbon and capture sequestration technology should be
used only if companies believe it is in their economic interest to do so.
Technological innovation in energy markets moves at a blistering clip,
far outpacing Washington.
But that doesn’t mean policymakers can dream up ideas and use
taxpayer-funded subsidies and its regulatory power to bring that wishful
thinking to fruition. It is a waste of money and diverts resources away
from other competitive uses.
Like Mississippi’s Public Service Commission, Washington should pull the
plug on clean coal.
