Page 227 - New Trends In Coal Conversion

Current status of coal gasification 189

The Wabash River IGCC Power Plant, with a capacity production of 262 MW, was
designed to use high-sulfur bituminous coal, but the plant can also use petcoke and
blends of coal and coke as feedstock, and it is able to produce around
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135,000 Nm /h of (CO þ H 2 )(Shah, 2016). Although, there are some news which
report that the Wabash River Generating Station has officially closed due to new envi-
ronmental regulations, it seems that these news are referred only to the coal-fired units
(Unit 2e6), which were officially shut down in 2016. However, the Wabash Valley
Power Association reported its intention of keeping the coal gasification unit (Unit
1A) at the river station online (Ropeik, 2016).

7.2.2.1.2 Great Plains Synfuels Plant (Beulah, North Dakota)
The Great Plains Synfuels Plant in Beulah, North Dakota, is one of the best well-
known coal gasification facilities since it began operation in 1984. Owned and
operated by Dakota Gasification Company since 1988, the plant has been producing
synthetic natural gas, byproducts used as fertilizers and chemicals, and high-purity
carbon dioxide from local lignite for more than 25 years. The gasification process is

carried out using 14 Lurgi Mark IV gasifiers operating at 1200 C, which consume
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18,000 TPD of lignite to generate around 5.53 million m /d of gas. The raw gas gener-
ated is cooled and CO 2 removed via Rectisol TM washing, followed by a methanation
process (using nickel catalyst). Subsequently, the SNG produced is then further
cooled, dried, and compressed, to be piped to Ventura and Harper, Iowa, for distribu-
tion in the eastern United States (Mills, 2016). The plant is not only in operation but
also expanding. Because of their interest in increasing urea production, Dakota Gasi-
fication Company will add a new urea production unit to the Great Plains Synfuels
Plant. This unit will produce 1100 tons of urea daily and is scheduled for completion
in 2017 (IHI, n.d.).

7.2.2.1.3 Kemper County IGCC Project
The Kemper County IGCC Project is one of the America’s flagship “clean coal” pro-
jects, being central to President Obama’s Climate Plan, and considered for more finan-
cial support from the Congress and the Trump administration in late 2016 (Smith,
2016). This project is based on a plant located in Kemper County, Mississippi, whose
construction began in December 2010 by its owners, Mississippi Power and Southern
Company. The plant has a net capacity of 524 MW with a peak net output of 582 MWe
from 12,000 tons/day of Mississippi lignite (widely available in the area near the plant)
through the IGCC process. The technology implemented is the air-blown TRIG TM .
More information about the technology can be found elsewhere (Lunsford, 2017;
Madden and Pikston, 2016; Rekos, 2016; Zhuang, 2014).
During the last years, this project has suffered a number of delays and overruns,
increasing its cost from $2.4 billion to more than $7.0 billion. Although full commer-
cial operation was expected to start in the third quarter of 2016, it was only in October
2016 when the plant was first producing electricity using syngas from two of the gas-
ifiers (Power Engineering, 2016). The most recent news reports that in June 2017, due