Editor’s Note: As part of the Coalblog’s continuing commitment to bringing you new and innovative editorial and ideas, I have invited Walter James O’Brien to expand on his recent American Coal magazine article, “Carbon Compliance Using the Carnegie Model.” In this short update, O’Brien considers how the coal industry can use CO2 to promote industrial development. Please feel free to comment and suggest other means of making CO2 pay.

Energy Secretary Steven Chu recently announced that $1 billion in stimulus funding was being targeted to restart the stalled FutureGen project.

This infusion of tax dollars will provide breathing room for the FutureGen project. Originally, FutureGen was to build a state of the art IGCC facility in Mattoon, IL. Synthetic natural gas from the facility would then be used to power a combined cycle generation plant. CO2 remaining after the gasification process would have been captured and stored underground in favorable Illinois geological sinks. Deep geology beneath the Meredosia site will not allow for carbon storage, however. Therefore, the Mattoon site is still being targeted for the physical sequestration of the CO2. A pipeline is expected to be built to transfer it from the Meredosia site.

America’s Power has an excellent resource on clean coal technology and research across the U.S. available.

If you need information on the over $12 billion in CCS & CCT installations and research that’s going on across 43 states, head to the America’s Power website to learn more.

Coalblog readers:

Please note the following invitation from WVU and DOE to those who are interested in exploring coal and CCS collaborative possibilities with China.

Dear Colleague:

We cordially invite you to attend the 2009 US-China Coal Conversion and Carbon Management Workshop, December 2-4, 2009 in Morgantown, West Virginia, USA. The event is hosted by the US-China Energy Center and the National Research Center for Coal and Energy of West Virginia University and supported by the U.S. Department of Energy. The 2009 US-China Coal Conversion and Carbon Management Workshop is an activity under Annex II-A to the protocol on cooperation in the field of fossil energy technology development and utilization between the Department of Energy of the United States of America and the Ministry of Science and Technology of the People’s Republic of China.

Scientific American has a slide show on the AEP Mountaineer power plant’s carbon capture and storage program.

As this information page on the AEP website describes, the Mountaineer Plant is using Alstom’s chilled ammonia process. This installation is capturing CO2 from a 20 MW portion of the Mountaineer Plant’s 1,300 MW total output. The program will capture “approximately 100,000 metric tons per year of CO2,” which will be injected into deep geologic formations about 2km under the Mountaineer plant.

Nubuo Tanaka, Executive Director of the International Energy Agency, has been publicly backing coal-based energy and carbon capture and storage. In a recent Sydney Morning Herald article, Mr. Tanaka stated that the technologies for carbon capture — using algae and chemicals — were already quite good and improvements in technologies were bringing prices down rapidly. He continued by noting that carbon storage technologies were the next area requiring research and study and that legal frameworks guiding the implementation of carbon storage needed to be developed.

Tanaka’s outlook on both the use of coal and the future of CCS was upbeat.

The Democrat Herald has a good editorial describing just how badly the latest Sierra Club anti-coal push misses the mark. Hasso Hering, (the author) describes how simple things like the fact that there’s no coal at Oregon State University appear to have escaped the movement’s organizers.

Hering then notes that if they expect OSU to stop buying their electricity from utilities that have coal in their generation portfolio, they will essentially have to give up on electricity or create their own special utility for their energy. Furthermore, he notes that while coal does have environmental impacts associated with its use, so do all the alternatives.