The South Heart North Dakota coal gasification is now going to be an ELECTRIC GENERATION plant.  DUH!  The 800 pound gorilla has just bared his teeth and started jumping around the room.  This IGCC plant will be up and ready
just in time to use CapX 2020 transmission — DUH!  And if you’re surprised, you’re in the wrong business.

Published August 01 2009

A change in plant plans

What was slated to be a coal gasification plant near South Heart will now produce electricity, a company spokesman said Friday.

By: Jennifer McBride and Beth Wischmeyer, The Dickinson Press

What was slated to be a coal gasification plant near South Heart will now produce electricity, a company spokesman said Friday.

Members
of the Industrial Commission of North Dakota continue to support Great
Northern Project Development/Allied Syngas Corp.’s ongoing development
of the South Heart project. The commissioners prepared a letter of
support to Chairman Charles Kerr of GNPD, after discussing the project
at their Friday meeting in Bismarck. Commissioners have supported the
project and $10 million has been committed to it, along with
legislative and technical support, according to the letter.

“The
site is ideally located to take advantage of the existing transmission
infrastructure and GNPD’s unique access to extensive, low-cost coal
reserves,” according to the letter.

The plant will be located four miles south and two miles west of South Heart and will be a

coal-to-hydrogen electrical generation plant.

Rich
Voss, Great Northern vice president, said the company asked the
commission for support because it is applying for U.S. Department of
Energy funding for its plant. Voss said this plant will be more
marketable and is a very clean project carbon-wise. He hopes plant
construction will begin in 2011 and said permits for the 2 million
ton-per-year coal mine are likely to be filed late this year or early
next year.

“They
originally were going to be a power plant, then a gasification plant
then a coal-drying plant, so the next logical attempt will be
electricity,” said Mary Hodell, a member of Neighbors United, a
citizen-awareness group based out of South Heart. “I don’t know what is
left.”

Voss
said Great Northern and GTL Energy, a company seeking to operate a coal
beneficiation plant also near South Heart, are independent companies.

“We
are not working together,” Voss said. “We will use their technology in
our plant when they build it and prove that it works, but we won’t use
their equipment.”

The cost to build Great Northern’s plant is estimated at $1 billion.

“The
county does have a comprehensive plan that is in place to protect the
livelihood of the people and it would be nice if that was followed,”
Hodell said.

Are we going to let them get away with this?  I love it when my
hunches are right, but I hate it when anyone has the audacity to
propose something so utterly stupid as this.  It will be hard for them
to get it up and running… except who has a power plant application
ready to rock (except that it’s a joke, but it takes some time to prove
that to the PUC)?  Drat… and here I thought Tom would be down in
Honduras trying to build Mesaba down there…