The US power utilities Southern Company and Mississippi Power have decided to suspend start-up and operations activities involving the lignite gasification process at their 582 MW Kemper County IGCC power project in Mississippi (United States) and to operate the project as a standard natural gas-fired power plant.
The Integrated Gasification Combined Cycle (IGCC) Kemper project, which is already under construction, was originally designed as a gasification plant that would transform lignite into synthetic gas (mostly hydrogen). It was also meant to include an amine-based carbon capture and storage (CCS) system.
The facility was proposed in 2006 and was intended to be a flagship project for clean coal and CCS technologies. However, the plant construction suffered from construction delays and cost overruns (more than twice the projected costs). After having invested 7 years and US$7bn into the project, the two utilities now plan to simply cut off the clean coal part and turn the facility into a standard combined-cycle gas-fired power plant.
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