A day after the U.S. Department of Energy officially scrapped a futuristic, low-pollution power plant planned for central Illinois, angry state and local officials asked themselves what could have derailed the $1.8 billion project.And some experts questioned whether the government’s new plan, which could result in more than one coal-fired power plant capturing and storing carbon dioxide, has enough money to accomplish more than FutureGen.
DOE officials said Wednesday they worked for months to address FutureGen’s rising costs.
Yet on Nov. 30, 19 days before the plant’s private-sector builders selected Mattoon, Ill., as its location, DOE Secretary Samuel Bodman told Rep. Tim Johnson, R-Urbana, that FutureGen was on track. The final government OK, an assurance known as a record of decision that the site was environmentally suitable, was expected soon.
“We are diligently working to complete the progress and issue the Record of Decision in a timeframe that supports FutureGen site selection by the end of the year,” Bodman wrote Johnson in a letter.
The note reflected the agency’s optimism at the time, DOE spokeswoman Julie Ruggiero said Thursday.
“At that point we had thought and hoped negotiations with the (plant builders) would have been successful,” she said.
Details about the new approach so far are few. The DOE wants to hear what companies that might be part of the new plan believe might work best.
The agency’s request for feedback says whatever plants are built would produce at least 300 megawatts of electricity, just more than the 275 planned for FutureGen. Like FutureGen, roughly 90 percent of the carbon dioxide produced by each plant would have to be captured and stored underground.
One energy expert who has studied FutureGen questions whether the $1.3 billion the DOE plans to spend is enough.
The money might not pay for the work on much more than a single plant, said Howard Herzog, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor and one of the authors of a study last year on the future of coal power. And the three-plus years of delay the decision to start over will cause could grow longer, depending on the whims of President Bush’s successor, he said.
“I think we’re going to lose even more time because there’s a new administration that’s going to want to come in and reevaluate this,” he said.
