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?

[pcmanjon]

Bush announced this in his fiscal meeting. He actually canceled this project and re-allocated the funds to Iraq.

Re:Money well spend?

[Fjandr]

Not saying whether it's a good idea or not, but to put it into perspective: the entire cost of the coal project is equal to 10-11 days of expenditures in Iraq.

Re:Money well spend?

[BlueParrot]

$1.8bill isn't a lot of money when compared to the cost of nuclear power

Rubbish. Over in Britain the royal academy of engineering compared costs of nuclear ( yes, including decommissioning costs) to that of various energy sources: http://www.countryguardian.net/generation_costs_report2.pdf . Essentially, while nuclear is expensive to build, the overall cost is comparable to coal fired power plants due to the low cost of fuel, and if you add on carbon capture and storage then the cost of coal overtakes nuclear rapidly.

A further thing to take into consideration is that increased energy consumption across the world combined with decreasing oil reserves is likely to drive up the price of coal/uranium. Since the fuel is a much lower proportion of the cost of nuclear power than it is for coal power this is likely to have a much lower impact upon the cost of nuclear power than for coal.

Finally, since nuclear power technology is advancing rapidly at the moment ( High temperature reactors around 2016 , breeders by 2025 , high efficiency hydrogen estimated 2030 ) the cost of nuclear plants is likely to drop ( per kilowatt generated ), while the cost of coal plants is likely to spike due to tighter emission standards.

The capture and storage research is worth it mainly because we can't expand other energy sources quick enough. In the long term it is not going to be economically competitive.

Re:Money well spend?

[timmarhy]

sorry but when i compare the OP's source of the royal academy of engineering vs UK papers, i have to say you'd be crazy to not go with the engineers who actually know something about nuclear power.

there's no "probably" about nuclear being safer, it's a simple fact.

there's always 2 things greenies try to call on nuclear - cost and life span. firstly while nuclear costs more initally, it's running costs see it break even with coal in 5 years. life span they will try tell you we only have 5 years of fissionable material - i make it clear right now they got that figure from the fact we have 5 years IF we all swapped to nuclear TODAY and relied totally on STOCKPILES. that means we didn't dig another ton out of the ground and didn't look for more. we also have breeder reactors which extend a plants life indefinately.

Re:Money well spend?

[ErikZ]

And according to http://www.socialsecurity.gov/budget/2007bud.pdf, the cost of the balloned budget is what the US spends on social security in a little over a day.

Just to put it into perspective.

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:I'd like to note

[sqrt(2)]

IIRC, our B-2 stealth bombers were purchased for approximately 1 billion each. That was the figure I remember being quoted most often. The shining bastion of accuracy and credibility Wikipedia cites the unit price as being between "$727 million to $2.2 billion"

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)

Re:No big deal.

[zerogeewhiz]

They might have been *supporting* it but they weren't *paying* for it. So you're right, but it was the government's money that was being pissed up against the wall. That 1.8bn would be much better spent on a no carbon wind or solar farm.

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...

[edwardpickman]

And it's only available 12 hours a day

Then obviously we should be devoting the funds to stopping Earth's rotation. With the US facing the Sun 24/7 we get 24 hours of solar power and more hours for crops to grow for biofuels. It'd also save us a fortune in lighting at night and allow for an unlimited work day. Seems like a win win.

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?

Pumping into the ground perhaps not a great idea

[Eric Smith]

I don't know the details of their plan, but it seems unlikely to me that there can be any realistic expectation that when you pump CO2 into the ground, however deep, that it's going to stay there.

In the 1960s, Rocky Mountain Arsenal tried to get rid of waste by pumping it into the ground. When they started doing that, there was an increase in seismic activity in the region, including several earthquakes that caused significant damage. When they finally stopped doing it, the seismic activity tapered off.

WARNING: GNAA

[SirBudgington]

Don't click the above link, it's got some nasty javascript in there. Tries to open a load of popups, kills Firefox (even on linux). Save yourself the hassle and don't click....

Yes, there can

[Goonie]

The scientists who are working on this give several reasons as to why it's plausible.

If you're pumping the CO2 into a depleted gas field, that gas field captured natural gas for many millions of years. Another type of disposal site that's been proposed is deep saline acquifers, in which case the CO2 will dissolve in the water, which has also stayed where it is for millions of years.

Finally, if you're really paranoid there's mineral sequestration, where you react the CO2 with various types of rock to form carbonates, which are very stable compounds (they're rocks, basically).

