DOE scraps advanced coal fired power plant in Illinois
Filed under: Emerging Technologies, Etc.
Plans to build a nearly emissions-free coal fired power plant in Illinois have been thrown into chaos now that the Department of Energy has pulled out of the project. Plans for the FutureGen plant began over a decade ago with a cost of about $1 billion. With the cost now over $1.8 billion, DOE as decided to bail out the project. DOE was going to cover 75 percent of the cost of the plant that was to produce electricity and hydrogen and feature carbon capture and sequestration. Instead, the Energy Department will now take the money and spread it among multiple other projects. The money will be used to pay only for the carbon capture and sequestration, while partner companies will have to fund the rest of the plant. The FutureGen Alliance still wants to proceed with the project. However, they haven't been able to raise the necessary funding prior to the DOE pullout. It's not clear how they will replace the government funding. The Energy Department came to the conclusion that the planned facility was not commercially viable. However, it's not clear what part of it they consider not workable. If it's the carbon capture and storage, redirecting it to several other projects may not make it any better.[Source: Forecast Earth]
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
2-01-2008 @ 2:48PM
GreyFlcn said...
==However, it's not clear what part of it they consider not workable.==
The fact that it was going to cost $6500/KW
Compared to a $2000/KW price for old grandfathered coal plants.
http://greyfalcon.net/costlycoal2
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2-01-2008 @ 3:26PM
mike said...
All of Coal production should be shut down, esp. the Mountain top removal coal mining. We've already poisoned enough of our water supply.
Wind and Solar are much cheaper if you include the "Externalities" Costs.
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2-01-2008 @ 4:34PM
rgseidl said...
Well, at least they pulled out of the hydrogen production part of the project. A complete pull-out probably wasn't possible for legal reasons.
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2-01-2008 @ 4:48PM
GreyFlcn said...
==A complete pull-out probably wasn't possible for legal reasons.==
Oh I doubt that.
The reason they canceled the original project is that they didn't want to show a gigantic failure to the world as an example of the potential of carbon sequestration.
So instead they are splitting up the money into 4 piles, and pushing back the completion date by 3 years to 2015.
In time for the 2016 Presidential election :P
(Where we get to elect a gay jewish mexican president!)
Gotta love how these technologies, CCS, Hydrogen, Cellulosic Ethanol, Nuclear Breeder Reactors, are all "perpetually in the future".
Meanwhile technologies like SolarThermal, Geothermal, Interconnected Wind, Thinfilm CIGS Solar, and Electrified Transportation are making huge leaps in the next 0-3 year timeframe.
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2-01-2008 @ 5:03PM
meme said...
Agreed, rgseidl. EVs and batteries are the future; hydrogen is an inefficient, expensive detour.
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2-01-2008 @ 9:39PM
Joseph said...
If the government think it's too expensive, then I think it's highly unlikely t will be commercially viable anytime soon.
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2-01-2008 @ 10:31PM
rob said...
Greyflcn, you can move cellulosic alcohols from the "sometime in the future" stack to the 0-3 year stack, there are several demonstration-scale projects being built this year.
While pure-EV should be the goal, the existing fleet will be with us for quite a while and being able to use a low-fossil-content fuel in them will help a lot. Butanol seems a good choice for non-flex vehicles. IIRC a normal car can take quite a high percentage of butanol mix.
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2-02-2008 @ 12:58AM
Chad Beckett said...
No, the reason why the plant was cancelled didn't have anything to do with it being viable (this is an experimental design, a concept for which government subsidies are routine), but rather because the FutureGen alliance decided to choose a site other than Texas.
There were four sites in the final round, two in central Illinois, and two in central Texas. FutureGen Alliance picked Mattoon, Illinois on December 17, 2007.
Guess when the feds announced that they were having second thoughts about the project. That's right: December 17, 2007.
This is all about the "Administration" yanking the project when it was decided (for very sound scientific reasons) not to be placed in the current President's back yard.
Cost over-run arguments were also red herrings. When the DOE expressed concern about the rising cost (again, for the first time on December 17, 2007), the Alliance came back with a plan that scaled back the Fed's contribution to $800M, or right about the level of the original agreed level of contribution.
No, this is all about the Alliance picking a site outside of Texas. One of those sites, Odyessa, is likely to receive funding from the feds from one of these "multiple other projects".
The local outrage is predictable, even by local Republican Congressmen, who opine that the decision is purely political (see, http://www.news-gazette.com/news/local/2008/02/01/lawmakers_ask_bush_to_reconsider) for more details)
So, when you hear the President carp in the State of the Union about moving forward on clean coal technology solutions--whether you agree with the policy or not--know that he only is interested in moving it forward when the fix is in to land the project in his home state.
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2-02-2008 @ 4:35AM
MitchJi said...
Hi,
"Plans to build a nearly emissions-free coal fired power plant in Illinois have been thrown into chaos now that the Department of Energy has pulled out of the project."
A Coal fired power plant with most or all of the Carbon Sequestered is NOT "nearly emissions-free".
Mitch
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