First CO2-Free Coal Power Plant Announced

FutureGen picks Illinois for carbon-sequestering facility

Coal is almost the perfect fuel. It’s cheap and absurdly abundant—especially in the U.S., which has the world’s larges reserves. There’s just that tiny problem of massive climate-altering carbon dioxide emissions. Or is there?

The FutureGen Alliance—a coalition of private power companies and the U.S. Department of Energy—thinks it can make power cleanly by siphoning off the carbon dioxide and pumping it into underground reservoirs. The Alliance spent the past year evaluating four locations around the country that applied to host the first full-scale power plant using the technology; and today it chose Mattoon, Illinois as the winner.

Unlike a regular coal power plant, the FutureGen plant won’t actually burn coal but gasify it by exposing powdered coal to oxygen in a high-pressure heated chamber. The system yields several gases which are processed into hydrogen, which burns in a turbine to produce electricity, and carbon-dioxide, which is pumped into deep geologic formations that researchers expect to hold the gas indefinitely.  Proponents say that gasification is easier than capturing CO2 from a regular power plant because it produces it produces a smaller volume of exhaust and it easily traps most other pollutants from coal, such as Mercury.

Pop Sci reported on the FutureGen project in February 2007, and we’re anxious to see if the Alliance can make good on its bold promise.—Sean Captain

(Image Credit: Kevin Hand)

Comments

[Ari Tapper]

In reading this concept and based on our experience of the leaching of gas and chemicals stored within "Geological Formations", I cannot understand why anyone would believe they can store the gas indefinitely. What about effects of siesmic activity? Looks like this concept does not address the same major complication all combustion based energy sources experience - what to do with the spent fuel.

[Christopher]

Great comment Ari. How do we know that these are airtightly sealed? And what about it's effects deep down in the earth? We'd really be just making a huge underground bubble of poisinous gas (which seems like it would happily collapse). There's no way to get it to disappear, you _have_ to find a way to neutralize it.

[Kevin]

IGCC and Hydrogen turbines, I believe this plant configuration would be. However the key question is that the cost or $/kW of this project and how far the CO2 price would sway the econimics. Otherwise, it's a project that will have a tough future to make a decent profit.Going alone without DOE's fully support is an even higher risk.