Carbon sequestration technology in the United States was dealt a setback at the end of January 2008 when federal energy secretary Samuel Bodman announced that the Department of Energy will radically restructure its FutureGen “clean coal” R&D program. Bodman’s announcement pulled the plug on the Bush administration’s showpiece FutureGen facility in Mattoon, Illinois, operated by the FutureGen Alliance. The Alliance is a nonprofit organization of private investors and utility companies who pledged 25 percent of funding for the project, with the other 75 percent coming from U.S. taxpayers.
Funding for the Mattoon plant had been projected at $1.8 billion, with hopes of recovering about $300 million of that amount by selling electrical power generated by the site. Bodman cited cost overruns and the need to secure more funding from private sources and less from taxpayers. The Illinois congressional delegation, which had pushed hard for the plant to be built in Mattoon, responded with fury, claiming that
“Many have argued that this abrupt about face by Secretary Bodman was the direct result of the FutureGen Alliance choosing Mattoon, Illinois as the site, over Texas applicants,” the congressional delegation wrote. “While we’d like not to believe this theory, there is no other plausible explanation.”
The Mattoon plant would have conducted R&D for several technologies centered around coal generation of electricity with low to no emissions:
1. Coal gasification: turns coal into “syngas” composed of hydrogen and carbon monixide, by applying heat under pressure in the presence of steam. Coal gasification has some similarities to Plasma Arc Gasification of municipal waste, in that the syngas requires steam to strip out the carbon monoxide. The difference is that PAG doesn’t use much water, because unlike coal, there’s plenty of water for the process in garbage itself. Also, coal produces some nasty byproducts besides carbon monoxide that need to be stripped out:
Sulfur impurities in the [coal] are converted to hydrogen sulfide and carbonyl sulfide, from which sulfur can be easily extracted, typically as elemental sulfur or sulfuric acid, both valuable byproducts. Nitrogen oxides, another potential pollutant, are not formed in the oxygen-deficient (reducing) environment of the gasifier; instead, ammonia is created by nitrogen-hydrogen reactions. The ammonia can be easily stripped out of the gas stream. (DOE website)
The hydrogen sulfide comes from using high-sulfur coal for the process. Southern Illinois, where the FutureGen Alliance’s plant is sited, sits atop millions of tons of high-sulfur coal that can’t meet today’s emission standards for traditional coal-burning power plants. I would add that phrases like “valuable byproducts” and “easily stripped out” should be taken with a grain of salt unless the process can pay for itself.
2. Carbon capture: Stripping the carbon monoxide out of syngas produces carbon dioxide, also known as greenhouse gas. The CO2 then has to be stripped out so it can be sequestered.
3. Carbon sequestration: Compressing the CO2 and pumping it deep underground into saline aquifers. This Scientific American article lists some of the challenges associated with carbon sequestration technology.
The FutureGen plant in Illinois was built to sequester 1 million metric tons of CO2 a year. That sounds promising until you consider that coal burning produces 9.3 billion metric tons a year. The Scientific American article points out the need to sequester carbon on a massive scale in order for it to have any effect on mitigating global warming.
Meanwhile, Secretary Bodman plans to shift the FutureGen program’s emphasis from one large-scale government funded R&D facility, to several commercial-scale facilities located throughout the U.S. Each plant would have a maximum carbon sequestration capacity of 1 million metric tons, as planned for the Mattoon plant. The miffed Illinois congressional delegation plans to push the Mattoon site in Congress.
In a comment thread over at DailyKos that reminds me pleasantly of the blog’s braininess in its early days, one commenter with ties to the energy industry says,
Clean coal in general and FutureGen specifically, are descriptors for pigs feeding at the public trough. Taxpayers have spent many billions of dollars on “clean coal” R&D going back at least to the 1970s, and the Beulah is the only thing we have to show for it so far.
The projected cost of the Mattoon plant would be pocket change for any one member of the FutureGen Industrial Alliance, Inc., or for the alliance collectively. For that matter, such a small demonstration plant is well within the capabilities of Basin Electric, which is not part of the FutureGen alliance.
Looking at the number of companies pursuing non-coal gasification technologies like PAG, I have to wonder why private industry isn’t all over coal gasification and carbon sequestration. Could it be because the process is so expensive that it can never deliver significant returns without government support? The problem as I see it is that coal is such a dirty feedstock for electrical generation that the technology for cleaning it up will still be putting on its track shoes while cleaner technologies are already crossing the finish line.
Earthanet 