The Kemper County Energy Facility will not reach full operation by the end of October, as project owner Mississippi Power had anticipated in the last few months. The carbon capture and storage project is now expected to reach that milestone by the end of November, a delay that will cost the company $33.2 million, according to a monthly filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
Mississippi Power on Monday attributed the delay to maintenance of one of the plant’s two gasifiers. According to the SEC filing, gasifier B was taken offline in late August for inspection. “The removal of ash and ash deposits prior to the inspection of gasifier ‘B’ required more time than initially expected. Additional time has been added to the schedule to allow for the restart of gasifier ‘B’ and for both gasifier trains to achieve the sustained capacity levels necessary for the initial operations and testing of the syngas clean-up systems and the production of electricity using syngas,” the filing says.
The maintenance on gasifier B bumped the project’s price tag up roughly $5 million. The remaining cost increase is related to the delay in startup, the filing says.
Both gasifiers have successfully produced syngas in recent months.
The project, a new-build, post-combustion CCS facility near the city of Meridian, has been producing energy with natural gas for two years. 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 carbon emissions roughly equal to that of natural gas. The CCS and IGCC portions of the plant are not yet online.
The project was initially billed at $2.4 billion and would have reached full operation in May 2014 under its original timeline. This new cost spike brings the project’s total estimated price tag to more than $6.88 billion.
