Route 16 through Mattoon has been lined with signs declaring support for FutureGen.
Unfortunately in January of 2008 the Department of Energy canceled funding for FutureGen, citing cost overruns and budgetary challenges.
FORBES: Is The Next Big Climate Change Solution Just Vaporware?
The hydrogen produced in a fully integrated, combined-cycle plant like FutureGen promises to be 25% cheaper than today's hydrogen.
FutureGen was scheduled for 2012, but has now been scrapped in favour of several smaller projects that have yet to be selected.
FutureGen would be a near zero-emissions plant that converted coal into hydrogen, to power electric turbines, and carbon dioxide, to be pumped underground.
Though it appears to all intents and purposes like a state-of-the-art power station, FutureGen is actually a huge hydrogen production facility in disguise.
While there have been subsequent announcements that the project will be restructured and restarted (FutureGen 2.0), its collapse opened it up to broad criticism.
FORBES: Is The Next Big Climate Change Solution Just Vaporware?
After FutureGen foundered, China broke ground on its own version: GreenGen.
America's lawmakers went a step further, and agreed to insure the proposed FutureGen plant and to indemnify the firms behind it from all lawsuits arising from leaks.
The agency also claims the new scheme will at least double the amount of carbon dioxide sequestered, compared with FutureGen, and that the new plants will be operating by 2015.
The more benign interpretation is that FutureGen-like projects are well intentioned, but that developing effective CCS is more challenging than expected and unlikely to produce results quick enough to stave off unwanted climate disruption.
FORBES: Is The Next Big Climate Change Solution Just Vaporware?
应用推荐