DOE Gives Go Ahead for FutureGen to Be in Illinois

The twisted road to building a federally funded carbon capture and sequestration project, FutureGen, has inched closer with the issuance of an environmental "record of decision" by the U.S. Department of Energy yesterday.

The decision gives the FutureGen Alliance the go-ahead to start the preliminary design of the project and figure out how to raise money for building the project in Mattoon, Ill. The alliance, made up of coal, metal and power generation companies, was considering four locations in the country and settled on Mattoon.

FutureGen was conceived to demonstrate the commercial viability of carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) technology, which would gather the carbon dioxide produced by a coal-fired power plant and store it underground instead of releasing it into the atmosphere. CCS has been seen as a promising method of reducing carbon dioxide emissions, but it has remained in pre-commercial stages.

The DOE expects the preliminary design and funding plan to be completed in early 2010, when the DOE will decide whether to proceed with the construction and operation of the project. The government and the alliance would have to sign a cooperative agreement.

The 275-megawatt project would be designed to capture 90 percent of the emissions by the third year of its operation, the DOE said. The goal is to harvest and store one million tons of carbon emissions per year when it reaches commercial operation.

The current FutureGen project is a resurrection of a previous attempt. The DOE nixed the project in late 2007 when it determined that the proposed project cost was way too high. The government had anticipated the cost to be $950 million, but the alliance estimated it to be $1.5 billion. Others in the industry put the cost at $1.8 billion.

This time around, the DOE said the project could cost about $2.4 billion. The government expects to dole out $1.073 billion for the project. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act would provide $1 billion of that amount.

The alliance's contribution is pegged at $400 million to $600 million, and it would have to raise non-federal money down the road to complete the project, the DOE said.