FEB 01

Our new brothers at EnviroWonk have brought us a little story that we're sad we didn't hear about sooner. Apparently, the FutureGen, near-carbon-neutral coal-fired power plant (a $1.8 billion joing govt and private enterprise) has just been scrapped.

The plant, set to be located in Illinois, would have captured and buried nearly 100% of its carbon emissions. And though coal is never going to be a solution, this could have been a good step toward mitigation.

Unfortunately, even as Bush pledge in his State of the Union to "fund new technologies that can generate coal power while capturing carbon emissions," they were preparing to scrap the project. Instead, the Department of Energy is looking to fund several, smaller projects that will, no doubt, keep the dream alive.

The problem with the dream of carbon sequestration is that it's a dream. The fact that they've decided to spend nearly $2B on a project that I could have told you wasn't going to work is not a surprise, but it is infuriating. Especially when various renewable and actually carbon-neutral energy sources are approaching the price of coal that isn't being sequesterd. And, as you can imagine, sequestration ads quite a bit to the cost of coal power.

Via EnviroWonk

Comments (4)

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written by Monotonehell, February 02, 2008

Possibly someone woke up to the fact that sequestration is;
1. A pipe dream
2. A technology that needs years of research
3. Even if the research is fruitful the infrastructure in getting the captured carbon from where it's produced to where it can be sequestered is VERY cost prohibitive. (Who can cost hundreds of miles of refrigerated high pressure pipes ?)

;although the truth is probably more like they don't want to spend any more money than they have to.

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yes CCS is expensive but did you expect
written by karl jeffery, February 02, 2008

yes carbon capture and storage is expensive but did you expect it to be free? people talk about estimates of 20 per cent extra to our electric costs for coal power with carbon capture.. I'm not sure how that compares with the price premium for electric from wind / solar but its probably similar (with the additional benefit that coal with CCS can provide power consistently, not only when its windy / sunny)

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Read the fine print
written by Doug, February 05, 2008

If I understood the DOE announcement specifically, the FutureGen project is being "rescoped" to focus on CCS technologies at existing facilities instead of building a full IGCC facility. That makes more sense from a cost standpoint as the real learning that is needed is on the CCS side.

As for CCS being a pipe dream, I think you should look at what the oil industry has been doing for the last 50 years. We can drill any hole and extract oil out of it. It's not much harder to put CO2 back down into it (and in fact, that's a common practice now-days for getting oil out of old wells). So the technology is sound, we don't know if it will work for the long term.

Have some faith. We need CCS to work.

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written by wedding dresses, October 13, 2009

although the truth is probably more like they don't want to spend any more money than they have to.

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