Mattoon Wins Clean Coal ... For a Few Hours

By Tankboy in News on Dec 19, 2007 11:00PM

Mattoon carved out a spot in the national consciousness yesterday with news that a zero-emission FutureGen coal power plant will be built there in the next few years. However, within hours of the announcement, the Department of Energy issued a statement warning that "projected cost overruns will require a reassessment of FutureGen's design," putting the whole project in jeopardy. The DOE had originally pledged $1 billion for the project, but the budget has ballooned to $1.8 billion from original projections of $950 million, and ground hasn't even been broken yet.

The FutureGen Alliance is collaboration between the federal government and private energy companies to create clean coal energy. Speaking on All Things Considered yesterday, Matthew Wald of the New York Times explained the gasification process:

[T]hey take the coal, and instead of grinding it up and burning it, the way you do in a conventional plant, they cook it, and it gives off two gasses: hydrogen, which is benign — when you burn it you get nothing but water — and carbon monoxide, which we think of as a pollutant, but here as a fuel gas. You mix the carbon monoxide with water; it grabs hydrogen out of the water, so you then end up with carbon dioxide, nicely separated, and more hydrogen. You burn the hydrogen to make power, and then you have this nice clean flow of CO2 that you can dispose of.

The CO2 is actually in a liquid form at the end of all that, so they pump it about a mile and a half into the ground where it is supposedly "chemically absorbed into the rock" and we can wash our hands of the stuff.

So why is the government flip-flopping on the project? The price tag is a big reason, but in addition to the up-front costs, sequestering carbon like this is not cost-effective, and it probably will never be. And because you can't make any money doing it, it's very unlikely that it will catch on with big energy companies. Therefore, the only way that it would ever really make sense would be if the government was to impose a significant carbon tax (in our friggin' dreams) that would make other sources of energy even less cost-effective. While on the surface, this thing sounds neat (and props to Mattoon), in the end, clean coal still seems to be a contradiction in terms.

FutureGen Artist Concept via U.S. Department of Energy

Thanks, Mark!