04.10.13
‘Clean coal’ dead
Browsing through Congressional Rsearch Reports today at Steve’s Secrecy blog I came across FutureGen: A Brief History And Issues for Congress.
The cryptic name drew a blank until I suddenly remembered it was clean coal project once supported by Barack Obama.
If you download the CRS .pdf, here, you’ll quickly come to the conclusion that “clean coal” technology is finished in the United States.
Which is a good thing.
It’s all over. The only thing left to do is to admit it.
And that’s shown in the report on FutureGen. It is a mere fifteen pages long, the first five devoted to mostly white space, title and a table of contents.
To put it in a nutshell, FutureGen, a clean coal demonstrator factory and business, formed as a collaboration between the private sector and the government in 2003 during the Bush administration, has gone nowhere in a decade.
The plan to make a coal plant and sequester the produced carbon dioxide as a liquid squirted into underground rock formations has failed. Indeed, it never even really got started.
Technical problems associated with the process kept revising the price to the government upward. And with no milestones met or set, FutureGen has just served as sink for escalating cost estimates, from 1 billion, to 1.4 to 1.6.
In the intervening time period the US government failed (or didn’t even try) to assign a tax to carbon emission which would have provided American industry some incentive to get behind things like FutureGen.
And fracking, the controversial method of extracting natural gas from underground reservoir rock formations, took off.
It is easier and more lucrative to pollute water and mine natural gas, which releases less carbon dioxide than the burning of coal, then to pursue the technical fantasy of “clean coal.” There is nothing to be done with carbon dioxide from fossil fuel combustion except work to generate less of it. Or to at least mine sources that produce more energy for every metric ton of it generated.
The report on FutureGen and its clean coal carbon sequestration effort, or more accurately, the analysis of its slowly cooling body, is here.