Kemper County IGCC Project

Location: Kemper County, Mississippi, United States of America

Proponent: Mississippi Power (Southern Company)

Technical aspects

• New build 582 MW net coal-based electric power plant using an Integrated Gasification Combined Cycle (IGCC) design called TRIG™ technology.
• The demonstration plant will generate electricity using Mississippi lignite coal as a feedstock.
• 3.5 million tonnes per annum of carbon dioxide (CO₂) will be captured at the Kemper County plant, around 65 per cent of the plant’s annual CO₂ emissions.
• CO₂ will be transported via pipeline and used for onshore enhanced oil recovery.

Key Deliverables

• The Kemper County energy facility will have fewer particulate, sulfur dioxide and mercury emissions than traditional pulverized coal plants.
• Financial investment decision for the project was taken in May 2010 and construction works commenced in June 2010.
• The project is scheduled to become operational in 2014.

This project was one of two selected in the second round of the US Department of Energy's Clean Coal Power Initiative. It received US$270 million in funding to demonstrate advanced power generation systems using IGCC technology.

This project highlights a technology - the transport gasifier - that has been used successfully for over 50 years in the petroleum refining industry, but was extensively re-designed in a 15 year development effort into the “TRIG” configuration that is being used in this project. The TRIG™ technology was developed over the last 15 years at the Power Systems Development Facility (PSDF) in Wilsonville, Alabama - a research facility for the Department of Energy and Southern Company. The TRIG gasifier is air-blown and has a fuel-flexible design projected to have higher efficiency and lower capital and operating costs than the currently available oxygen-blown entrained-flow gasifiers.