Could we get Sen. Dick Durbin and other public officials to apply some common sense before promoting another big “clean coal” project? It is only natural for job-hungry politicians to crow about Illinois being “the Saudi Arabia of coal,” as U. S. Sen. Barack Obama described his state in 2006. But somebody needs to tell the pols the only way coal becomes clean is to take the nasty stuff out of it and put it somewhere, and nowhere on this earth is there a good place to put concentrated coal “waste.” In the case of FutureGen 2.0, the plan was to transport carbon dioxide 30 miles by pipeline to store the gas underground forever, using a dubious process called “sequestration.” With projected costs mounting, the plan became requiring Ameren and Commonwealth Edison ratepayers to buy electricity from the expensive coal-gas, which the utilities vehemently opposed. The private financial community, which would have had to help pay for the increasingly elaborate scheme, finally realized what ordinary citizens had known for awhile – “That’ll never work.” So, after 10 years, millions of dollars and tons of newspaper ink, FutureGen is dead again, thank goodness. For now at least, the best way to have clean coal is to leave it in the ground undisturbed. –Fletcher Farrar, editor and publisher
This article appears in Feb 5-11, 2015.
