Clean-coal backers want stimulus to revive project

Electric and coal companies want President-elect Barack Obama's stimulus plan to include a restart of their project to build the first commercial-scale generating plant that can capture and store greenhouse gases, "setting up a fight with the anti-coal wing of Mr. Obama's base," Siobhan Hughes reports for The Wall Street Journal. "In one sign of its confidence, the FutureGen Alliance, along with a development group for Coles County, Ill., last week bought a 400-acre site for $7 million." (Encarta map: Mattoon, the city nearest the site)

The federal government was to pay most of the project's cost, but pulled out early this year after the estimate nearly doubled, to $1.8 billion. The Bush administration planned to parcel out the federal money to smaller-scale projects, but FutureGen and its allies in Congress stoutly opposed such a move. Now, worries about spending have taken a back seat to desires for stimulating the economy, but some Obama advisers may think that the technology isn't ready for a commercial-scale test. Herb Meeker of Coles County's Journal-Gazette and Times-Courier notes that Obama's pick for energy secretary, Nobel Prize-winning physicist Steven Chu, said of clean coal at a March conference on energy futures, “If people think this is the solution, think again. A lot of research is needed.” (Read more)

"Technology to take the carbon dioxide out of the exhaust from a coal-fired power plant could take 10 to 15 years to develop on a commercial scale, and even then would be costly," Hughes writes. (Read more) For more background on clean coal, click here.

Competition for stimulus money could be stiff. "The profusion of requests from governors, transportation groups, environmental activists and business organizations is spawning fears that the package could be loaded with provisions that satisfy important Democratic constituencies but fail to provide the jolt needed to pull the nation out of a deepening recession," Lori Montgomery reports for The Washington Post. She quotes an unnamed Obama adviser as sayign that Obama is focused on funding ideas that would quickly pump money into the economy, to meet his promise to create or preserve 2.5 million jobs by 2011. (Read more)