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

Why it was cancelled

[jeffgtr]

I live near the site Futuregen was to be built. There was fierce competition between Illinois and Texas for the location of the plant. Illinois was chosen based on science not politics. I have heard that Bush was furious that Texas was not chosen, pulled a few strings and the project was cancelled. From what I have read this was a technology that would work and let us take advantage of the abundant coal supplies without damaging the environment.

Re:Money well spent?

[tm2b]

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

You know, I'm a big fan of nuclear power and not so much of coal. Still.

If there were guarantees of future success, it wouldn't be much of an experiment. It's worth our pouring a lot of money (but still microscopic compared to our overall energy expenditures) into ambitious experiments just so that we learn the full range of options and their implications - if we learned, we example, from this experiment that "low Co2 coal" is much more dangerous and expensive (for whatever reason) than the coal industry would like us to believe, wouldn't that be worth a mere couple billion dollars?

Re:Who cares

[Whiteox]

Don't be too concerned about the loss of funding. Australia's Eastern seaboard is sitting on mountains of coal and the current gov. is pushing research into clean coal. So is China (the biggest user), so if the USA doesn't do it, then someone else will.
As for the comments I've read so far, it's not the CO2 only that is worrisome, but the fact that the waste heat generated from power plants (should read all heat exchange type power plants) is directly warming the Earth.
Not only should there be no CO2 from power plants, but there should also be no waste heat either.
So solar power/geothermal/hydro and to some extent, nuclear technologies have the clear edge.

Ideally, the model for future energy creation and use would be:
* non-heat producing energy creation and storage
* non-heat producing energy consumption

One system currently in focus by the Australian gov. are 1.5kw domestic solar roof installations feeding directly into the grid. If you have every house (excluding high rise) with an installation from Hobart (far South) towards the equator, then that would make a significant impact on all fossil fuel use. Currently, such an installation costs approx $15,000/household and the gov. pays for half.
Every country or geophysical region will have their own solutions, so I doubt that there will be a single technology that would be the panacea for everyone.
http://www.greenhouse.gov.au/rebates/index.html