(Bloomberg) — The U.S. government has pulled the plug on a
project in Illinois to capture carbon, a significant setback for
development of a technology that may be critical to the future
of coal.
The Energy Department said Tuesday it’s pulling support for
FutureGen Industrial Alliance Inc., a public-private partnership
to build a coal plant that would store its carbon emissions deep
underground instead of sending the gases skyward.
The project, proposed more than a decade ago, was supposed
to demonstrate the feasibility of a new, climate-friendly way to
use coal, which remains the largest single source of electricity
generation in the U.S. Instead, the combination of approaching
deadlines, leery investors and reluctant power buyers scuttled
the project.
“Carbon capture is important because we cannot address
climate change adequately without it,” said John Thompson, a
director of the Clean Air Task Force, a Boston-based
environmental group. “The importance of CCS hasn’t
diminished.”
President Barack Obama’s administration used FutureGen to
show it remained committed to the fossil fuel as it advanced
climate rules that sought to limit coal use. Illinois lawmakers
saw the project as an economic engine for the state, which is
the fifth-biggest coal producer in the U.S.
The Energy Department spent $202 million on the Meredosia,
Illinois, plant about 90 miles (145 kilometers) north of St.
Louis.
Wary Investors
Investors, however, remain wary of carbon capture projects,
which are unproven even as the federal government has spent
billions of dollars to make the technology economically viable.
The projects aren’t a “destination for serious financial
commitment,” said Christine Tezak, an energy analyst at
ClearView Energy Partners LLC in Washington. “The major change
agent this industry needs is a technological breakthrough.”
That hasn’t happened yet, and that’s bad for tackling
climate change. While wind and solar power gain market share,
they still represent just a fraction of power production. Coal
produced about 38 percent of the electricity used in the U.S. in
November, the last month figures are available, according to the
U.S. Energy Information Administration, which analyzes federal
energy data. And while coal use in the U.S. is forecast to hold
steady, its use in China and India is set to soar.
Stimulus Award
“If we are to have any hope of avoiding the worst aspects
of climate change, we need CCS on a whole host of things” from
coal plants to factories, Thompson said, referring to carbon
capture and storage or sequestration.
FutureGen won $1.1 billion in federal money in the economic
stimulus in 2009, and was championed by Illinois lawmakers
including Democratic Senator Richard Durbin, his party’s No. 2
leader in the chamber.
Durbin, who tried to add a provision in last year’s
spending bill to extend the deadline, said the project struggled
to attract sufficient commercial interest. He called the
government’s withdrawal a “huge disappointment.”
The Energy Department determined that FutureGen’s sponsors
couldn’t meet the September deadline to get the project’s plans
finalized, said Christopher Smith, assistant secretary of energy
for fossil fuels.
Deadline Dilemma
“This is unfortunate for us. This is a project we worked
very hard on,” Smith said at a meeting in Washington of the
Global CCS Institute, an industry-supported group based in
Melbourne. “We were simply undone by some timelines established
by statute.”
Smith said another project funded by the department —
Hydrogen Energy California — faces a similar deadline crunch.
That project “has had challenges,” he said.
Ken Humphreys, chief executive officer of the FutureGen
Alliance, said in a phone interview that private investors were
holding back until an Illinois court decided on a challenge to a
rate increase that would cover the project’s cost. FutureGen
would have received financial backing once the court case was
resolved, he said.
Other projects are in progress, though none operating. NRG
Energy Inc. is spending $1 billion on equipment to remove carbon
dioxide at a Houston-area coal plant, and plans to sell it to
nearby oil fields to help generate further production.
Expensive Plant
Southern Co.’s Kemper plant in Mississippi, which will use
a chemical process to cut the carbon emitted from a coal plant
to a level on par with the natural gas plant, is still under
construction. Southern says it will cost $6.2 billion, up from
$2 billion, making it the most expensive coal plant in U.S.
history.
In West Virginia, American Electric Power Co. spent $114
million to test carbon-capture equipment on its Mountaineer
plant. The company pumped gas underground for about 18 months,
then pulled out of a deal with the federal government to build a
commercial-scale project in 2011, because of the “uncertain
status of U.S. climate policy and the continued weak economy.”
And in west Texas, Summit Power Group LLC is well past its
deadline to begin construction on a plant that would make
electricity, urea and carbon dioxide to sell.
In Canada, SaskPower International Inc. installed carbon
capture equipment on the Boundary Dam plant, establishing the
first commercial-level operation of its kind when it opened last
year.
Industry Rebuke
“A lot of the problem is just the size of the projects,”
Jeffrey Price, who wrote a report on incentives for the
International Energy Agency, said at the Washington forum.
“It’s not like putting some solar panels on someone’s house.”
Environmental groups including the Sierra Club and Friends
of the Earth opposed the project, saying coal can’t be burned
safely or cleanly.
The demise of FutureGen drew a rebuke from the American
Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity. The Washington-based group
said the decision reflected the administration’s lack of
commitment to the technology.
Senator Joe Manchin, a West Virginia Democrat and a coal
supporter, said lawmakers including Durbin may try to extend the
September deadline to let the department spend the money. A
provision to suspend the deadline was in a Senate spending bill
but was dropped from the version Congress passed.
Budget Request
Under Obama, the U.S. has invested $6 billion in the
technology. And the 2016 budget request would add to that: about
$2 billion worth of tax credits for coal plants that capture and
bury their emissions.
The Energy Department also is seeking applications for loan
guarantees that could back up as much as $8 billion in projects
in carbon capture and storage projects. Manchin expressed
frustration that the program had yet to be used.
“They won’t spend what they have,” he told reporters.
The department’s participation in FutureGen wasn’t a loss
because it helped further development of carbon capture
technologies, spokesman Gibbons said. The U.S. had spent about
$116.5 million since 2010 on the planned 200-megawatt power
plant and $86 million developing an underground storage site.
“Our hope is that industry and government will continue to
find ways to develop CCS technology for a cleaner, more secure
energy future,” CEO Humphreys said in a statement.
To contact the reporters on this story:
Jim Snyder in Washington at
Mark Drajem in Washington at
To contact the editors responsible for this story:
Jon Morgan at
Steve Geimann, Romaine Bostick