POWER July 2014 - 54

COAL
Does IGCC Have a Future?
Once touted as the savior of coal power and the future of clean coal generation, integrated
gasification combined cycle (IGCC) technology has seen its prospects
swamped by soaring costs and technological challenges. Though it remains
controversial, its proponents are not ready to give up.
Thomas W. Overton, JD
I
f you're an energy sector observer with an
interest in integrated gasification combined
cycle (IGCC) generation, the last few years
have been much like attending a performance
of Samuel Beckett's classic play, Waiting for
Godot, in which the performers spend two
acts tediously waiting for someone who never
appears. And, much like Beckett's characters,
who are never quite sure if they're waiting in
the right place or are unknowingly repeating
the same scene each day, the generators working
on IGCC have been struggling for years to
find a viable path forward.
The newest operating IGCC plant in the
U.S., Duke Energy's Edwardsport Generating
Station in Indiana, has struggled to maintain
consistent operations since coming online last
June (though it was still named a POWER Top
Plant for 2013). Duke stated at the time that
it planned to slowly ramp the plant up to full
operation, and in that at least, it has fulfilled
expectations. It reached 60% capacity in August,
only to suffer mechanical failures this
past winter that reduced output to a trickle
in January and February. Duke said things
improved later in the spring, but CEO Lynn
Good acknowledged in the company's firstquarter
earnings call, " Edwardsport is a large,
complex project, and it has taken time to work
out technical issues. "
Ballooning Budgets
Edwardsport reached commercial operations
two years late and about $1.5 billion over budget,
but that record fairly shines in comparison
to Mississippi Power's Kemper County
project, which will be the first to incorporate
carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology
(Edwardsport is " CCS-ready " but does not
have it installed). The Kemper County plant
has seen costs spiral from an initial estimate
of $2.2 billion to more than $5.5 billion in
the most recent revision in April. That update
again pushed out the plant's in-service date
to May 2015, a year beyond the original plan.
Missouri Power's parent, Southern Company,
blamed early miscalculations on the
type and amount of piping needed for many
of the problems. With the state having set a
cost cap of $3.87 billion, the overruns have
cost Southern about $1.6 billion.
54
None of this has stopped the U.S. Department
of Energy (DOE) and the Environmental
Protection Agency from touting IGCC
with CCS as the future of coal generation.
" I consider seeing this plant a look at the
future, " DOE Secretary Ernest Moniz said
at an event at Kemper County last November.
" We're going to need not 10, maybe 100
more of these plants across the country. "
Yet only two other such plants are under
active development in the U.S., the Texas
Clean Energy Project (TCEP), near Odessa,
and Hydrogen Energy California, planned
for a site near Bakersfield; both are still in
search of financing despite years of work
(see " Is Polygeneration the Future for Clean
Coal? " in the March 2014 issue). Most recently,
in April, developer Summit Power requested
yet another extension from the DOE,
with financial closing now hoped for in June
2015. Director of Projects Laura Miller said
the company's goal between now and then is
to cut " hundreds of millions " of dollars from
the current $3.5 billion estimate.
These numbers are naturally a deterrent
to future investment. Jeff Phillips, manager
of the Electric Power Research Institute's
(EPRI's) Advanced Fossil, Carbon Capture,
Utilization and Storage research program,
told POWER, " The combination of the substantial
cost overruns at the two U.S. IGCC
projects built this decade and relatively low
natural gas prices present in North America
has dried up interest in IGCC among U.S.
power producers. "
Mixed Record
Overseas, the picture is more nuanced.
According to the Gasification Technologies
Council (GTC) database, there are only
six commercially operating coal-fired IGCC
plants worldwide, including Edwardsport. Of
those, four came online in the 1990s and one,
at Nakoso, Japan, in 2007 (Figure 1).
A seventh plant, China's GreenGen project
in Tianjin, has mostly completed the second
phase of its development in which the first,
250-MW unit has been successfully fired on
syngas, though it is not yet fully commissioned.
A second, 400-MW plant is under
development on the same site.
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POWER | July 2014
Worldwide, according to DOE and GTC
data, about a dozen coal-fired IGCC projects
are in various stages of active development,
though the commercial prospects for several
of these are doubtful. About five or six appear
to be under construction, though reports
conflict. Nearly all of them seem to have experienced
varying degrees of cost overruns,
delays, and doubts about their viability.
GreenGen, for example, was originally
planned for full operation in 2015, but completion
has now been pushed out to 2020. The
cost overruns for the project are not publicly
known, but reports suggest they have been
substantial. (The developer, Huaneng Group,
is a state-owned firm.)
There are success stories, however. Mitsubishi
Heavy Industries' thermal power division
(now part of Mitsubishi Hitachi Power
Systems, MHPS) began developing the 250MW
IGCC demonstration plant at Nakoso in
Fukushima Prefecture in the early 2000s, and
brought it online in late 2007 (when it was
named a POWER Top Plant). The plant uses a
single MHPS 701DA turbine that burns syngas
from an air-blown gasifier. It operates at
42% net efficiency and has achieved very low
SOx
and NOx
emissions of 1.0 ppm and 3.4
ppm, respectively.
MHPS is actively marketing its IGCC
technology and believes that efficiencies
over 48% are achievable with its advanced
G-series gas turbines operating at higher inlet
temperatures. Despite the high costs experienced
with current IGCC projects in the U.S.,
1. Trailblazer. The 250-MW IGCC demonstration
plant at Nakoso, Japan, owned by
Mitsubishi-Hitachi Power Systems, has been
operating successfully since 2007. Courtesy:
MHPS

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POWER July 2014

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