The cost of Southern Co.’s Kemper County Energy Facility carbon capture and storage project in Mississippi continues to climb. The project, originally billed at $2.4 billion, now has a projected price tag of $6.644 billion after a budget overage of $7.4 million in January, the company reported Monday in a monthly filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The filing did not make clear what caused the increase in the project’s estimated cost. The latest spike is comparatively small when considering past cost increases, such as the $110 million reported in the last monthly filing.
The project, a new-build, post-combustion CCS project located near the city of Meridian, has been producing energy with natural gas since August 2014. Once fully operational, the plant will use Mississippi lignite, a low-rank brown coal, to produce electricity. It will employ a custom integrated gasification combined cycle (IGCC) system and CCS technology to produce electricity from the coal with carbon emissions roughly equal to that of natural gas. As of yet the CCS and IGCC portions of the plant are not online.
The plant is also almost three years behind schedule and is expected to reach full operation in the third quarter of this year.
