The participants in the FutureGen alliance have reacted strongly to the US DoE's plan to cancel the virtually emissions-free coal plant scheduled to be built in Mattoon, Illinois. The DoE is saying that it prefers to spend the money on a handful of projects around the country that would demonstrate the capture and storage of carbon dioxide from commercial power plants.
The project was cancelled - or has undergone a major restructuring, depending on who you listen to - essentially because of cost overruns of about 80%, and a lot of competing projects. The DoE has discovered that carbon sequestration isn't cheap, and decided the price tag was too high for this project.
"This restructuring ... is an all-around better deal for Americans," said energy secretary Samuel Bodman in making the announcement to scuttle the FutureGen programme.
Bodman said the Energy Department would solicit industry applications for participation in the new carbon capture projects. The idea is for the government to pay for building the carbon capture and storage facilities and industry to build the modern coal-burning power plant. Each project would be designed to capture 1 million metric tons of CO2, the leading greenhouse gas linked to global warming, officials said.
The change in policy has come as a shock to lawmakers and industrialists in Illinois, where the $1.8 billion FutureGen plant, three fourths of which was being paid for by the federal government, was to be built. That funding has been withdrawn, effectively putting an end to the project.
The FutureGen program was envisioned as a unique research project that would trigger development of a virtually pollution-free coal plant where carbon dioxide emissions would be captured and buried deep beneath the earth. It would produce both electricity and hydrogen.
The FutureGen participants have reacted furiously, accusing the DoE of misrepresentation and inaccuracies.
Costs have increased, they say, but the DOE's share has not doubled, or anything like it. When president Bush first announced FutureGen, the DOE share was $800M. DOE's current estimated share is $1.1bn with the increase due to inflation. The Alliance has offered to provide DOE with partial-to-full repayment to ease the final cost to the taxpayer. The costs, it says, are manageable.
The DOE says that part-financing of FutureGen is inappropriate. The Alliance says that this is routine for clean coal and other projects, and that the new plan will almost certainly be financed the same way by industrial partners. And the DOE, says the Alliance, wants iron-clad funding guarantees from industry, but provides no such guarantees for its own funding, which will be available on a year-to-year basis depending upon available appropriations.
In fact the Alliance disagrees with the DoE on nearly every point. The project is not "smaller-than-commercial-scale" as the DoE says, but full scale. The facility was to be built around a commercial-scale gasifier and commercial-scale frame 7 turbine. What is more, IGCC technology is not so mature, as Secretary Bodman’s assertion has it, that testing it in integration with carbon capture and sequestration is unnecessary. FutureGen at Mattoon, says the Alliance, remains the world’s premier leading project to advance near-zero emission coal plant technology in the shortest amount of time. Members of the Alliance "unanimously agree that FutureGen at Mattoon remains in the public interest and the project should proceed to completion" and on 7 February announced via its board of directors that it would push the project forward as planned, as it believes that it remains in the public interest.
Chief executive officer Michael J. Mudd said that "The FutureGen project at Mattoon is in the best position to move ahead with the urgency that the energy and climate challenges demand."
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