"Clean Coal" Project Abandoned

In Major Reversal, Administration Abandons 'Clean Coal' Project as Too Expensive. By Stephen Power, Rebecca Smith and Jeffrey Ball, WSJournal, January 31, 2008. "The Bush administration, in a major policy reversal, canceled its support for [the] planned $1.8 billion coal-gasification plant, FutureGen Industrial Alliance, that was supposed to herald a new era of emissions-free power but instead has been plagued by huge cost overruns. The move may kill the project by shifting most of the cost to an industry consortium whose exposure was expected to be capped at $400 million. The decision by the DOE represents a blow to coal producers and coal-burning utilities which had hoped to use the demonstration plant to test 'clean-coal' technologies. The Bush administration had promoted the project as part of a broader effort to keep coal as part of the nation's fuel mix by finding ways to burn it more cleanly and store carbon-dioxide emissions. Under the project... the government was to support the construction of a nearly pollution-free coal plant that would have turned coal into hydrogen-rich synthetic gas for generating electricity while pumping [CO2] underground for permanent storage."