US Pulls Plug on Low-CO2 Powerplant Project

Geoffrey.landis writes "The administration announced plans to withdraw its support from FutureGen. FutureGen was a project to develop a low CO2-emission electrical power plant, supported by an alliance of a dozen or so coal companies and utilities from around the world. The new plant would have captured carbon dioxide produced by combustion and pumped it deep underground, to avoid releasing greenhouse-gas into the atmosphere. It had been intended as a prototype for next generation clean-coal plants worldwide. Originally budgeted at about a billion dollars, the estimated cost had "ballooned" to $1.8 billion, according to U.S. Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman."

Comments

Money well spend?

[WarwickRyan]

$1.8bill isn't a lot of money when compared to the cost of nuclear power, or the money spend blowing up parts of the Middle East..

Re:Money well spend?

[BlueParrot]

Lovely. Let us all see what those running costs are for an actual existing plant and name it please. None of the nuclear advocates on this site have known enough about their topic to actually know the "simple facts", but perhaps this time they'll be a little more than handwaving and distractions.

Your question is impossible to answer because variable costs are measured over a plants lifetime and thus they are strictly speaking not defined for any plant that is still operating. Many costs ( repairs, refueling , service, etc .. ) occur at discrete moments, and their magnitude changes as a plant ages, and thus the life-cycle variable costs are not completely determined until the plant is decomissioned. As a consequence every quotation of such costs for plants that are still operating ( or about to be built ) is a best estimate based on the experience at hand.

If we were to answer your question by taking the costs incurred by a plant up until today and average it over the time it has been in service the estimate would likely be too low because more repairs are necessary towards the end of its life. Similarly if we were to take the variable costs associated with a plant that has already been decommissioned then the estimate would be too high because technology has improved over the years. Your question is similar to the problem of estimating how long it will take to download a file. You can't answer it with certainty until after the file has been downloaded, because you don't know what will happen to your download speed before it is done. What you CAN do is to make a reasonable estimate based on previous based on previous experience and the knowledge at hand. This is the estimates that are quoted in most reports ( among others the one I gave above ).

Now, I don't expect you to accept this answer, because I've seen you argue this point before only to reject every reply you get when you don't like it, but simply put there is no way to know the life-cycle variable costs of ANY power source until after it has been decommissioned, and that is not something that applies merely to nuclear, it applies to Solar, Wave, Coal etc ... Call it hand waving if you really want to, I still think you are just trying to use a bullshit argument to reject widely published figures that you personally dislike. To the best of our knowledge, the life-cycle costs of Nuclear power plants are lower than those of competing energy sources. Now if you don't trust organizations like the RAE or IEA then that is one thing, but don't try to pretend that nobody has told you about this, because it isn't the first time it is spelled out for you.

I'd like to note

[Icarus1919]

I'd like to note that $1 billion is about what the government spends on each of the new modern military aircraft that they purchase. If we just took a little out of the defense budget, the cost of something like this, which is a PROTOTYPE and expected to be expensive, wouldn't be as much of an issue.

Re:Who cares

[WarwickRyan]

'Clean' coal is one of the few alternative which would actually scale enough to be able to provide the energy we require. It's also something which should be possible within a reasonable timescale - certainly before oil starts to run out.

Sure, it's not a pancea - but it might be able to give us the time figure out how to exploit renewable energies cheaply and safely enough..

No big deal.

[Ralph Spoilsport]

Clean coal isn't. Pumping CO2 underground is not a permanent solution. The Actual Solution is: STOP USING FOSSIL FUELS. NOW.

If you can't / won't do it NOW, then the long emergency will get longer. And Darker. No, it's not the end of the world. It's just a new world we won't recognise, and one that won't likely permit 7 billion people shitting all over it.

You can buy a shit load of grid tied windmills for 1.8 billion dollars...

RS

Re:No big deal.

[RealGrouchy]

You can buy a shit load of grid tied windmills for 1.8 billion dollars... Yes, but the fact is coal companies (who were supporting this FutureGen project) probably wouldn't.

- RG>

Re:No big deal.

[v1]

You can buy a shit load of grid tied windmills for 1.8 billion dollars

I must say you have a very good point there.

I wonder why they don't find something more constructive to do with all that CO2? Plants use water and sun to split CO2 and release O2, why can't we either make something that does that, or use plants to do it for us? I don't know, something like a giant version of what looks like a waste treatment plant. (with the large covered pools)

Is the rate of absorption too slow for that, where they'd need an unreasonably large biomass, or what's the problem?

Pumping CO2 undergound to get rid of it is about as forward-thinking as landfills. Burying it doesn't make it go away, it just makes it resurface well after you're dead. (and your elections are over)

Sure...

