MS Power/Southern Company sued by local pipeline group claiming they were duped on #Kemper

MS Power/Southern Company sued by local pipeline group claiming they were duped on #Kemper

Well, if you thought things couldn’t get worse for Mississippi Power’s Kemper plant, you’d be wrong.

Mississippi Watchdog has reported that a group of local oil recovery/pipeline companies in Jackson have sued Mississippi Power and Southern Company in Gwinnet County, Georgia. The lawsuit, involving over $100 million in pipeline costs, claims that Jackson-area based Treetop/Tellus had an agreement to provide a pipeline to the Kemper plant to pump away CO2 for advanced oil recovery, but that Kemper couldn’t deliver a working clean coal plant on time. After numerous delays, the lawsuit alleges that MS Power on June 9 awarded what would have been Treetop/Tellus’ share of the Kemper CO2 to Denbury Resources, which already had a deal for the first 70%.

The lawsuit basically hinges on whether or not Southern Company was truthful in both their dealings and in SEC filings about the true condition and deliverables of the Kemper clean coal plant.

This is on the heels of a ratings downgrade and the announcement of an SEC investigation related to the Kemper IGCC.

Although this lawsuit has been in the public domain for a couple of weeks now, there’s scarcely any press on it either in Georgia or Mississippi. It will be interesting to see if the print/new media cowers on this story, but the complaint (which of course only represents one side of the story) is a barnburner of a read.