Clean-Coal Group Backs New Carbon Capture And Storage Project

   DOW JONES NEWSWIRES 
 

A group of coal and power companies said Tuesday that it has decided to stick with a government-backed project to cut greenhouse-gas emissions from a coal-fired power plant despite a significant change in plan.

The FutureGen Alliance said that it would like to build and operate a pipeline and underground storage facility where carbon dioxide emissions from an Illinois coal-fired power plant would be shipped and stored. The group said it will need to find a location for the storage facility, and will need to reach agreement with the U.S. Department of Energy on terms before proceeding.

Earlier this month, the DOE awarded $1 billion to the project, as part of a broad initiative to combat climate change. The department, however, completely revised the project from an earlier plan.

The new project, known as "FutureGen 2.0," would retrofit a now-shuttered Ameren Corp. (AEE) coal-fired power plant in Meredosia, Ill., and help establish a pipeline network to ship and store more than one million tons of carbon-dioxide a year.

"The Alliance is pleased that DOE and Senator Durbin have been able to preserve the $1 billion in funding for advancing clean coal technologies and the associated jobs, and we look forward to working with them and our new partners in making FutureGen 2.0 a success," Steve Winberg, a general manager at Consol Energy Inc. (CNX) who is also chairman of FutureGen's board, said in a statement.

An earlier plan 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.

U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin, a Democrat from Illinois, said Tuesday the project is expected to generate 1,000 construction jobs and about 200 permanent jobs, and that more than two dozen Illinois communities have expressed interest in hosting the CO2 storage facility.

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

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," the department said.

The original FutureGen project was intended to be the first commercial-scale project that combined technology to capture and store carbon-dioxide emissions with coal gasification, a process where heat and pressure are applied to coal, creating a synthetic gas that fuels turbines to generate electricity. FutureGen leaders struggled to line up backers and some members of the alliance pulled out in order to start their own projects.

-By Cassandra Sweet, Dow Jones Newswires; 415-439-6468; [e-mail]

(Siobhan Hughes and Stephen Power contributed to this article)