[Goonie]

And it's only available 12 hours a day, costs a fortune to tap (and if you mention Nanosolar I suggest you call them up and offer them $1 per watt for their solar panels - the only response you'll get is fits of giggles), and battery backup is extremely expensive. The world's total solar power capacity is roughly equivalent to one unit of your average coal-fired power station. And while solar cells are large maintenance free, solar thermal power, which the people who've looked into the issue generally regard as a more serious solution, is not.

Please go away and actually do some research into the costs of the various energy options, and you might appreciate why research into carbon capture and storage is money well spent.

Re:Sure...

[Swampash]

Please go away and actually do some research into the costs of the various energy options

I live in Australia. I have solar panels on my roof at home. The installation costs were subsidised by the Federal Government. My panels generate more power than I actually use, and the excess is fed back into the grid at a credit, so the power company ends up owing me money at the end of the year.

You were saying?

Stop-gap

[r_jensen11]

My interpretation is that this would be a stop-gap until we can develop an efficient means of using renewable energy. Why?

Shifting reliance from oil to coal would "Make America safer!" because the US is like the Saudi Arabia of coal
China is building powerplants like crazy, and guess what they're using? COAL
Storing CO2 underground is a temporary solution, but it would buy us some more time to develop means of converting it into something in another physical state (gas or liquid). Then perhaps we could begin to fill up those oil fields we've been draining for the past hundred & some odd years.

Re:Who cares

[Anonymous Coward]

Clean coal, fine. I'm sure there are ways to "scrub" CO2 if we think long and hard enough. Coal gasification plants for instance are said to be a lot cleaner than "conventional" coal plants, albeit not when it comes to the release of CO2 unfortunately, in fact a lot more CO2 is created. But maybe they'll find a way around that too. Pumping CO2 underground on the other hand, I'm sorry, but I have a hard time accepting that as a reasonable alternative. I'm far too afraid that this is just the same thinking as with nuclear energy. "Oh, we only have to store it for a few millenia and then it'll be perfectly safe." Yeah right, as if that stuff is actually going to stay down there, it's gas for crying out loud. What if a massive cloud of CO2 is released suddenly, due to a massive earthquake or whatnot? It's one thing to prevent CO2 from being created, it's quite another to try and "put it away" until the end of times... I'm not so sure that investing so much money into a project like this is really worth it. At best, it seems to me a temporary solution, with potentially fatal drawbacks later on. We shouldn't be thinking about how to put this stuff away, we need to think about ways of creating less of it! Alternative fuels, more fuel efficient cars (especially in the US!) and nuclear fusion, ESPECIALLY nuclear fusion.

YOU FIRST!

[Jane Q. Public]

Good idea. And since it is your idea, you go first. No gas heat or fossil-fuel-generated electricity, no fossil-fuel automobile, no snow blower, snowmobile, dirt bike, lawnmower, and no... plastics.

As of NOW.

Have a nice day. :o)

Re:Money well spent?

[jfim]

The objection that I have to this program was that it was an experiment, a costly one, with no guarantees of future success.

The fact that there were no guarantees of success is what makes research interesting and worth it. If you're only researching things that you're certain will lead somewhere, only incremental improvements are possible. On the other hand, fundamental research has no guarantee of finding something useful, but can lead to major breakthroughs(or not).

Re:Who cares

[OrangeTide]

you should care because it's a clear example of government lining the pockets of the energy industry with an obviously stupid plan.

This makes my blood boil

[onion_joe]

So we pull out of ITER again, cut funding for alternative CO2 reduction technologies, and decide to subsidize corn for biofuel source material.

And spend close to a trillion dollars on a war over fossil resources in the Middle East.

The US energy policy is fucked. Totally, completely, totally fucked. Utterly utterly mindbogglingly stupid.

Re:Who cares

[spoco2]

All his points were completely valid, you're just subscribing to the theory of 'out of sight, out of mind'

'Clean coal' is an oxymoron. It doesn't work. It's been touted here (Australia) by the last government as a way of keeping our coal power stations running too, but that was by a right wing, environmental hating government. When anyone looks at it seriously, it's all bunk.

Rather than investing in technologies to actually make energy without the horrendous environmental cost (solar, window, tidal etc. etc.) WHY on earth would you prefer them to invest money in continuing to use the horror that is coal, but just shove the waste underground?

How does that at all sound like a good idea to you?

"you're saying that because there is a tiny, remote chance that Co2 might leak into the atmosphere, that we should just put it into the atmosphere first"

Is exactly the wrong way of thinking. The options are not pump it underground and hope it stays there, vs. pump it into the air. The options are create vast amounts of CO2 and worse, OR produce power in an ACTUAL CLEAN MANNER.

Good riddance to the plan, and it would be great if it were just stricken from the worldwide stage overall... stop building coal plants, you can make the energy in so many other ways.