Clean coal: Welcome to Illinois

As a life-long resident of a coal-rich state, I’m very happy that the new Future Gen plant is going to be built here. I’m a little concerned as to its practicality, but this kind of experimentation is very important these days. Here’s the deal: This plant will use coal gasification technology. You can read more online, but the short version is that the coal is broken down chemically in a way that produces lots of hydrogen and other combustible gasses, while allowing carbon dioxide to be captured in a liquid that can be pumped into the ground.

The test plant is going to be built in Mattoon, IL, where rock formations are particularly well suited to this experiment. The plant itself is 275 MW (which is small relative to conventional generating plants) but it will be hugely expensive. Estimates seem to be rising daily, but right now they’re at about $1.8 billion. President Bush is already saying the price may be getting a little too high, so it will be critical to see how this works out. It will be interesting to see who gets the job of providing the plant operating systems. It could be years before we find out.

This technology needs to be tried, and the experiment is probably worth it within reason. Nobody has tried carbon sequestration on this scale before, and promoters are very interested to see how well the CO2 stays in the ground. Some may percolate back to the surface (Shall we say burp? It sounds like we’re pumping seltzer into the ground.) but how much, nobody knows. The larger issue is whether this approach will be practical on a larger scale or an interesting bit of environmental window dressing the utilities can point to as old plants continue to run full tilt. For my money, I’ll go with modernized nuke plants, coal notwithstanding.