Not so much.  Remarkable to see how a 1 hour interview gets morphed into 5 seconds of air time.  Oh well.  Will post a video link if I can track one down.

I hope it was "coal is the enemy of the human race"!

grist.org

"maddeningly stupid"

It's a start...

I couldn't quite tell how much of this is public finance and how much private.  Do you know?

If I were Illinois & Texas, and somebody said they were going to spend $1.5B in my state, I'd probably fight for it also :-)

Of course, if the US said "We've got $1B to build a pyramid", people wouldn't turn it away.

-John Mashey

Yes - all the pols love it because it's a $1.8 billion investment in their state with a lot of associated jobs - and mostly from the DOE.  But as I pointed out in my (much longer, unaired interview), if this is the only test for good policy, then we ought to just do the north korean thing and shovel coal out of the ground and then bury it in another hole.  We'd create a ton of jobs that way too.

The crux then becomes to ask the question: why are we doing this - or more broadly, does it meet some bigger policy purpose.  To the best I can tell, there are three reasons, amply discussed elsewhere on Grist:

Because we're concerned about GHG emissions.
Because we believe that coal is so cheap as to be an inevitable part of our energy future.
Because hydrogen will be a part of our energy future.

Apropos of this plant, it fails the sniff test on all of the above.  Re: the first, the question isn't whether or not it will reduce GHG (although we may ask how long that CO2 will stay under ground), but rather whether it is the most cost-effective way to reduce carbon.  It is the cost per ton of reduction that matters, not the simple fact of reduction, since we do not have infinite dollars, and a decision to preferentially invest in expensive CO2 reduction is tautologically a decision not to maximize CO2 reduction.  

Which brings us to the second question: is coal really so cheap?  At $6500/kW, this is something like 18 cents/kWh delivered.  That's not only not cheap, it's absurdly expensive. So expensive that if it were built, it would create a huge economic incentive to build lots of more cost effective GHG abatement projects, from negative cost efficiency to ~10 - 11 cent delivered wind.  Which raises the obvious question of "why not do those first?"  I've got a hard time personally not concluding tha the answer is because there's no fiscal accountability on spending DOE money.  If I was in Vegas and was able to gamble with other people's money, I'd put a lot on 17 red on the roulette wheel.  If I win, I'm a hero, and if I lose, I'll drown my sorrows in free drinks at the Celine Dion concert.  How is this project different?

So then we're left with hydrogen.  Perhaps that justifies the whole thing.  Let's look: last time I checked, the biggest market for hydrogen was margarine production.  After that, NASA (and petroleum refineries, who use it to strip out sulfur).  So let's stick with the gambling with other people's money scenario.  Would you put up $1.8 billion on the odds that we're going to see growth in the number of astronauts eating Parkay? And is that scenario more or less likely than that by the time this plant is built, there's going to be some other growth industry for hydrogen (e.g., a nationwide fueling infrastructure and hydrogen fueled vehicles that finally crack the storage problem) to justify the production.  

The word boondoggle comes to mind.  But "maddeningly stupid" was all that made it onto the tape!

Energy Cost -
The study below analyzes the costs of an advanced coal plant with the exact same features as FutureGen.  It was done by experts at Lawrence Livermore Nat'l Lab and industry and presented at the 2003 ASME power conference.

They estimate a cost/KWHr that is less than 1/3 rd of the amount claimed here.

https:/e-reports-ext.llnl.gov/pdf/244643.pdf

Funding -
$400 million is private with 8 companies involved.
Industry shares technical knowledge and risk, but never gets any payment for the power produced.  

There is wide interest in the project and costs will be reduced by payments from foreign participants.  These include partners from London, Sydney, Beijing and Melbourne.
I'm not sure why this is being italicized but they are my words.

Hydrogen -
Hydrogen isn't a final product (although it could be drawn off).  IGCC means Integrated Gasification Combined Cycle.  The gasification process produces a "Syngas" consisting of hydrogen and carbon monoxide.  The CO is then reacted with water to make additional hydrogen.  The hydrogen is burned to spin a gas turbine.  Waste heat from the exhaust is captured by a heat exchanger and runs a low-pressure steam turbine.   [combined cycle gas & steam turbines]

It is an efficient process, even after the energy used to separate the gases is included.

A big advantage of the process is that by converting all fuel into gases, it is easier to cleanup unwanted by-products.  They  expect to capture all the CO2, 99% of Sulfur and 90% of mercury.  Also, instead of loose, useless fly ash, it makes a glassy slag that is strong enough to use in pavement or construction.    

Saying that you can make 5 cent power from $1700/kW coal is like saying you can travel across country for free using nothing more than a lemon, 1 cup of crushed ice and a teleporter.

Perhaps we should set McGyver loose on FutureGen!

grist.org

"Griffin said representatives from the FutureGen Alliance were to be in Mattoon on Wednesday to begin seismic surveys of 16 square miles of land." from the Chicago Business News article, p.2

Can anyone explain why this survey was not conducted before the site was chosen?  I assume this will inform decisions about CO2 injections.  

DOE isn't having 2nd thoughts, they wanted the project ~6 years ago. How quickly it goes up depends on what is in appropriations bills between now and 2012.  

The 'bonkers' data are the calculations done by steam engineers for every power plant built in the last 80 years.  Steam tables, pressure drops, inlet temperatures, all to calculate efficiencies.  Typically, when a plant is finished, tests must prove the system meets guaranteed efficiencies, or the final payment will be reduced per the contract.  So it is safe to say- the numbers are solid and the result of a proven process.

Efficiencies don't change, regardless of construction costs.  And that study is for a 400 MW unit rather than the 275 MW station being built.

DOE & fossil energy producers have shot themselves in the foot with the timing.  They had no urgency to build anything with Bush stalling and Congress passive for 6 years.  They waited for them to make things more friendly, delay pollution restrictions, and avoid new construction that would require tighter emission standards.  

Now AGW, the 'other problem,' comes at them hard and they aren't ready.  They should have gotten lower bids during a business lull, now they must pay top dollar.  As a result, the plant is smaller than previously proposals and some reports suggest it won't contain everything in the earlier versions.

The 5 - 6 cent /KWe estimate is the theoretical production cost from a mature technology.  If the concept works, the costs would decline for additional plants.