Gregg Easterbrook: Stop waiting for magically clean energy

While President Obama's cap-and-trade proposal to reduce greenhouse gases has been the big topic of recent environmental debate, the White House has also been pushing a futuristic federal project to build a power plant that burns coal without any greenhouse gases. Sounds great, right? Except the idea is a rehash of a proposal that went bust the first time around.

More important, the technology already exists to make huge reductions in greenhouse emissions from coal, allowing power companies to begin cutting the carbon footprint of coal today. Instead, advanced-technology coal power sits on the shelf while regulators wait to see what happens with a project that may be just a boondoggle.

The big project, a public-private partnership called FutureGen, was first announced by George W. Bush in 2003. Dreading facing up to the problem of greenhouse gases from electricity generation, the Bush White House suggested that decisions should wait while FutureGen developed a coal-fired power with no emissions. FutureGen's administrators spent five years on studies, proposals and studies of studies, but never broke ground for a test installation.

Then, in a fit of integrity, the Department of Energy decided the project should be put in Illinois, a Democratic state -- Midwestern coal is high in carbon, making this a logical choice -- rather than in Republican Texas, which the White House preferred. The administration promptly canceled financing for FutureGen. But this month, Energy Secretary Steven Chu announced he was reviving the project, hinting that the ultimate cost may run to billions of dollars.

FutureGen was better off canceled. Government is good at basic research, poor at commercial-scale applied energy technology. The Synthetic Fuels Corp., a heavily subsidized attempt begun by the Carter administration to manufacture gasoline substitutes, flopped without ever producing a marketable gallon. The Energy Department has also financed overpriced, unrealistic projects like the MOD-5B, a wind turbine that weighed 470 tons and stood 20 stories tall: It looked like a gigantic propeller intended to push the Earth to a new star system. It ended up being sold for scrap.

The Obama administration's FutureGen plan calls for yet another year of study before any actual action; test runs may not begin for a decade. This is part of a Washington tradition -- beginning pie-in-the-sky projects that create an excuse to avoid forms of conservation and greenhouse-gas reduction that are possible immediately. Companies including General Electric have already perfected technology to reduce emissions substantially, called "integrated gasification combined cycle" power. (Yes, it needs a better name.)

Current coal-fired power plants burn pulverized coal using a combustion process that hasn't changed in a half a century. The new approach turns coal into a gas similar to natural gas, which runs through a device similar to a jet engine. Such plants can achieve near-zero emissions of toxic material and chemicals that form smog, and they require about a third less coal than regular coal-fired power plants to produce an equal amount of energy.

Beyond that, the promising technology of "sequestering" carbon dioxide -- pumping it back into the ground to keep it out of the atmosphere -- appears for technical reasons to be impractical for conventional pulverized-coal power plants. But gasification plants have technical characteristics that should make "sequestration" of carbon feasible. A gasification power plant with sequestration would have around two-thirds lower greenhouse gases than a conventional coal-fired generating station.

Why aren't progressives fighting for an immediate embrace of gasification power? Much of the environmental movement clings to a fairyland notion that coal combustion can soon be eliminated, and therefore no coal-fired power plant of any kind, even an advanced plant, should be built.

Yet coal use is a future certainty. Half of our power comes from coal, compared with about 2 percent from solar and wind. In the next few decades, green power simply cannot grow quickly enough to eliminate the need for coal. We have two choices: Do nothing, and wait for FutureGen while coal-caused carbon emissions continue unabated; or start building improved coal-fired plants that reduce the problem. Which seems more forward-thinking?

Gregg Easterbrook is the author of "The Progress Paradox" and the forthcoming "Sonic Boom." He wrote this article for the New York Times.