Free Republic

The Obama administration has shut down a Bush administration federal project aimed at demonstrating “clean coal” technology. The $1.7 billion FutureGen 2.0 project was meant to build a coal-fired power plant in Illinois that captures carbon and pumps it underground. Congress authorized $1.1 billion toward the project in 2009 as a continuation of a 2003 project Bush proposed. “The U.S. Department of Energy has directed the suspension of FutureGen 2.0 project development activities,” Ken Humphreys, head of the public-private FutureGen Alliance developing the plant, said in a Tuesday statement. “The DOE has concluded that there is insufficient time to complete...

WHILE President Obama’s cap-and-trade proposal to reduce greenhouse gases has been the big topic of recent environmental debate, the White House has also been pushing a futuristic federal project to build a power plant that burns coal without any greenhouse gases. Sounds great, right? Except the idea is a rehash of a proposal that went bust the first time around. More important, the technology already exists to make huge reductions in greenhouse emissions from coal, allowing power companies to begin cutting the carbon footprint of coal today. Instead, advanced-technology coal power sits on the shelf while regulators wait to see...

Buried in the 800 page stimulus bill is this seemingly innocuous allocation — well it's inocuous relative to a $1 trillion stimulus bill anyway — "$2,000,000,000 is available for one or more near zero emission powerplant(s).” Interstingly enough, there's no such thing as a "near zero emission powerplant" — yet. The Bush administration had been planning to try and build the first of its kind in Mattoon, Illinois as part of the FutureGen project. The Department of Energy scuttled the project last year in part due to rising costs. The project was to be done as a part of a...

An experimental, “clean” coal-fired power plant that was sought by Ohio and six other states might be scrapped because of its rising construction costs. The power plant, called FutureGen, was supposed to test methods to trap carbon dioxide, which is blamed for global warming. The plant's price nearly doubled in five years from $950 million to $1.8 billion. Department of Energy officials, who were supposed to pay 74 percent of the plant's cost, reportedly told federal lawmakers yesterday that they were dropping their support for FutureGen. Mike Mudd, a former American Electric Power executive and president of a group of...