FutureGen Dead Again: Obama Pulls Plug On NeverGen Clean Coal Projectby Joe Romm Posted on February 5, 2015 at 9:09 am708Share This 105Tweet This "FutureGen Dead Again: Obama Pulls Plug On NeverGen Clean Coal Project"Share:

CREDIT: APThe U.S. Department of Energy has finally pulled the plug on FutureGen 2.0, which was an attempt to reboot a failed Bush-era clean coal project. The final death of this troubled 12-year effort to capture CO2 from a coal power plant and bury it underground is more evidence that we shouldnt expect large-scale deployment of carbon capture and storage (CCS) before the 2030s at the earliest.This post will review the ongoing challenges that CCS (aka carbon capture and sequestration) has had, why FutureGen died twice, and why CCS is unlikely to provide more than 10 percent of the answer to the carbon problem by 2050 especially if the coal industry maintains its suicidal indifference to responding to climate change.The original goal of FutureGen, a $1.7 billion public-private venture launched by President Bush in 2003, was to design, construct, and operate a nominal 275-megawatt prototype plant that produces electricity and hydrogen with near-zero emissions, with the electricity less than 10 percent higher in cost compared to nonsequestered systems all by 2020. Aside from the unrealistic goals, the program was badly structured, with confusion about whether it was a research project or a demonstration, as the AP summarized a 2007 MIT study led by Prof. Ernie Moniz (who is now Obamas Secretary of Energy).The project was so mismanaged and over-budget it was dubbed NeverGen by energy experts and the Bush administration itself killed it for a while.In 2009, Harvards Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs published a major study, Realistic Costs of Carbon Capture. The paper concluded that first-of-a-kind CCS plants will have acosts of carbon abatement of some $150/tCO2 avoided (with a range $120-180/tCO2avoided), excluding transport and storage costs. This yields a levelised cost of electricity on a 2008 basis [that] is approximately 10 cents/kWh higher with capture than for conventional plants roughly doubling the cost of power from a new coal plant!In 2010, the Obama Administration restructured the moribund project as FutureGen 2.0 specifically aimed at retrofitting an existing coal plant in Illinois to capture 90 percent of its carbon pollution allocating $1.1 billion in stimulus money for the effort (see full Futuregen history here). Obviously it would be vastly more useful to have a CCS technology that could capture and store the CO2 from the flue gas post-combustion produced by thousands of existing coal plants, than to have CCS technology that works only on newly designed plants.But that technology was even further from commercialization at scale and necessarily involves capturing CO2 that is far more dilute. As a U.S. Department of Energyreport had pointed out:Existing CO2 capture technologies are not cost-effective when considered in the context of large power plants. Economic studies indicate that carbon capture will add over 30% to the cost of electricity for new integrated gasification combined cycle (IGCC) units and over 80% to the cost of electricity if retrofitted to existing pulverised coal (PC) units. In addition, the net electricity produced from existing plants would be significantly reduced often referred to as parasitic loss since 20-30% of the power generated by the plant would have to be used to capture and compress the CO2.Probably the core reason for the super slow development of CCS for both new and existing power plants has been the lackluster interest and investment by the private sector. Given how very expensive early-stage CCS is, jump-starting accelerated development and deployment of CCS requires:1. a significant and rising price on carbon dioxide to make CCS profitable or 2. massive subsidies by the federal government or3. serious investment and financing by the private sector or4. some combination of those three things.But when the coal industry (and the rest of the fossil fuel industry) helped kill off the big Waxman-Markey climate bill that had passed the House in mid-2009, they effectively eliminated any chance of the first two happening. When the climate bill died, so did the the chance for a predictably rising price for CO2, which is the vital incentive for CCS. Killing the bill also killed the incentives for near-term deployment of CCS that might have exceeded $100 billion (!), which again were vital to jump-starting the entire effort.The fact is the only hope for the coal industry (at least in a world that does not itself suicidally ignore climate change) is an immediate, very well-funded effort to demonstrate and deploy carbon capture and storage, as I wrote in December 2008 [see the coal industry chooses (assisted) suicide]. But the coal industry has never been willing to put up much money, as we have documented.The only reason FutureGen was temporarily resuscitated in 2010 was the money included in Obamas economic stimulus bill for clean coal a bill the fossil fuel industry and conservatives fought against. National Journal reports that of the $1.1 billion in stimulus cash, DOE has spent $116.5 million since 2010 for work on the power plant, and another $86 million was spent on the underground site envisioned for carbon storage and related infrastructure,The DOE realized it had to pull the plug saving taxpayers nearly $1 billion once they concluded that there is insufficient time to complete the project before federal funding expires in September 2015, according to Kenneth Humphrey, CEO of the private-industry side of the project, FutureGen Alliance.Significantly, the AP reports on a letter sent to DOEs Moniz, where Humphrey expressed profound disappointment over the decision, and further noting the $9 million spent by the state of Illinois on the project and $25 million spent by private companies.So DOE and the state have spent more than $210 million on a project whose primary aim is to save the coal industry in a carbon-constrained world but industry has spent a mere $25 million. On top of that, Moniz told Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) the FutureGen Alliance was unable to secure the private financing necessary to meet the conditions of the project.If the coal and power industry wont provide serious support for CCS and cant get private financing, the technology is unlikely to make major advances any time soon. Indeed, outside of China, large-scale CCS projects are on the decline. In October 2013, the New York Times summarized the state of CCS with this headline, Study Finds Setbacks in Carbon Capture Projects. The Times reported that, the technology for capturing carbon has not been proved to work on a commercial scale, either in the United States or abroad.As that story noted, one major CCS demonstration at a West Virginia coal plant was shut down in 2011 because it could not sell the carbon dioxide or recover the extra cost from its electricity customers, and the equipment consumed so much energy that, at full scale, the project would have sharply cut electricity production. Doh!The 2013 survey by the the Global CCS Institute found that while C.C.S. projects are progressing, the pace is well below the level required for C.C.S. to make a substantial contribution to climate change mitigation. The 2014 survey by the Institute found continued progress, but concluded, the data on large-scale CCS projects highlights two other areas requiring increased attention by policymakers the lack of projects in non-OECD economies (outside of China) and the lack of progress in CCS technology development in high carbon intensive industries such as cement, iron and steel and chemicals.Readers who want more background on CCS might read three pieces I wrote for The Economist in a 2011 online debate explaining why CCS cant possibly be a stand-alone solution and why we are a long way away from CCS even making a substantial contribution: Climate-Control Policies Cannot Rely on CCS Large-Scale CCS: Feasibility, Permanence and Safety Issues Remain Unresolved Economist Debate Concludes /li> One key problem is the daunting scale of the challenge, as Vaclav Smil explained in Energy at the Crossroads:Sequestering a mere 1/10 of todays global CO2 emissions (less than 3 Gt CO2) would thus call for putting in place an industry that would have to force underground every year the volume of compressed gas larger than or (with higher compression) equal to the volume of crude oil extracted globally by [the] petroleum industry whose infrastructures and capacities have been put in place over a century of development. Needless to say, such a technical feat could not be accomplished within a single generation.No doubt thats why the pro-CCS debater, Barry Jones wrote:The international community aims to deliver 20 demonstration projects by 2020, applying CCS to various kinds of industrial sectors. The idea is that CCS then becomes a commercial reality and begins to make deep cuts in emissions during the 2030s.Ahh, if only the climate had two decades to wait.CCS simply hasnt yet proven to be practical, affordable, scalable, and ready to be ramped up rapidly. CCS certainly remains worth pursuing in terms of R&D and demonstration if industry will provide serious support and financing with the hope it can be, say, 10 percent of the solution by 2050. But as the International Energy Agency has concluded: On planned policies, rising fossil energy use will lead to irreversible and potentially catastrophic climate change Delaying action is a false economy: for every $1 of investment in cleaner technology that is avoided in the power sector before 2020, an additional $4.30 would need to be spent after 2020 to compensate for the increased emissions.So the lack of commercial CCS for the foreseeable future is no excuse whatsoever to delay rapid deployment of the myriad carbon-free technologies available today that are commercial and practical.Tags: Carbon Capture and Sequestration Climate Change CoalBy clicking and submitting a comment I acknowledge the ThinkProgress Privacy Policy and agree to the ThinkProgress Terms of Use. I understand that my comments are also being governed by Facebook, Yahoo, AOL, or Hotmails Terms of Use and Privacy Policies as applicable, which can be found here.

