Last summer we reported the Obama administration planned to move ahead on the Illinois "cleaner-coal" power plant, known as FutureGen, that the Bush administration canceled in 2007. Now the administration has announced it will instead invest $1 billion to retrofit the Central Illinois plant to accommodate carbon-capture and storage technology, Christa Marshall of Environment & Energy Daily reports. Initial plans were to build a first-of-a kind power plant that would have gasified coal before burning and capturing nearly all of its emissions.
"Engineers plan to swap out a boiler in the 200-megawatt plant, replace it with one that can capture CO2 and pipe the resulting gas across the state to a storage spot in Mattoon, Ill.," Marshall writes. While the announcement represented a significant step back from the initial 2003 plans for a $2 billion state-of-the-art facility, the project's supporters considered Thursday's news a victory. "This was a great day for Illinois," Illinois Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin said on a conference call with reporters. "The heart of this is a research effort. We're going to learn as we go."
Durbin said the project, redubbed FutureGen 2.0, would bring 900 jobs to downstate Illinois and 1,000 additional jobs to Illinois manufacturers. Several coal experts told Marshall the project did not necessarily signal future federal investment in CO2 technology. "You're not going to see that huge amount of money unless there's a climate bill," Kevin Book, managing director of research at ClearView Energy Partners, told Marshall. "With federal climate legislation stalled on Capitol Hill for now, he and other analysts said that there may not be an economic driver to spur widespread deployment of the technology," Marshall writes. (Read more, subscription required)
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