FutureGen Clean Coal Project Revived, For Now

All the talk about clean coal in the United States may finally get some action. The FutureGen project, a 275 megawatt coal burning plant whose carbon dioxide emissions will be captured and pumped underground, is back on track after being derailed by the Bush administration last year.

The plant got its first cancellation because of budget overruns, initially reported to be almost double the projected cost of $950 million but later admitted to be just a few hundred million dollars shy of the mark. Such a modest overshot put FutureGen about on par with the typical Federal government project, but at the time it was decided to split it into several smaller projects instead.

With the election of President Obama, FutureGen now has a sort of dream team on its side: not only is clean energy a prominent part of Obama's platform, he and many of his close advisors are also from Illinois. The plant is to be located in a small Illinois town called Mattoon, population 18,000. With the potential for over 10,000 jobs in the project, the town itself has understandably been one of the plant's biggest cheerleaders.

Along with reviving the FutureGen, the Fed has revised the expected price to around $1.6 billion, with up to $600 million coming from a coalition of 20 big companies like E.On and Xstrata, and the other billion from government funds. Since the stimulus package handily included $3.4 billion for cloan coal technologies, the necessary money will simply be awarded to the project.

For now the administration, along with Department of Energy secretary Steven Chu, is still putting on a show of caution about FutureGen. Instead of starting to build, they'll spend the rest of this year studying the project and working out final details of the technology. It's implied that the project could once again be canceled, if costs can't be brought into line.

But is that really likely? Nah. Bush's plan to break the project up into smaller ones doesn't address one of the biggest issues with clean coal, namely that the technology has never been tested at large scale. And it never will be, unless someone takes a risk on something like FutureGen.

Right now, the spotlight is on the United States to lead the way in developing clean coal, both because our politicians insist that coal will continue being a major energy source, and because we're critical of developing nations, primarily China and India, for drastically ramping up their own coal use. The companies in the FutureGen Alliance are also increasingly antsy to prove that clean coal really does exist -- or at least could, with enough investment.