Dallas – Texas and Illinois will compete for the world’s first near-zero-emissions coal power plant, a $1 billion project headed by the U.S. Department of Energy and a consortium of 10 energy companies from the United States, China and Australia.
The Energy Department and the consortium announced Tuesday that two sites from each state will vie for the project, known as FutureGen. The plant is designed to turn coal into a hydrogen-rich gas to produce electricity for about 275,000 single-family homes.
The project dates from 2003 when President Bush announced the need for FutureGen to address global warming and touted technologies that would capture carbon dioxide for other uses.
Those include fertilizers or liquefying the gas to inject it into old oil wells and push remaining oil or natural gas to the surface.
The process would not release into the atmosphere the pollutants usually associated with coal-burning plants, such as carbon dioxide. Scientists have cited the burning of fossil fuels as one of the main causes of global warming.
Mattoon and Tuscola, Ill., and Jewett and Odessa, Texas, beat out eight other candidates. The winner will be announced in September 2007 and will be operating a facility deemed the “ultimate power plant” almost five years later. Gillette, Wyo., was one of the cities that didn’t make the cut.
“This project makes coal, one of the most abundant fossil energies in the world, available in the future in the face of growing concern over greenhouse gas emissions and climate change,” said Jeff Jarrett, the Energy Department’s assistant secretary of fossil energy.
Plans call for the 275-megawatt plant to capture most of its emissions of carbon dioxide and inject them permanently into underground reservoirs, a process called sequestration.
The FutureGen Alliance has already committed more than $250 million to the project.
