AT THE MAJOR CCS PROJECTS: KEMPER, DECATUR

Tamar Hallerman
GHG Monitor
11/16/12

AT KEMPER: BARBOUR DEFENDS HIS SUPPORT OF PROJECT

Former Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour defended his previous support of Mississippi Power’s Kemper County carbon capture and storage project in a letter to the editor this weekend in the Sun Herald. “The Sierra Club’s claim that Kemper County residents will lose millions because of legislation related to this project is not true,” he said. Barbour’s comments were in response to a letter to the editor in the same newspaper written by Director of the Mississippi Sierra Club Louie Miller earlier this month. Miller criticized Barbour for approving tax breaks for Mississippi Power to build the plant when he was Governor. “That’s costing Kemper County residents millions,” Miller wrote.

Barbour, a Republican who served as Governor of the state from 2004 through 2012, said the $2.88 billion, 582 MW integrated gasification combined cycle project was and is the cheapest and most reliable option for baseload electric generation capacity in the region. “Reliability in providing electricity is essential to economic prosperity and job creation, not to mention the basic quality of life Americans demand and deserve,” Barbour said. He criticized the Sierra Club for being against both coal and natural gas, the alternative the environmental group has been advocating for at Kemper. “The Sierra Club’s position of no coal and no natural gas plants must mean it opposes new baseload plants in Mississippi,” he said.

Miller Says Kemper Not a ‘Home Run’ 

In his letter to the editor, Miller criticized the head of Mississippi Power’s parent company, Tom Fanning of Southern Company, for calling the IGCC plan a ‘home run.’ “He seems to have forgotten the plant is more than $400 million over budget and, by his company’s own admission, will raise rates by at least 30 percent,” Miller wrote. “Only in Tom Fanning’s high-flying, high-dollar world is a 30 percent rate increase for Mississippi’s coastal families and businesses a ‘home run.” Miller said the utility’s investors would get a “fat profit” off the plant while its customers foot the bill. “The taxpayer and the ratepayer are providing the cash, but reaping none of the reward,” he said. Miller underscored previous claims made by the Sierra Club that the project is “dirty, expensive and unnecessary.”

Barbour said the facility could bring in revenue for the area through taxes on the lignite mine the plant is relying on for feedstock. He added that the income from the project’s contracts for the CO2 captured at the plant could also be applied in part to reduce electricity bills for the utility’s nearly 200,000 customers. Barbour criticized the Sierra Club for filing a lawsuit in local chancery court that led the state’s Public Service Commission to deny Mississippi Power the power to implement a rate increase that would help pay for the plant during construction until after that legal challenge is over. “This rate increase, according to the court testimony, would have saved Mississippi Power customers $500 million through lower rates during the first 40 years of the plant’s being in service…Thanks to the Sierra Club, regular customers didn’t get that relief,” he said.

Last week during the company’s third quarter earnings call, Fanning said the IGCC project is on time and on budget. He said project construction is more than 70 percent complete and that installation of the plant gasifier is moving forward “exceptionally well.” The project, which has a $270 million grant from the Department of Energy, plans on capturing 65 percent of the plant’s emissions and piping the CO2 to nearby depleted oil fields for enhanced oil recovery.

AT DECATUR: ONE YEAR SINCE FIRST CO2 INJECTION

This week marks the one year anniversary of CO2 injection operations at the Midwest Geological Sequestration Consortium’s carbon sequestration site in Decatur, Ill. Researchers have been injecting roughly 1,000 metric tons of supercritical CO2 per day into a deep saline reservoir in the Mount Simon formation adjacent to an Archer Daniels Midland’s ethanol plant, which is supplying the CO2 for the project. Operations for the regional partnership will eventually coincide with a larger-scale injection operation being sponsored by the Department of Energy’s Industrial Carbon Capture and Storage program that will capture CO2 from the same ethanol facility an pump it into the same formation. Together, they are expected to inject roughly one million tons of CO2 annually into the saline reservoir. Project lead Rob Finley of the Illinois State Geological Survey was unavailable for an interview this week.

Geologists think Mt. Simon has the potential to safely store tens of billions of tons of CO2. The project is being billed as having “negative” CO2 emissions. Since ethanol is a biofuel, it removes CO2 out of the atmosphere during photosynthesis, and when the CO2 from it is captured and stored when it is being converted for energy, that CO2 is subsequently not released back into the atmosphere.