USA: White House dumps support for ‘clean coal’

On Feb. 3, the Department of Energy announced it was withdrawing support. Environmentalists who want investment in renewable power technologies rather than fossil energy cheered the decision. “We don’t need it, and we can’t afford it,” Bruce Nilles, head of the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal campaign, says of carbon-capture projects

The White House Walks Away from Clean Coal A $1 billion Illinois project, meant to be the poster child for coal’s climate-friendly future, gets scuttled. Bloomberg, Feb 15, 2015 Jim Snyder Mark Drajem Matthew Philips

On the banks of the Illinois River, about 60 miles west of the state capital in Springfield, an old coal-fired power plant sits waiting for its future to arrive. First opened in 1948, it’s been dormant since 2011, when its owner, St. Louis-based Ameren, shut down the plant rather than retrofit it to meet federal standards. Last year workers came to give it a makeover. Using almost $1 billion in stimulus money, the project was supposed to become the poster child for clean-coal technology. Rather than spewing into the sky, the carbon dioxide produced as the plant burned coal would be captured into a pipeline buried below corn and soybean fields. It would run 30 miles east to Jacksonville, where the gas would be injected 4,000 feet underground. “It was like we were the phoenix rising,” says the plant’s director, Mike Long.

The resurrection was short-lived. On Feb. 3, the Department of Energy announced it was withdrawing support. Environmentalists who want investment in renewable power technologies rather than fossil energy cheered the decision. “We don’t need it, and we can’t afford it,” Bruce Nilles, head of the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal campaign, says of carbon-capture projects……

The Illinois project, called FutureGen, was supposed to be a model for coal’s climate-friendly future. It was backed by some of the world’s biggest coal mining companies, who created a nonprofit, the FutureGen Industrial Alliance, to oversee the plant’s conversion. The White House saw FutureGen as a way to show leaders in China and India, where coal fuels more than half of electricity generation, that they can address their own carbon emissions without compromising economic growth. About 40 percent of man-made carbon emissions come from power plants……http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2015-02-14/the-white-house-walks-away-from-clean-coal

February 20, 2015 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | Uncategorized

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