Is FutureGen really dead?

It’s still unclear exactly why the Department of Energy is trying to back out of FutureGen, but the most likely explanation is that they are trying to back themselves out of another billion-dollar boondoggle (they’ve had quite a few). FutureGen is a collaboration between DoE (fronting 75% of the CAPEX) and a consortium of oil and coal companies under the FutureGen Industrial Alliance umbrella. Siting of the plant has been contentious, but recently was awarded to a site in eastern Illinois.

Despite media coverage claiming that DoE “scrapped” FutureGen, the future of the project is likely good. Even in a carbon-constrained world, coal-fired electricity generation is not going away. The solution is to bring down the OPEX of integrated gasification combined cycle (IGCC) technology and carbon capture and storage (CCS). If you’re looking more than ten to twenty years in the future, whatever FutureGen costs is worth it. Without FutureGen or something like it, we’ll continue to stumble forward on carbon-free coal.

There are two routes forward: A- The Illinois Congressional delegation successfully adds language to the Energy Appropriations bill that forbids DoE from backing out of the project. B- The businesses in the Alliance go forward without DoE. Our guess is that (A) is more likely, as Illinois’ senior Senator (Durbin) is the #2 to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, and at this point in time Barack Obama has a decent chance of gaining the White House.