Durbin Pushes DOE to Save FutureGen

By The Associated Press

ST. LOUIS (AP) – The senior U.S. senators from Illinois and Missouri pressed anew Monday for the Energy Department to hold off on its already announced plans to scuttle its deal with an alliance of big power and coal companies to build a nearly emissions-free power plant.Sens. Dick Durbin, an Illinois Democrat, and Kit Bond, a Missouri Republican, urged Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman in a letter to continue funding the project known as FutureGen into March of next year, allowing the next president to consider its fate.The deal between the Energy Department and the coalition of roughly a dozen energy companies is to expire June 15, when the DOE can legally cancel the contract.FutureGen’s developers in December tapped Mattoon, Ill. – in Durbin’s home state – as the site for FutureGen, under which carbon dioxide from the planned coal-fired power plant would be trapped and permanently stored underground.But the Energy Department pulled the plug in January, citing costs that had ballooned to $1.8 billion, nearly double the original price tag.The DOE announced this month it is moving in a different direction and expects to spend up to $1.3 billion on multiple clean- coal power plants involving carbon capture and below-ground sequestration. The sites have not been chosen.The DOE said it would be smarter to spread taxpayer money around to several smaller projects. It also considers the alternate plan a faster way to go because it instantly commercializes the technology instead of experimenting with it at a research site in Mattoon.Undeterred, Durbin and Bond sponsored an amendment to a war-funding measure that cleared the Senate Appropriations Committee on May 15, calling for the Energy Department to continue funding FutureGen until March of next year. The full Senate has yet to take up that measure.In their letter Monday, Durbin and Bond insisted they were compelled to push the legislation, hoping to let the next president’s administration decide FutureGen’s fate.

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