Energy Department Teams With Consortium
.............. to Build Model 'Clean-Coal' Plant
WASHINGTON -- The Department of Energy has signed an agreement with an international consortium to build a $950 million prototype for a new generation of coal-fired power plants that remove pollutants including carbon dioxide and produce hydrogen as well as electricity.
The plant, called FutureGen, is scheduled to be built by 2012. If it works, it will further one of the Bush administration's main policy goals: to reduce reliance on imported oil and natural gas by using technology to clean up and increase the use of coal, a fuel the U.S. has in abundance.
The agency is set today to announce that a group of eight companies, including major coal and electricity producers, will contribute $250 million toward the project. The plant will produce 250 megawatts of electricity -- the output of a medium-sized power plant -- as well as hydrogen, which could be sold to power future cars and trucks or sent to oil refineries to upgrade petroleum products. And some of the pollutants removed from the coal, which would be gasified, may also be sold as byproducts, according to the agency.
Sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides, which cause acid rain and urban smog, can be turned into fertilizers and "soil enhancers," the department stated. The plant will separate carbon dioxide, a gas thought to be one of the major causes of global warming, and inject it into deep underground rock formations. The project will test it to determine if it will remain there indefinitely.
"No other power plant in the world has been built with this capability," says a draft version of the department's announcement, expected today. The companies backing the project, called the FutureGen Industrial Alliance, will pick a site to construct the facility by 2007. The department's goal is to capture 90% of the plant's carbon dioxide once it begins operation and later raise that to 100% using "advanced technologies." DOE projections estimate the plant's cost of cleaning up coal and burying the carbon dioxide will add only about 10% to today's electricity prices.
Members of the alliance are American Electric Power, of Columbus, Ohio; Southern Co., of Atlanta; Consol Energy Inc., of Pittsburgh; Foundation Coal, of Linthicum Heights, Md.; Kennecott Energy, of Gillette, Wyo.; Peabody Energy Corp., of St. Louis; China Huaneng Group, of Beijing; and BHP Billiton Ltd., of Melbourne, Australia.
China Huaneng is China's largest producer of coal-fired power. BHP Billiton is a major Australian coal producer. Both countries, like the U.S., have huge reserves of coal and depend on them to produce most of their electricity.
The technique of gasifying coal has been known and used for decades. The Carter administration launched a $1 billion program in the late 1970s to build a plant near Beulah, N.D., that was designed to produce synthetic methane, a form of natural gas, out of cheap lignite coal. The plant, described as a "coal refinery," was sold by the Reagan administration to a local electric-power company in 1988, when it failed to produce a product that could compete economically with natural gas.
The FutureGen plant, according to DOE officials, will "leapfrog" that plant's technology by using less-expensive processes that produce hydrogen to make electricity or to sell as fuel. It will also feature newer and cheaper ways to separate carbon dioxide from other byproducts.