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High-tech Power Plant is $5 billion bet on future of Coal

Looming like a spaceship over pine and sweet-gum forest, the high-tech power plant under construction in rural Kemper County is a $5 billion wager on an energy future that includes coal. The Kemper plant is scheduled to open this year as the first in the United States to ramp up technology to remove carbon dioxide emissions on a large scale. If it works as planned, up to 65 percent of the plant's potential carbon dioxide emissions would be removed, significantly more than the Environmental Protection Agency's proposed requirement of about 40 percent.

But if its progress is any indication, building a coal plant that can sharply reduce greenhouse gas pollution is a white-knuckle ride. The project is five months behind schedule and more than $2 billion over budget. The cost overruns have increased electricity bills in southeast Mississippi and contributed to a downgrade in the credit rating outlook for Southern Co., the plant's parent corporation.

The U.S. Energy Department has spent $270 million on the project - part of $3.4 billion allocated to carbon-capture demonstration projects since 2009 - yet it remains unclear, according to some analysts, whether the Kemper plant will work as planned.

The carbon-capture plant and four others on the drawing boards are cited by Obama administration officials as evidence that coal can remain part of the president's "all of the above" energy strategy. But many power companies and environmentalists think the administration's proposed standards for greenhouse gas emissions would all but eliminate new coal plants.

Dalia Patino Echeverri, an assistant professor of energy systems and public policy at Duke University, said the new rules would "put coal at a huge disadvantage," noting that the technology to capture and store carbon dioxide "is still an expensive, uncertain proposition."

Six years into the project, Southern is careful not to tout Kemper as a model that could easily be replicated. "To say there is a one-size-fits-all, that what we do here is applicable someplace else, would probably not be accurate," said Amoi Geter, a spokeswoman for Mississippi Power, the Southern Co. subsidiary building the plant.

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