The Polk County IGCC has design problems. First, the project was initially shut down because of corrosion in the slurry pipeline that fed slurried coal from the rail cars into the gasifier. A new coating for the pipe was developed. Second, the thermocoupler was replaced in less than two years; an indication that the gasifier had problems with a variety of feedstocks; from bituminous to sub-bituminous coal. The gasifier was designed to also handle lower rank lignites. Third, unplanned down time on the gasifier because of refractory liner problems, and those problems were expensive to repair. The gasifier was originally designed in Italy to be half the size of what was built at Polk. Newer ceramic materials may assist in improving gasifier performance and longevity. Understanding the operating problems of the current IGCC plant is necessary to improve the design for the IGCC plant of the future. (Polk IGCC Power Plant, https://web.archive.org/web/20151228085513/http://www.clean-energy.us/projects/polk_florida.html.) Keim, K., 2009, IGCC A Project on Sustainability Management Systems for Plant Re-Design and Re-Image. This is an unpublished paper from Harvard University)