http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2015/02/05/3619195/futuregen-clean-coal-project-dead/

Green Tech 7/02/2013 @ 4:11PM 2,494 views An Obama Proposal To Fund 'Clean' Fossil Fuel TechnologiesComment Now

The U.S. Department of Energy is floating a proposal to offer up to $8 billion in loan guarantees for fossil fuel technology projects that reduce the greenhouse gas emissions, the government said Tuesday.Those projects could involve coal, natural gas, or oil production, waste heat recovery or carbon dioxide capture and sequestration. The proposal, which is open to public comment for 60 days, is offering a substantial help to the fossil fuel industry and a departure from the administrations previous major loan guarantee program that focused on renewable energy technology and electric cars.Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz announced the new loan guarantee program just a week after President Obama laid out a plan to support clean power generation and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The plan includes tighter regulations to lower emissions from existing fossil fuel power plants.Coal and fossil fuels still provide 80% of our energy and 70% of electricity, and they will remain an important part of our future, as the president noted, Moniz told reporters during a conference call on Tuesday. Any serious effort (to deal with climate change) will be important to include deploying fossil sources as cleanly as possible.Some renewable energy advocates would rather see a gradual closure of fossil fuel power plants, especially ones that burn coal, and replacing them with renewable sources such as wind and solar. The new loan guarantee program would help the fossil fuel industry deal with the tougher emission regulations that the president referred to last week and likely prolong our reliance on fossil fuels as the primary energy sources.The energy department has issued a draft proposal for the program and is looking for suggestions that could end up expanding the types of technologies that would be eligible for a loan guarantee. The department plans to finalize the proposal and issue a formal request for project proposals this fall. In the previous loan guarantee program that focused on renewable energy, the federal government would either issue a loan guarantee and also offer the loan itself, or guarantee part of a loan offered by private financial institutions.The previous program has issued about $34.4 billion in loan guarantees and commitments to offer guarantees for 33 projects. Its recipients included Solyndra and its failed attempt to stay competitive in the solar market and Tesla Motors which has repaid its loan earlyhttp://www.forbes.com/sites/uciliawang/2013/07/02/an-obama-proposal-to-fund-fossil-fuel-technologies/

Green Tech 4/30/2015 @ 7:49PM 6,721 views First Solar's Disappointing Earnings and Budding Relationship WithCaterpillarComment Now Follow Comments Two things stood out in First Solar's FSLR -2.08% earnings report on Thursday: it posted disappointing first quarter numbers, and it plans to make Caterpillar CAT -0.8%-branded solar panels for the industrial equipment giant.First, the bad news. First Solar warned earlier this year that it would likely post lower revenues and losses for the first quarter mainly because it was starting to keep some solar power generation projects instead of selling them. First Solar is keep them around because it plans to create a yieldco called 8Point3 Energy Partners, which is set to become a public company that will hold power plants and issues dividends regularly.A growing number of renewable energy companies are creating yieldcos primarily as another source of funding for building power plants. Theres also an investor sentiment that a yieldco will generate more value over time for these companies shareholders than if the companies were to focus only on building and selling power plants. Some of First Solars competitors, such as SunEdison, have created yieldcos within the past two years.

First Solars Topaz Solar Project in Californias Carrizo Plain.But First Solar missed its forecast, reporting $0.62 per share in losses on $469 million in sales instead of $0.25-$0.35 per share in losses on $550-$650 million in sales. Delays in project permitting and completion also contributed to the poorer financial results.SunPower SPWR -2.91%, which is First Solars partner in creating that yieldco, on Thursday also reported losses for the first quarter. The two companies filed an initial public offering of 8Point3 Energy Partners in March and have yet to price the shares.First Solar also announced Thursday that it will produce solar panels for Caterpillar to sell through its dealers in Asia Pacific, Latin America and Africa. This news, issued before the company released its earnings, gave investors something positive to look at.Whether the deal is significant isnt clear yet. First Solar will be selling solar energy systems to Caterpillar, which plans to sell them in places with no electric grids or unreliable electricity supplies from local utilities. Caterpillarcreated a business unit called the electric power division last fall, and First Solar plans to deliver equipment to that divisions customers.First Solars CEO, Jim Hughes, told analysts Thursday that he wont be able to get a clear idea of the demand for First Solars products until Caterpillar dealers start to sell them. Caterpillar plans to market First Solars systems along with other equipment for building microgrids, which are so called because they use batteries or other types of energy storage systems to manage solar energy use and in doing so create a mini electric grid within a larger grid. Energy storage equipment could bank unused solar electricity for use for when solar panels arent producing electricity.Some microgrids also use diesel generators, which can be more expensive to run than solar but provide more reliable power generation, to fill up the batteries in case solar energy production falls short of demand.http://www.forbes.com/sites/uciliawang/2015/04/30/first-solars-disappointing-earnings-and-budding-relationship-with-caterpillar/2/

