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State of the State: FutureGen 2.0's Bypass of Coles County Tells a Story of Problem Planning

Jamey Dunn
WUIS/Illinois Issues

Everywhere you looked when you drove up the main drag of my hometown, Mattoon, in the fall of 2007, you could see signs outside of businesses saying, “Welcome FutureGen.” 

When the project was awarded to the central Illinois town in December 2007, many were celebrating the pending construction of a new coal-fired “near-zero-emission” power plant meant to test a technology that sounded a tad like science fiction at the time. The plant was to function as a lab and demonstration site, which would use a new combination of technologies that had not been proven effective on a commercial scale. The first would have been gasification, a process that turns the coal into gas and allows some pollutants to be removed. The second would have been carbon sequestration, which traps pollutants underground for possibly thousands of years. 

I am sure many people of the town, like me, had never heard of those two terms before the bid for FutureGen. I have since become familiar with them and the issue of “clean coal” after writing a piece on it for this magazine. 

While the idea of pioneering a first-of-its-kind technology was exciting, the prospect of thousands of new jobs was also thrilling to a community that had watched manufacturing jobs disappear during the last 15 years as plants closed or moved to new locations. 

After almost two years of evaluating potential sites, the FutureGen Alliance, the group of investors helping to back the plant, chose Mattoon over a site near Tuscola and two in Texas. Mattoon was picked because of its geological makeup, as well as positive factors, such as proximity to rail lines and water. 

But doubts loomed over the project from the very beginning. “It became clear very shortly after that announcement … when we couldn’t get the official record of decision [from the Department of Energy]. And that was when it became pretty obvious to the community something is not right here,” says Angela Griffin, president of Coles Together, a county economic development group that has worked closely on the project. 

FutureGen stalled after basically being scrapped by the Department of Energy under then-President George W. Bush. Officials cited the rising cost estimates for the plant, but many in Illinois felt that the decision was made for political reasons and displeasure over the site choice. At the time, U.S. Sen. Richard Durbin alleged that a former U.S. under secretary of energy, C.H. Albright, referred to Mattoon as “some swamp in Illinois” during a conference call about the project. 

So stakeholders went into a holding pattern waiting for a new president to be elected. Many in Coles County thought having then-U.S. Sen. Barack Obama in the White House might help resurrect the project — which he supported — in his home state. Coles County, normally a solidly Republican area, did indeed back Obama in the 2008 election. 

The new administration’s American Recovery and Reinvestment Act provided $1 billion for fossil fuel research, and many believed it was the funding for FutureGen. Yet the project continued to stall. 

Last month, Durbin announced a revamped version of the project, called FutureGen 2.0, without the new power plant in Coles County. Instead, carbon dioxide emissions from a retrofitted plant in Meredosia would have been pumped through a 175-mile subterranean pipeline through Decatur and then down to Mattoon to be sequestered underground in the same basin that the original FutureGen plant would have used to store emissions. Durbin promised Coles County a training center where workers would learn how to retrofit coal plants with oxygen-combustion technology. 

Durbin estimated the project would create 1,000 construction jobs and 1,000 other jobs with businesses and suppliers serving the project. Meredosia would gain 47 to 50 full-time permanent positions when its plant reopens.

Mattoon got a week to decide. Durbin says the project had to move forward quickly to get the stimulus money. It wasn’t surprising when Coles Together announced that Mattoon would not participate in FutureGen 2.0. The public backlash was pretty overwhelming. People in Mattoon felt as if they had been strung along and deceived. 

But Durbin says the estimated costs of the original project had gotten too big. U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu said last year the plant could cost more than $2.3 billion to build. Illinois only had $1.2 billion in federal funds to work with, and Durbin says the technology that FutureGen was going to test was already being used at other plants. 

“It became [a method] that was being proved out on a commercial basis. … So we had to find another way to create this opportunity for Coles County and Illinois. … One that fit into the existing budget,” he says. 

