FutureGen clean coal project gets a second look

FutureGen, the clean coal project in Illinois that was shelved by the Bush administration for escalating costs, was revived today. Department of Energy Secretary Steven Chu restarted studies of the cost of carbon capture and sequestration technologies that could be used to make a zero emissions coal plant. At a cost of roughly $1 billion, this stuff doesn’t come cheap. But the FutureGen alliance, which is made up of coal industry companies and coal users, is to provide $400 to $600 million of the total funding necessary.

Chu notes that public investment is the only way projects like FutureGen will get off the ground. The Bush Administration yanked funding for FutureGen in January 2008, when they were told costs would double from $950 million to $1.8 billion. Fortunately, more recent data seems to suggest cost projections were inaccurate. Although a final decision won’t be made until early 2010, this is a step in the right direction for a project that was once presumed dead.

The United States’ lack of a functioning utility-scale clean coal project is currently a major roadblock to the coal industry’s acceptance by environmental groups. Campaigns like Reality have maligned the concept of “clean coal”, saying that it didn’t exist because there was no functioning example of the technology in our country so far.

Meanwhile, clean coal became a great vehicle for the coal industry during the election season, helping to lodge our dirtiest electricity source in the minds of the public as a viable “clean” technology. See below for the Reality campaign’s latest TV commercial, directed by the Cohen brothers. Restarting FutureGen changes the argument, albeit at a cost of $1 billion for one zero emissions coal plant. At least you can’t say we didn’t try.