The US Department of Energy (DOE) has announced the revival of FutureGen – the government’s flagship demonstration coal plant designed to capture carbon dioxide emissions and pump them underground.
‘FutureGen 2.0’, as the project is now officially tagged, differs substantially from its predecessor, which was cancelled in 2008 by the DOE under George W. Bush’s administration, citing a dispute with industry partners over the soaring US$1.8-billion price tag (see Nature 451, 612–613; 2008). Last year, the DOE said it would restart the project, with energy secretary Steven Chu and $1 billion of stimulus funding firmly behind the effort.
The old FutureGen would have been built in Mattoon, Illinois, and would have been one of a number of demonstration plants around the world which transform coal (or any other fuel) into a mixture of carbon dioxide and hydrogen gases. The hydrogen is burned for energy, and the carbon dioxide is separated, piped away, and injected deep underground as a compressed liquid.
The new FutureGen will still be based in Illinois – the home state of President Barack Obama, who supported the venture when he was a senator. It will also still pipe its carbon dioxide to Mattoon, which, it’s envisaged, will be the final resting place of carbon dioxide sent from a regional network of pipelines. Despite criticism from Senator Tom Coburn (Rep, Oklahoma), who said the decision “appears to have more to do with politics and geography than science” (WSJ), Mattoon happens to be a good place to store carbon dioxide underground.
Rather than a new gasifier plant, however, FutureGen will now be a retrofit of a 200MW unit at an existing little-used coal plant in Meredosia, western Illinois. The plant will burn pulverized coal the old-fashioned way, but in a mixture of oxygen and carbon dioxide, instead of in air. This process produces a flue gas from which it is easier to strip out carbon dioxide for storage.
The cheaper ‘oxyfuel’ concept is already being trialled with small oxygen boilers in France. Retrofitting of the Meredosia plant is expected to begin in the spring, but the project has no target completion date (AP). The aim is to store 1 million tonnes of carbon dioxide a year at Mattoon.
A spokesman for US senator Tim Johnson (Rep, Urbana) told AP that the plan was ‘a far cry from what they were originally talking about’, but the DOE move overall seems quite sensible. Costs are lower than building a new gasifying plant, which a number of private companies are already planning. And coal plants can be retrofitted with oxyfuel boilers, so experience gained from this demonstration will apply to cleaning up existing coal plants, a worthier aim than building new ones.
By the time the scheme starts operating, it may not be the largest oxyfuel demonstration plant in the world. Swedish energy company Vattenfall plans to trial a 250MW oxyfuel boiler at Jänschwalde in Germany, assuming that the requisite carbon capture regulations are passed by the German government. It’s worth remembering that today’s commercial-scale coal power plants produce typically anything from 1 to 2 GW, so these 200-300MW efforts are still mid-size research demonstrations. A global map of planned CCS projects can be found at the Scottish Centre for Carbon Capture and Storage’s website, while the formidable barriers facing the commercialisation of such efforts are detailed in the feature, ‘Buried trouble’ (Nature, 463, 871-873; 2010).