Election 2008: What’s At Stake?

Oil isn’t America’s only black gold. And with the emerald glow as every candidate claims to be greener than the next, the jury is still out on the long-term future of the country’s most prevalent fossil fuel: coal.

In coal-producing Illinois, coal’s role in the environment and economy promises to play a critical role. A prototype clean coal plant, scrapped by the U.S. Department of Energy, has become a bipartisan cause celebré among state politicians, including Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) who was re-elected tonight.

Coal fires slightly more than half of the nation’s power plants that generate electricity and is found in large deposits in 16 U.S. states, including Illinois. In fact, Illinois is home to the country’s largest reported deposits of bituminous coal – the Saudi Arabia of coal. But burning coal is always a dirty process, and Illinois bituminous coal is dirtier than anthracite coal because it has a lower carbon content.

In the face of global warming, it’s no surprise that this year’s politicians are stressing clean, renewable energy. Most seem to recognize, however, that coal is cheap and won’t be falling entirely out of vogue as an energy source any time soon. These simple realities gave birth to the “clean coal” movement..

Clean coal technology focuses on burning coal cleaner and reducing carbon emissions but has been greeted derisively by many environmentalists and labor activists. They site the dirty process of coal extraction and the toll it takes on coal miners. And strip mining scars the earth at the surface, blowing the tops off mountains in some cases.

In coal’s search for a new image, one of the most significant projects in recent years has been FutureGen, a massive coal-fueled near zero-emissions prototype power plant planned for construction in Mattoon, Ill. Plans for the plant went forward for five years, with the U.S. Department of Energy pledging to cover a percentage of the project. Ballooning construction costs, however, caused the DOE to pull funding this January.

“The department’s decision to revamp FutureGen was made in order to maximize our national investment in clean-coal technology by reducing financial risk to American taxpayers and taking advantage of recent technological advancements,” DOE Press Secretary Healy Baumgardner said in an e-mail.

DOE’s plan now is to equip multiple commercial scale carbon-capture plants. That won’t be as effective as FutureGen, said Marcelyn Love, spokeswoman for the Illinois Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity. “It’s a simple fact: these projects don’t go to the extent that FutureGen would,” she said.

The new DOE Plan B wrongly assumes that new coal gasification technology is commercially viable before being tested at FutureGen, Love added, referring to power plants. “[The Plan B] also wrongly assumes that the DOE can accomplish the same goals as FutureGen in Mattoon merely by funding the CO₂ capture and storage component” of coal gasification.

FutureGen’s uncertain future (private backers are hoping the project can still be accomplished) has become an issue in Illinois’ elections. Durbin has been a proponent of FutureGen since the DOE revoked the Mattoon project’s funding.

“The next Administration needs to reinstate the FutureGen program, so that construction can begin on this innovative effort,” said Christina Angarola, Durbin’s Illinois Communications Director in an e-mail. “The FutureGen program at Mattoon, Ill., is our best hope of building and operating a near-zero-emission coal-fired power plant.”

Photo courtesy of Underclassrising.