Climate Climate & Energy

FutureGen was 'nothing more than a public relations ploy,' House study finds

In a stunning new report [PDF], two House Committees demonstrate that the Bush administration was never serious about FutureGen NeverGen, the "centerpiece" of its effort to develop "clean coal" technology. Turns out centerpieces are largely decorative.

Climate Progress has previously documented that the coal industry itself has never taken seriously the development of the one technology that could save the industry from extinction in the face of humanity's urgent need slash CO2 emissions sharply and avoid its own self-destruction [see here].

Now we learn the same was true of the Bush Administration. We learn that they killed FutureGen even after Department of Energy staff explained the implications: "affordable coal fueled CCS plants would be delayed at least 10 years" deferring "widespread deployment of CCS" until after 2030.

That means the whole "clean coal" or carbon capture and storage (CCS) effort of the past decade was an intentional fraud by all parties concerned -- and nobody should be allowed to use the absence of demonstrated CCS technology today as an excuse for weakening near-term CO2 targets or for giving the coal industry another decade to (fatally) delay serious climate action.

As the shocking House press release reveals:

In an effort to kill the FutureGen project, top officials at the Department of Energy knowingly used inaccurate project cost figures and promoted an alternative plan that career staff repeatedly warned them would not work, according to a majority staff report to Science and Technology Committee Chairman Bart Gordon (D-TN) and Investigations and Oversight Subcommittee Chairman Brad Miller (D-NC).

FutureGen was a highly-touted initiative announced by President George W. Bush in February of 2003 to demonstrate that coal could be changed from an environmentally challenging energy resource into an environmentally benign one by sequestering carbon dioxide emissions and eliminating other pollutants.... It would have been the first plant of this type in the world. But in January of 2008, former Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman pulled the plug on the project, reconfiguring it as a privately funded initiative with limited government subsidies. To date, nothing has come of this new initiative.

"To knowingly abandon a program that held out the hope of making a real impact in the effort to reduce greenhouse gases from coal in favor of another program that held out no hope at all-not commercially and not to provide technological innovation to capture and sequester carbon-is inexcusable," said Gordon. "All we have to show for 'Plan B' is lost time and an abandoned global leadership role."

"DOE officials knew that they were manipulating the numbers, and that the 'restructured' FutureGen would not accomplish what had been planned, but they went ahead anyway," said Subcommittee Chairman Miller. "In the process, they lost the participation of China and India, which are some of the largest users of coal in the world. The damage to U.S. leadership on "clean coal" technology, and climate change generally, cannot be overstated."

I had thought, like many others, that the Bush administration was simply incompetent in its management of the program (see here). But this wasn't benign neglect, it was malign neglect.

The entire report [PDF] is worth reading if you can stomach the Administration's audacity (of hopelessness), but let me pull out some of the highlights:

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