3 Years After Inaugural Hype, "Future Gen" Coal Plan Due For 2012 Debut

WASHINGTON - Three years after he first announced it, the centerpiece of President Bush's plan to produce electricity from coal without adding to global warming is finally getting under way. But it's off to a small start. Like the war in Iraq, success will come to the billion-dollar project, if ever, long after Bush leaves the White House. Critics say the effort, known as "FutureGen," is too little and too late.

The goal of FutureGen is to demonstrate a new kind of electric power plant that will capture the carbon dioxide (CO2) emitted by burning coal and keep it out of the atmosphere permanently. CO2 is the principal "greenhouse gas" blamed for the ominous increase in the Earth's temperature.

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On March 8, the Energy Department asked the eight power companies in the FutureGen Industrial Alliance, including one in China, to propose sites for a demonstration coal power plant. At least 10 states have already expressed an interest in hosting it. The site proposals are due in May. Environmental analysis will take a year, and a winner will be selected in the fall of 2007. The plant won't begin operating until 2012.

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FutureGen is estimated to cost $962 million, with $250 million coming from the coal industry, $80 million from foreign contributors, and the rest from the federal government. The plant is supposed to generate 275 megawatts of electricity, enough to heat 150,000 homes. That's only a trickle in the world's demand for electric power. The United States alone consumes more than a billion megawatts of electricity.

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http://www.duluthsuperior.com/mld/duluthsuperior/news/politics/14193250.htm

Take that, melting Greenland! Take that, drowning polar bears! We'll be sequestering thousands of tons of CO2 . . . someday . . .

If you build one, then all coal plants after have to meet that clean standard. You can also burn high sulfur coal this way. Coal is going to be part of our electric generation. It should be done as cleanly as possible. Bushco and big energy are dragging their feet.