What’s Congress up to on FutureGen?

As we wrote previously, FutureGen’s demise has been greatly exaggerated. We expected that Congress would not allow FutureGen to be effectively killed or otherwise radically altered without a skirmish, and today the skirmish went border war during a Senate Energy and Water Approps hearing. A highish-level DoE staffer (deputy assistant secretary in the Office of Fossil Energy – OFE) was raked over the coals by Senators Dorgan, Bond and Domenici.What was curious about today’s hearing was trying to decipher what Congress is actually thinking about FutureGen. Sen. Bond went as far as to say

that DOE’s decision to restructure because of the escalating costs of the program “ring hollow” and calls into question the veracity and judgment of the department.

DOE “left FutureGen at the altar choosing three younger, cheaper women,” Bond said.

Of the three Senators quoted in the recaps we saw of the hearing, Domenici has by far the most experience with energy, having been Chairman of both the Committee on Energy and Natural Resources and the Energy and Water Approps subcommittee (which is a ridiculous amount of power to hold on a single issue, but we digress). Sen. Domenici said:

Ranking member Pete Domenici (R-N.M.) said he wants more answers from DOE on how the funds are being split between cleaning up the coal and capturing carbon dioxide emissions.

“We have been funding clean coal research, about $2 to $3 billion over the last five to seven years,” Domenici said in an interview after the hearing. “Carbon capture and storage can’t knock out basic research … for ambient air purposes.”

Domenici said he wanted results from DOE whether it was clean coal, reprocessing capabilities for spent nuclear fuel, or other DOE programs.

“Next year get something done, beyond study,” he told DOE officials. “Put some of these programs into action.”

Our read is that Congress isn’t exactly sure what it wants. DoE has expressed interest in deemphasizing a huge, sure-to-become-a-boondoggle project that tries to do everything at once by going after IGCC, hydrogen production, and CCS in one not-so-neat package. In its place DoE wants to do commercial-ready systems that focus on real-world viable CCS efforts. This seems entirely reasonable to us, and probably is the proper play here.

So why is Congress balking? The most likely answer, at least today, is that Congress is balking because they weren’t consulted enough before the decision was made by DoE to switch emphasis. The usual explanation — that the decision to go away from a boondoggle means less pork for a few constituents — doesn’t hold water considering who was speaking at today’s hearing. As it was slated to be built in Illinois, the states of North Dakota, New Mexico and Missouri had little interest in FutureGen. They should have much more interest in smaller-scale IGCC/CCS plants coming to their states.

If, despite Sen. Bond’s questioning of DoE’s “veracity and judgment,” we can take DoE OFE at their word that they think FutureGen money is better spent deemphasizing hydrogen and emphasizing getting CCS commercially viable ASAP, then kudos to DoE for waking up and smelling the future.