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.

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?

[hedwards]

You should indeed. Nuclear power is well understood and bringing a new reactor online can be done with technology which is already available.

The objection that I have to this program was that it was an experiment, a costly one, with no guarantees of future success. Nuclear energy isn't a panacea or necessarily the best of ideas, but the risks and challenges are well known and it can already be used to produce energy in a cost effective manner.

Most of the complaints people have about the current Fission reactors is that they are unsafe and the waste is toxic and hard to handle. But the reality is that it is really hard to get a nuclear reactor to reach a meltdown. Even the plant in Chernobyl which was being run in the least competent manner imaginable, was able to keep from reaching the really serious point where there's a sustained uncontrolled nuclear reaction. 3-mile island, the nuclear material was completely unable to make it past the huge amount of concrete that the facility was made of.

The amount of waste from a reactor tends to be exaggerated, it is significantly less material than is created by coal plants, with the ability to reprocess the majority of the radioactive material for another plant. The amount of waste that is created in the US would be reduced significantly if it were subjected to the sort of reprocessing that happens in other parts of the world.

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?

[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

[enoz]

Everyone knows it will stay underground, whey we're worried about is when it comes back up. Ever heard of Lake Nyos?

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.

Mole Men

[saxoholic]

Thank God the goverment had the foresight to cancel this project. Although it may have helped stop climate change, it would have flooded the underground with CO2, causing angry mole-men to declare war on us surface dwellers. I am thankful to delay the welcoming of our mole-men overloards.

Re:Money well spent?

[Waffle Iron]

these days everyone is comparing spending to iraq,when its very rarely a good comparison.

That's right, since Iraq is costing us orders of magnitude more than almost anything else. We really should be using more reasonable units like milliIraqs.

Re:In the other news...

[Solandri]

In the other news - the defense budget is biggest since WWII.

Not relative to GDP. It's actually close to the lowest it's been in 60+ years.

Re:Who cares

[jbengt]

CO2 is commonly pumped underground to help retrieve hard-to-get oil from underground oil deposits. Unfortunately, they typcially manufacture the CO2 nearby, so it doesn't reduce greenhouse gases at all. If they could use flue gases from coal fired plants for this, it might be worth it. But the hard part is getting the CO2 to the right location, so I don't hold out promise for that.

And as far as the fact that it may someday come up, methane (natural gas) is a much more powerful greenhouse gas and we go to great lengths to get it out of the ground. If we put the CO2 in those deep geological formations, we would be no worse off than we were previously.

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.

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

Re:Money well spent?

[TubeSteak]

If the USA wanted cleaner coal technology, they could have it right now, simply by forcing all coal plants to meet modern standards.

As the laws now stand, you could drive a flotilla of aircraft carriers through the loopholes. For starters, pre-1970 coal burning powerplants were effectively grandfathered in under the Bush era laws. Those powerplants don't have to be upgraded to meet current regs as long as the owner only performs "routine maintanence".

The EPA defines "routine maintanence" as anything that doesn't exceed 20% of the powerplant's value.

In 5 years you could rebuild that powerplant doing nothing more than EPA approved routine maintanence.

Re:Who cares

[Bj�rn]

so if the USA doesn't do it, then someone else will.

Vattenfall is working on it.

"Can a coal-fired power plant completely eliminate carbon-dioxide emissions? That's what Swedish energy company Vattenfall is hoping to prove with a pilot project under construction in Germany that promises to be the world's first emissions-free carbon power-generating plant.

The $62 million, 30-megawatt facility, scheduled to go into operation by mid-2008, makes use of oxyfuel technology, in which coal is burned in pure oxygen instead of air. That leaves the resulting emissions nitrogen-free and easier to clean and store. Once the plant in Schwarze Pumpe, south of Berlin, is fully operational, the plan is to compress the CO2 into liquid and inject it into porous rock about a kilometer below ground."

Re:Who cares

[squidinkcalligraphy]

Gases do exist underground naturally. A friend of mine is a research scientist for this technology. He assures me it is technically feasible, and safe too (provided you find the right spot underground to do it (I'm not convinced personally). The major problem with it is cost. Basically, it ends up being cheaper to run solar panels.

Of course, the reason Australia has been investing so heavily in this tech is that Australia has a crap-load of coal, which is propping up it's economy. If international demand for coal drops because people get serious about climate change, Australia's economy goes down the crapper (unless, of course, it goes ahead and tries something different).