By Jennifer Jacob Brown

jjacob@themeridianstar.com



Mississippi Power is nearing a crucial step toward the construction of a new “clean coal” plant in Kemper County.

Anthony Topazi, the company’s president and CEO, said the company will file for the approval of the Mississippi Public Service Commission “in the very near future,” but not before the new year.

The new plant will cost $2.2 billion to construct, and rates may be raised to help offset that cost. However, Topazi said the new form of fuel the plant will use to generate electricity is so much cheaper than natural gas or traditional coal that the fuel cost savings will outweigh the cost of building the plant.

Topazi said he hopes to “work creatively” with the Public Service Commission to try to “offset rate increase from fuel benefits ahead of time.” He hopes to somehow keep rates from skyrocketing during construction of the plant by accounting for fuel cost savings before the actual savings take effect.

“If we can somehow move forward the fuel benefits and offset the rate increase with the fuel benefits, my customers will see very little impact from building such a big plant and will have energy cheaper than they would” otherwise, he said.

“Customers will pay more if we don’t build this plant,” he added. “This will be the lowest cost carbon based energy that any Southern Company plant owns or produces.” Mississippi Power is a subsidiary of Southern Company.

The plant will use lignite coal instead of traditional coal. Lignite is a low BTU, high moisture coal that is not commercially viable for other regions and so does not fluctuate in price along with the global market. Both the lignite mine and the power generation plant will be located in Kemper County to reduce transportation costs.

The lignite will be gasified rather than burned, making the proposed plant 20 percent more efficient than a traditional coal plant.

In addition, about 50 percent of the carbon dioxide created during the gasification process will be captured, sold to oil companies that will use it to extract residual oil from used oil fields, and then trapped underground rather than being emitted into the atmosphere, Topazi said.

He said the money gained from selling the carbon dioxide will be credited to Mississippi Power customers’ bills.

Capturing half of the carbon dioxide “will make it obviously much cleaner in terms of CO2 than other coal plants,” Topazi said. “This coal will be as clean as (natural) gas.”

Topazi said the TRIG technology used to gasify the lignite was developed by Mississippi Power and that the plant will be the first of its kind in the world.

“This will be clean coal,” Topazi said. “And this will be the first at full scale anywhere in the world.”