Imagine this: a handful of scientists working on a revolutionary technology, an international cartel of energy giants, secretive meetings of a government panel and a few billion dollars thrown into the mix. Sounds like something from a best-selling thriller, right?

 

Unfortunately, it’s not. This drama is playing out right here in Illinois and it centers around a zero-emission power plant known as the FutureGen project.

 

It's no secret that Illinois is sitting on one of the largest and most valuable deposits of fossil fuel in the world. According to the Illinois Office of Coal Development, 38 billion tons of recoverable coal lie buried under our farms, forests and prairies, but the high sulfur content makes it expensive and impractical to process. As a consequence, we export most of our coal to other states.

 

In 2003, however, it looked as if Illinois' role in coal-based energy was about to undergo a major change. President George W. Bush announced that the Department of Energy (DOE), in conjunction with an international group of energy producers and brokers known as the FutureGen Industrial Alliance, was about to build a near zero-emission coal-based power plant using a new technology known as carbon capture and storage (CCS). This plant, originally scheduled to be on-line in 2012, is to be located in central Illinois, just outside the town of Mattoon.

 

Conventional coal-based energy produces high levels of carbon dioxide (CO2) as a byproduct of combustion. With CCS, however, that CO2 is captured before it can be released into the air. It is then compressed and pumped deep beneath the ground where it remains, effectively "stored" within deep rock strata, resulting in lower emissions and cleaner air.

 

With millions of dollars in development funding and hundreds of jobs on the line, several states lobbied heavily to host the project, but in the end it was narrowed to four sites in two states: Illinois and Texas. In November of 2007, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced that it had completed environmental impact assessments and found that all four sites were acceptable. The DOE was expected to publicize its final selection in late December of that year, but instead delayed the announcement. The members of the Industrial Alliance decided to move forward regardless, citing fears that further delay would inflate costs beyond the approved budget. On December 18, 2007, the Alliance announced that Mattoon, Ill., had been selected as the site of the FutureGen Plant.

 

Now here's where things get tricky ... A little over a month after the Alliance's announcement, on January 29, 2008, the DOE announced that it was pulling all funding from the project, essentially halting the development of the plant and preventing one of the first large-scale attempts to validate CCS as an affordable means of providing clean energy.

 

DOE officials claimed that an increase in the project's expense, due mostly to inflation and the rising cost of materials, was the primary reason for their withdrawal. Almost immediately, however, Illinois politicians began to cry foul, claiming that the energy secretary, then Samuel Bodman, had pulled the plug on the project only after Texas lost in the site selection process. The resulting political battle created a significant delay and left the Industrial Alliance in the awkward position of renegotiating the project's future.

 

Political tides change, however, and with the arrival of the Obama administration, there have been promising signs that FutureGen may be back on track. In July of 2009, the DOE finally released its Record of Decision, the official document stating that the Mattoon site meets environmental standards. This important milestone was followed, in September, by the signing of a cooperative agreement between the DOE, now headed by Dr. Steven Chu, and the Industrial Alliance.

 

With the partnership between the DOE and FutureGen renewed, and feasibility studies underway, Illinois may finally see a clear determination of the plant's fate by early 2010.

 

If you're interested in the FutureGen project, check out the website at http://www.futuregenalliance.org.

 

Or contact our elected officials and let them know that you support clean energy in Illinois!

 

Tune in next week for more on why we should care about CCS and what else Illinois is doing to improve sustainable energy.