Before Solyndra, a long history of failed government energy projectsBy Steven Mufson November 12, 2011 Follow @StevenMufson Solyndra, the solar-panel maker that received more than half a billion dollars in federal loans from the Obama administration only to go bankrupt this fall, isnt the first dud for U.S. government officials trying to play venture capitalist in the energy industry.The Clinch River Breeder Reactor. The Synthetic Fuels Corporation. The hydrogen car. Clean coal. These are but a few examples spanning several decades a graveyard of costly and failed projects.Not a single one of these much-ballyhooed initiatives is producing or saving a drop or a watt or a whiff of energy, but they have managed to burn through far more more taxpayer money than the ill-fated Solyndra. An Energy Department report in 2008 estimated that the federal government had spent $172 billion since 1961 on basic research and the development of advanced energy technologies.What does Washington have to show for these investments? And should the government even be in the business of promoting particular energy technologies?Some economists, executives and financiers as well as Energy Secretary Steven Chu argue that the government must play a role because certain technologies have non-financial benefits, such as producing fewer greenhouse gas emissions or easing U.S. reliance on foreign oil. The semiconductor industry is often held up as a model of how government money can help build a new type of economy.But others argue that the history of government attempts to reach for the holy grail of new energy technology a history that features both political parties is not inspiring. Were making very large bets, and the decisions seem to be more grounded in politics and geography than in engineering and science, said Michael Graetz, a professor at Columbia Law School and the author of The End of Energy. Consider the saga of the Clinch River Breeder Reactor.In 1971, President Richard Nixon set a goal of building an experimental nuclear power plant. The Clinch River reactor was supposed to be a sort of perpetual motion machine, producing power as well as plutonium that could be used in other plants.Private utilities agreed to kick in $175million, less than half of the $400million that the Atomic Energy Commission estimated it would cost to build. As expenses ballooned, the government covered all the overruns. The project was criticized by activists and scientists worried about the risk of nuclear weapons proliferation. Cheap uranium undercut it.After President Ronald Reagan was elected, Clinch River survived the first round of his spending cuts, in part out of deference to Senate Majority Leader Howard Baker (R-Tenn.), a strong supporter of the reactor, which was in his home state. But finally, in 1983, with the Congressional Budget Office saying the cost might exceed $4 billion, Congress terminated the program. Blueprints had been drawn up, modeling done, components ordered and some ground cleared, but the reactor was never built. The price tag for the federal government: $1.7 billion ($3.9 billion in todays dollars).Then there was the Synthetic Fuels Corporation.President Jimmy Carter called it the keystone of U.S. energy policy; Congress authorized $17 billion for it to act as a sort of investment bank, funding projects that would turn plentiful U.S. coal and shale into oil and gas. Carter set a goal of producing 2 million barrels a day of synfuels by 1990.Not quite. A handful of coal and auto companies tapped the new funds to build a facility that was intended to produce 50,000 barrels a day, the first of what was supposed to be a network of synfuel plants, many on federal lands. But after oil prices leveled off, then fell, in the early 1980s, the project was not economically sound, even with government help. The private partners pulled out.Congress ousted the corporations president in 1983 after the entity was accused of handing out money for political reasons. In 1986 the corporation closed down. It had spent $2 billion (more than $4 billion in todays dollars).This sort of industrial policy fell out of favor in the Reagan era and into the 1990s, but then it returned, as fears of climate change spawned new clean energy ideas.President George W. Bush had his own pet projects. In his 2003 State of the Union address, he called for a new national commitment to work toward hydrogen-powered vehicles so that our scientists and engineers will overcome obstacles to taking these cars from laboratory to showroom.But on the road to the showroom, the hydrogen car made a wrong turn. From 2004 through 2008, the federal government poured $1.2 billion into hydrogen vehicle projects; the Government Accountability Office noted that about a quarter of that money went to congressionally directed projects outside the initiatives original research and development scope. Visitors to General Motors outside Detroit could drive a vehicle powered by hydrogen, but the technology was costly, and there was no infrastructure to support the vehicles. They died in development.The clean coal movement has been no more successful. Politicians on both sides of the aisle have sought to put money into efforts that would make coal more appealing by taking its greenhouse emissions and burying them. After a carbon-capture project in Alaska burned through $117 million during the 1990s, Republican lawmakers tried to give the moribund project another $125 million in 2005. Just this year, the utility AEP, one of the nations largest emitters of carbon dioxide, abandoned a pilot project because it was too expensive even though the Energy Department was willing to kick in $334 million, half the expected cost. A North Dakota project was shelved last December despite a $100 million federal grant.Bush launched what was supposed to be a $1 billion project to separate carbon dioxide from the emissions of a coal power plant in Illinois and bury the gas underground. Several years later, cost estimates have climbed, the