President Obama’s dream of clean coal facing down the threat of climate change has run “off the tracks,” the New York Times reported Tuesday.
The Times wrote an expose on utility giant Southern Company’s clean coal power plant project in Kemper County, Miss., which has faced years of well-documented setbacks and cost overruns.
“The plant was not only a central piece of the Obama administration’s climate plan, it was also supposed to be a model for future power plants to help slow the dangerous effects of global warming,” the newspaper wrote. “The project was hailed as a way to bring thousands of jobs to Mississippi, the nation’s poorest state, and to extend a lifeline to the dying coal industry.”
That sense of hope for the struggling coal industry is “fading fast” as the plant faces two years of delays, stands $4 billion over its original budget, and is still not operational.
Southern Company tried to defend itself by downplaying the Times’ reporting as a rehash of past facts and figures that the public already knew. The utility says the “new” reporting in the story, from “secret recordings,” is even old, and no longer current.
“In drawing from the recordings, the Times captured specific phrases from sometimes years-old conversations — without providing appropriate context — to achieve a pre-determined objective and tone,” Southern Company added in a statement.
“In an apparent attempt to deliver a pre-conceived narrative, the article also fails to mention key facts communicated to the reporter that would have clearly illustrated the company’s commitment to completing the project the right way for the benefit of customers,” the company said.
The Times admitted in the story that most of the facts about the cost overruns and delays are broadly known. But it said the story brings to light a significant number of previously unreleased documents, emails and recordings, offering a “detailed look at what went wrong and why.”
It said the new information comes amid a Securities and Exchange Commission investigation into the plant and Southern Company, while electricity consumers are “alleging fraud” in a lawsuit against the firm over the project.
“Members of Congress have described the project as more boondoggle than boon,” the newspaper reported. “The mismanagement is particularly egregious, they say, given the urgent need to rein in the largest source of dangerous emissions around the world: coal plants.”
The Kemper plant employs a state-of-the-art process that seeks to remove carbon dioxide from a process of producing electricity from coal. The CO2 — which is blamed for raising the temperature of the Earth and creating global warming — is shipped to nearby oil fields to be used in the extraction of hard-to-reach petroleum deposits.
The plant is one of a handful being developed that the Environmental Protection Agency used to justify strict climate rules for new coal-fired power plants.
The coal industry, represented by the National Mining Association and others, calls EPA’s standard a “defacto ban” on coal plants because of the substantial cost involved in applying the technology to a new plant’s construction.
The coal industry and states are fighting the New Source rule in federal appeals court, using the cost argument in an effort to beat back EPA’s rationale that the clean-coal technology is commercial.
