No Future for FutureGen
January 30th, 2008 at 5:23 pm
It was a minor part of a forgettable speech, but President Bush touched on his second-favorite fossil fuel during Monday’s State of the Union Address: coal. “Let us fund new technologies that can generate coal power while capturing carbon emissions,” he said to applause.
How ironic then that the day after Bush’s soft-focus call to action, his Department of Energy pulled out of its signature “clean coal” project. Years in the making, the optimistically-named FutureGen coal-fired power plant was Big Coal’s answer to climate change - a “zero-emissions” plant that would capture carbon and store it underground. Coal-burning utilities, including TXU (now Luminant, et al), talked the project up endlessly.
States fiercely competed to win the project, with Mattoon, llinois besting runners-up Odessa and Jewett, Texas last year. Environmentalists suspected that FutureGen was little more than an expensive greenwashing tactic to delay real action to curb carbon emissions from coal. They’ve been proved partially right. The AP:
The Department of Energy, after weeks of complaining about rising costs, told members of Illinois’ congressional delegation that it wants out of the project. Three-quarters of the money was to have come from the agency, with the rest from power and coal companies in the alliance.
Illinois power-brokers are royally pissed, but Texas smells opportunity. The AP again:
And Texas Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison seemed poised to try to swoop in and snag some of whatever clean-coal project the DOE might now have in mind.
“With the overall cost of FutureGen nearly doubling, the Department of Energy is wise to review the project to ensure the best use of taxpayer dollars,” said Hutchison spokesman Matt Mackowiak.
“The state of Texas and our private industry have a lot to offer if DOE decides to competitively bid this project,” he said.
Meanwhile, coal is cooking the planet. Hands-down, the black rock is the most carbon-intensive fuel for generating electricity available. Globally, coal power pumps almost 10 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year. More important, if all the plants on the drawing board are built they will, by 2030, emit more carbon than all the coal burned since the advent of the Industrial Revolution, according to Scientific American. That scenario will doom any effort to halt runaway climate change. And them’s the facts.
Yet, the utilities and their friends in Washington - and Austin - have little to offer other than a half-baked boondoggle that has descended into an interstate squabble over pork-rich scraps.
January 31st, 2008 at 8:05 am
The new mini-project approach to “coal power(sic)” is theoretically better but lends itself to even more proliferation of pork-barrel outlay with likely zero results to show for the expenditure. Think a few dozen “earmarks”.
The underlying problem here is that synthesizing fuel from coal, capturing the carbon dioxide, sequestering it, and, then, disposing of or further refining the other myriad by-products (from toxic waste to non-leaded paint for toys), in addition to just mining, milling, and transporting many different grades and types of coal, constitutes thousands, probably tens of thousands, of chemical engineering problems, not to mention a like number of international intellectual property matters.
The “turn-key” or “public/private partnership” (public credit, private application) project favored by land-speculators, bond-lawyers, and paper-hangers, otherwise known as the “utility industry” in Texas is not suitable for that maze. Thus, the FuturGen macro-boondoggle has already proven unsound. The STNP or just about anything involving Texas government (in Austin or Washington) and more complex than black-top farm-to-market roads have not fared well. this is not news.
I could talk about the 1950’s-vintage “Manhattan Project” to cure cancer (UT MD Anderson), but I won’t.
The government-owned, contractor-operated (military-industrial-academic) “defense plant industry”. Even the exceptions, Los Alamos during WWII and NASA-MSC, make another point: These, at best, were ad hoc re-assembly of WW-I vintage German Army projects already decades-old when we took them up. They were, in effect, finished off exploitatively in a Hell-for-leather “arms race” with no thought at all of economic sustainability.
Curiously, the failed Soviet moon project and the French ordnance sector have had the only commercially sustainable industrial derivatives of the German atomic bomb and rocketry initiatives of WW-I.
The most successful project in the US “GOCO” style of project is the F-16, but maybe or maybe not the F-35. The F-16 is older than some of the pilots now learning to fly it, yet, in many generations of refinement, still one of the two most practical military aircraft still in production, though, not for US armed forces.
Let me suggest that the problem of shifting from coal as a cheap fuel with high external costs to coal as a feed-stock to which value can be added through technology and distributed efficiently in global markets is something like desiging, building, integrating, and then maintaining diesel engines.
It takes generations of meticulous and extensive science, craft, and art, some of which is very small scale, some of which is very large-scale, some of which is essentially military but most of which is commercial, and all of which is intimately woven together.
Today, a small, high-speed diesel engine with variable-geometry aspiration and microelectronic fuel-injection burning di-methyl ether and hybridized with an hydaulic or electrical capacitor is the most efficient and least toxic form of transportation on this planet, net, net, net.
It is not produced in Texas and you cannot buy it here. We still subsidize mohair for the purpose of propping up rural car dealers selling trucks with WW-II-vintage gasoline engines fueled by WW-II vintage refineries and, now, WW-I vintage agricultural subsidies.
That is not even a Grisham novel, more like a Foxworthy joke.
There is a little “pet-coke” project in Fort Bend County which may be the closest thing to a break-through and something to seed larger-scale developments in Texas.
I think that covering what I smile at calling the “organic” style of moving to fuel from coal coal as fuel might be a uniquely Texas and highly interesting story.
Texas has been moving from petrochemical refining to petrochemical systhesis for decades. The industry gets more efficient and less toxic as it does so. Global market competition and technology collaboration have helped.
Our “Mississippi with good roads” political culture, based on “extractive industry”, not real industry, has not helped much with either economic/technical progress or social/environmental mitigation.
The literary, political, and economic challenge for the Observer, or the Monthly, is making a good Texas story intersting. John Grisham can beat us with the bad, cornpone-lawyers-gone-wild, story from his outpost in Oxford, Mississippi.