project has been scaled back and it still hasnt broken ground. Despite this track record and the recent Solyndra failure, Energy Secretary Chu remains undeterred. Citing examples from Civil War-era railroads to airplanes to semiconductors, he has defended governments role in funding new technologies and promising companies.Americans have always led by looking ahead. Even in the midst of the Civil War, when our country was under incredible stress, we planned for the future, Chu said in September. President Lincoln signed the Pacific Railway Act of 1862, which authorized generous public financing for two private companies Union Pacific Railroad Company and Central Pacific Railroad Company to lower the investor risk in building railroads in unsettled territories. In 1869, the first Transcontinental Railroad was completed at Promontory Summit, Utah, revolutionizing transport in this country and opening up a world of possibilities for industry.Enter Stanford University professor Richard White, a historian of the American West who wrote Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America. I admire Steven Chu a great deal, but his knowledge of the Pacific Railway Act unfortunately appears to be about equal to my knowledge of high-energy physics, White said in an interview. He said the legislation produced a disaster far larger than the lifeless factory that Solyndra has left behind.White said that Union Pacific and Central Pacific became two of the most hated corporations in the West, spawning political opposition wherever they went. Within 10 years of giving them land grants and loan guarantees, the federal government reversed its policy and eventually sued to recover its investment. The litigation dragged on into the 20th century.Chu has also argued that the government should help ramp up manufacturing. He says that while the internal-combustion engine was invented in Germany, Henry Ford mastered the assembly line and made the United States the world leader in automaking. However, historians note, Ford did not receive government assistance.Some experts also question the semiconductor example, in which the government purportedly created an industry through military purchases. Jack Spencer, a nuclear power and energy expert at the Heritage Foundation, said that the Pentagon supported the semiconductor industry because it wanted to kill people better through innovation, but its goal wasnt to create commercial enterprises.Moreover, he added, if the broader marketplace hasnt created enough incentives for a new technology such as solar or wind energy to thrive, then loan guarantees or grants will only postpone the death of a company. But Chu isnt the only one who thinks the government has a role to play.David Eaglesham, chief technology officer at First Solar, a leading maker of thin-film solar panels, says government funding for basic research during the 1990s kept the company alive when it comprised about 10 guys working in Toledo. He said the Energy Departments National Renewable Energy Laboratory funded pretty much everything when it came to technology, but at low levels.Many policy experts say some of governments biggest energy investment payoffs have come in the small stuff, such as testing the use of magnesium alloys to make lightweight car batteries more efficient or developing ballasts that make compact fluorescent bulbs more efficient.Still others say that the nearly $40billion paid out by the federal government so far to subsidize corn-based ethanol is a success story; ethanol has displaced more than half a million barrels a day of petroleum. But that benefit must be weighed against whether ethanol has driven up corn prices, along with evidence that it may be worse than oil from a greenhouse gas perspective.Energy innovation is simply different from innovation in other industries, argue Edward Steinfeld and Jason Lee of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In electronics and information technology, they note in an unpublished article, the end products are cheap, consumers buy new ones every few months or years, and much of the value is captured by the front-end designer rather than the manufacturer. (Think Apple.)Energy technologies, however, are more expensive by several orders of magnitude, and they have much longer life cycles, they say. A solar panel is expected to last 20 to 25 years. Moreover, for many of these technologies, including thin-film solar, the key knowledge lies not just in upstream design, but also in learning how to produce inexpensively at high volume. Essentially, Steinfeld and Lee conclude, to pull off energy innovation successfully, you need scale.And, of course, you also need to keep innovating. As First Solars Eaglesham says, theres never the last word in technology. Doing all this requires massive sums of money and an acceptance of the inevitability of frequent failure.That could be a tough sell in Washington, given the downfall of Solyndra and the unsteady status of some other recipients of Energy Department assistance. Massachusetts-based Beacon Power, maker of a nifty and effective but unprofitable method of using flywheels for electricity storage, filed for bankruptcy on Oct. 30. Ener1, a maker of lithium-ion batteries and a recipient of an Energy Department grant, was delisted by the Nasdaq Oct. 28 because of its low stock price.Perhaps the federal government is, as former Obama economic adviser Lawrence Summers put it, a crappy VC, or venture capitalist. Or perhaps it should stick to funding basic research. But if more recipients of Energy Department loan guarantees falter, they will become part of a long, if undistinguished, history of failure.mufsons@washpost.com Steven Mufson covers energy for The Washington Post.Read more from Outlook, friend us on Facebook, and follow us on Twitter.

Steven Mufson covers the White House. Since joining The Post, he has covered economics, China, foreign policy and energy.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/before-solyndra-a-long-history-of-failed-government-energy-projects/2011/10/25/gIQA1xG0CN_story.html