DOW JONES NEWSWIRES 
 

A group of coal and power companies said Friday they will start accepting bids soon for Illinois locations where they can store carbon dioxide that will be captured and shipped from a coal-fired power plant in Meredosia, Ill.

The FutureGen Alliance plans to build and operate a pipeline and underground storage facility where carbon dioxide emissions from a plant owned by Ameren Corp. (AEE) will be shipped and stored. The alliance estimates that the operation will be able to ship and store more than 1 million tons of carbon dioxide a year.

The U.S. Department of Energy awarded $1 billion to the project in August, as part of a broad initiative to combat climate change.

The project, called "FutureGen 2.0," replaced an earlier project that envisioned building a first-of-a-kind "clean-coal" power plant in Mattoon, Ill., using a different technology.

The Energy Department proposed locating the new project's storage facility in Mattoon, but town officials said they no longer wanted the project in their town.

The new project, to be developed by the FutureGen Alliance, which backed the original clean-coal project, along with Ameren, Babcock & Wilcox Co. (BWC) and Air Liquide Process & Construction Inc., would be the first to use advanced oxy-combustion technology on a commercial scale.

The alliance said it will begin soliciting proposals by Oct. 25 for communities that want to host the CO2 storage site for the project.

Oxy-combustion burns coal with a mixture of oxygen and carbon dioxide instead of air to produce a concentrated carbon dioxide stream for safe, permanent storage, according to the DOE.

FutureGen members include Alpha Natural Resources Inc. (ANR), Anglo American PLC (AAUKY, AAL.LN), BHP Billiton Ltd. (BHP, BHP.AU), Chinese government-owned China Huaneng Group, Consol Energy Inc. (CNX), E.ON AG (EOAN.XE, EONGY), Peabody Energy (BTU), Rio Tinto Ltd. (RIO.AU, RTP, RTP.LN) and Xstrata PLC (XTA.LN).

-By Cassandra Sweet, Dow Jones Newswires; 415-439-6468; cassandra.sweet@dowjones.com