FutureGen, a Hope of Rural Illinois, is Cancelled

<div style="text-align: center"><img src="/files/u2/Illinoispowerplant_1.jpg" title="futuregen" alt="futuregen" height="83" hspace="4" vspace="4" width="125" />  </div> FutureGen was supposed to produce electricity from coal without polluting or emitting carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas. In December, the US Department of Energy announced <a href="/new-fangled-power-plant-goes-illinois" target="_blank">FutureGen would arise in central Illinois</a> and then, a month later, the US DOE said FutureGen wouldn't be built at all. The $1.8 billion project was cancelled. (Residents in Tuscola, Illinois, gathered, above, to hear if their town was picked for FutureGen.)<br /><br /><div style="text-align: center" align="left"> </div>What happened? The DOE said the dang thing had gotten too expensive. (It started at $1 billion and had nearly doubled in cost over the years.) <a href="http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/bus/stories/DN-Futuregen_08bus.ART.State.Edition1.391f8d2.html" target="_blank">Illinois legislators are asking for an investigation</a>, convinced a Texan at DOE killed the project because it was to be built in Illinois instead of within a day's drive of the Alamo.<p> The <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/02/15/AR2008021503186.html" target="_blank">Washington Post editorial page</a> said, good riddance: "As noble as FutureGen was, putting so much hope in just one project was not the way to go about it." The <a href="http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/editorials/articles/2008/02/17/bush_retreats_on_cleaner_coal/" target="_blank">Boston Globe editorial page </a> came to the opposite conclusion: "Congress should call on the Government Accountability Office to investigate how the department made its decision to pull out of a project it had once hailed as key to producing clean power with coal."</p>