Caucus and Staff Reports :: March 10, 2009

The Passing of FutureGen: How the World’s Premier Clean Coal Technology Project Came to be Abandoned

Staff Report
Subcommittee on Investigations and Oversight
Committee on Science and Technology
U.S. House of Representatives

March 10, 2009

Executive Summary

When President George W. Bush announced the FutureGen initiative in February of 2003, he described it as a 10-year, $1 billion, government/private partnership to build a coal-based, zero-emissions electricity and hydrogen producing power plant. It would provide the American people and the world with advanced technologies that would help meet the world's energy needs, and would improve the global environment for future generations. Spencer Abraham, then-Secretary of the Department of Energy (DOE), went even further. This "bold step" would turn coal from an "environmentally challenging energy resource into an environmentally benign one" and demonstrate the best technologies the world had to offer.

The plant would not use traditional coal technology, but would be an integrated gasification combined cycle/carbon capture and storage (IGCC/CCS) facility built at the commercial scale of 275 megawatts. It would sequester one million metric tons of carbon dioxide per year, produce both electricity and hydrogen as energy sources and demonstrate the integration of commercial and untested technologies. Its results would be shared with all participants, including international parties, industry, the environmental community and the public. International participation was a core component of the project as acceptance of the project's results were deemed necessary by the Administration for building an international consensus on the role of coal and carbon sequestration in addressing global climate change and energy security.

But in December of 2007, after a site in Illinois was selected by FutureGen's private industrial partners, the environmental impact statement required by the National Environmental Policy Act was completed, and the State of Illinois had accepted liability for the sequestration aspect of the project, then-DOE Secretary Samuel Bodman announced that he intended to restructure FutureGen. He would "maximize" the private sector role and prevent further cost escalation. The restructured FutureGen was rolled out at the end of January of 2008, but it was widely viewed as the death of the Bush initiative. Subsequent events have verified that view, as the four applications - two of which have been deemed ineligible - responding to the new competition bear no resemblance to the original FutureGen and have no capability to meet the original goals.

 Read the full staff report

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