POLITICO: …What Southern Company and its subsidiary Mississippi Power have constructed here over the past five years can rightly be described as an engineering marvel. Fifteen stories of metal scaffolding surrounds a labyrinth of steel, concrete and more than 170 miles of piping. When the Kemper plant starts to burn coal, there will be nothing else like it in the world: Instead of releasing millions of tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere every year, it will capture 65 percent of that greenhouse gas and ship it off to an aging oil field, where it will be pumped underground to help produce valuable crude.
Just one problem: It was supposed to be doing all those things two years ago. The plant was scheduled to start generating power in 2013. But during the permitting and regulatory approval process, opening day got moved to 2014. Blaming bad weather, faulty estimates and contractor delays, company officials again delayed the deadline to May 2015. Now Kemper managers say the plant won’t be online until the first half of next year at the earliest. And as the plant blows through deadlines, the cost has ballooned dramatically: An original price tag of $1.8 billion has swelled to $6.2 billion. Last week, Kemper lost one of its major partners because of the construction delays and higher-than-expected costs projected for producing electricity…
It is also turning into a lesson in just how hard survival is likely to be.
As clean-coal projects go, Kemper — even with its delays and cost overruns — practically counts as a success story. Another high-profile test case for the technology — FutureGen 2.0 in central Illinois — died three months ago after its federal subsidies evaporated. Two more major federally funded demonstration projects in California and Texas are also imperiled… (more)
