Decision to revamp FutureGen and use Mattoon only as a storage site leaves town disappointed

Mattoon asks: What now with FutureGen?

MATTOON, Ill. — Angela Griffin spent Friday morning on the phone and in interviews trying to learn why the crown jewel of the FutureGen clean-coal experiment won’t be coming to eastern Illinois.

Griffin led the local campaign to bring the idea of the project to Mattoon. But the president of the Coles Together economic development agency still doesn’t know a lot about the federal government’s abrupt decision to radically rewrite its plans for FutureGen, the on-again, off-again power plant project the town has celebrated, mourned and puzzled over the past few years.

The planned plant is gone, but Griffin says the Department of Energy’s new plan to retrofit an existing plant 120 miles west and use Mattoon to store carbon dioxide generated there could still be a good job creator — with 75 to start.

But Griffin knows people around town — after spending well over a million dollars and thousands of hours wooing FutureGen — aren’t happy to learn that, in the end, they’ll sit on top of millions of tons of someone else’s greenhouse gases.

“They have invested and invested so much in what they thought was going to become a flagship facility,” she said. “And the spinoff economic activity that comes with that — those opportunities appear to be gone, and folks are very unhappy about that.”

Mattoon was chosen in December 2007 as the site for FutureGen. The Energy Department and FutureGen Alliance, a group of coal mining companies and other firms, planned to build the power plant to prove that coal could be burned to make electricity while the carbon dioxide that makes coal a pollution problem could be captured and safely stored underground.

Since then the eastern Illinois town of 18,000 has watched the Bush administration pull its support over cost concerns that a federal auditor later said were based on faulty data, and then saw the project revived with a new president from Illinois in office.

The project promised 1,300 construction jobs and 150 high-skilled positions to a place that has struggled to replace jobs lost to the Rust Belt collapse of the 1970s and ’80s.

On Thursday, the town and the FutureGen Alliance learned about the Department of Energy’s plans for major changes. The department now plans a $1.2 billion project — including $1.1 billion in federal stimulus money — to retrofit a coal-fired plant owned by Ameren Corp. in Meredosia, Ill., about 60 miles northwest of Springfield.

That plant will try out a relatively new technology known as oxy-combustion — using pure oxygen to combust fuel rather than air — and pump its carbon dioxide to Mattoon through a 175-mile pipeline to be built as part of the project. The Mattoon plant would have tested a different technology to burn coal before capturing and storing the carbon.

There are also plans for a training center in Mattoon to teach people how to retrofit plants like the one in Meredosia, though the department said the details are still to be worked out.

The Energy Department says that if the new FutureGen project works, potentially dozens of other power plants in Illinois and surrounding states will need to be updated to meet changes in clean air standards and could be retrofitted and connected to the pipeline.

That position at the center of a network of carbon capture and storage should excite Mattoon, said Matt Rogers, a senior adviser to Energy Secretary Steven Chu.

If the project works, Mattoon could wind up with more jobs than the original FutureGen would have created, Rogers said.

Rogers called the department’s decision to change the project without first consulting with Mattoon or the FutureGen Alliance companies less than ideal. But he said a Sept. 30 deadline to finalize stimulus-funded projects made it a necessity.

“This wasn’t something where we had the time to sort of work through a long process,” Roger said.

Alliance members met Friday to discuss the shift in FutureGen’s plans. Steve Winberg of member CONCOL Energy said afterward the group “looks forward to moving the project to the new phase,” including familiarizing themselves with the details.

Rogers’ also said Energy Department officials plan to head to Mattoon and Meredosia soon to explain the changes. In Mattoon, Energy Department officials will face a hard sell.

“Right now I’m pretty frustrated,” said Cory Sanders, who owns a real estate agency in town. “Mattoon’s becoming a dumping ground.”

His business, he figures, will be fine, but, like a lot of local business owners, he had anticipated a boost from FutureGen workers and from the companies expected to set up shop nearby to serve the power plant.

Back in her office, Griffin said she understood Sanders’ sentiment.

“I still feel we won,” she said as she prepared for an interview with a TV news crew. “It will be hard for this community to see this latest incarnation as a win, and I understand that.”