However, John Mead, director of the Coal Research Center at Southern Illinois University Carbondale, says the combination of technologies from the original FutureGen plan, including the production of hydrogen gas, have not been demonstrated working together. He supports both the Meredosia and FutureGen projects. “We need a suite of technology choices, and underlying all of this is the need to integrate these technologies with carbon capture and sequestration.” 

The Meredosia project could produce some useful results. With so many coal-fired plants already in operation, a retrofitting technique to cut carbon emissions would be an important technological advance. Pipelines could capture and sequester carbon from all over the state, including areas that do not have the geological make-up conducive to storing carbon. However, the Department of Energy should have avoided the appearance that the reconfigured project is a slapdash 11th-hour modification, and Mattoon should not have been forced to make such an important decision so quickly. The DOE should have been more realistic about its goals and transparent about its intentions. 

In reality “clean coal” is a misnomer: The process of mining coal continues to be dangerous, dirty and environmentally damaging, no matter what becomes of the emissions. Ideally, we would move away from using coal altogether and shift jobs other growing energy industries. 

Coal-fired plants generate half of the electricity in the nation and create more than a quarter of its carbon pollution. If America is going to keep burning coal — which seems likely at least in the short-term — and also work to slow global warming, some big steps must be taken. 

If the federal government is going to begin regulating carbon emissions — which global warming seems to be making necessary and inevitable — it needs to work with power producers to find ways to reduce carbon. That means investing in solar and wind power, electric vehicles — the works. We must start developing the green infrastructure that will power our economy in the future. If we are going to stimulate the economy with government spending, it makes sense to do so by funding things we need. 

The inability to get the most bang for the buck when it comes to stimulating the economy while also building “green” infrastructure is a recurring complaint. Examples include spending billions on so-called high-speed trains that will travel 100 miles-per-hour slower than their European counterparts and creating numerous wind farms while missing the opportunity to replace lost manufacturing jobs by making more of the turbines in the United States. 

Griffin says that much to her surprise, turning FutureGen into a stimulus project may have helped to kill it. “In my mind, it would have been just the opposite effect. I would have thought the stimulus bill was looking for things that were shovel-ready, and this thing has been shovel-ready since December of 2007.” 

She adds that mixing the project with the stimulus package might have blurred some of the intent. “The project stood for so much more than just a stimulus project. I think when it became a stimulus project, it got caught up in that whole notion. … It’s almost as though folks at [the Department of Energy] forgot why we went into this project in the first place, and it wasn’t to achieve what the stimulus bill was trying to achieve. … [It was] giving the next generation and the generation after that inexpensive energy and doing it cleanly.”

But we should be able to accomplish both. 

Griffin says that manufacturing jobs in Coles County have recently held steady, and so has the unemployment level, which is near the state’s average. “I don’t want to paint a picture here that we were so desperate and this is going to crush us.” She says Coles Together is acquiring the land where FutureGen would have been and hopes to bring in another carbon sequestration project, which would also create jobs in the area.

I am by no means advocating so-called clean coal as the answer to America’s energy woes. I am also not saying that FutureGen or FutureGen 2.0 is the more worthy project or that either deserves funding over other sustainable energy projects. I am not a scientist; nor can I predict the future. In fact, Mead advocates for both FutureGen projects because at this point, he says no one can tell which technology would be more effective or useful. 

What I am saying is that politicians need to own up to the fact that we get most of our electricity from coal, and a climate bill cannot work without funding the research needed to either shift most power generation to another source or finding a way to burn coal without releasing dangerous amounts of greenhouse gases into the air. And if the federal government ever again decides to spend billions to stimulate the economy, it should plan better for the research and construction needed to deal with environmental realities while creating jobs.

 

The plant was to function as a lab and a demonstration site, which would use a combination of strategies that had not been proven effective on a commercial scale.

Illinois Issues, October 2010

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