Clean-coal too expensive for USA

A change in financial climate< (Credit: FUTUREGEN)Facing ever-increasing costs, the us Department of Energy has given up a plan to build the
world's largest clean-coal power plant and carbon sequestration facility.

At the time of the announcement, the
estimated cost of the plant, called FutureGen, was us $1.8 billion. The department said that the
costs had doubled since it was originally conceived in 2003. Rather than pouring funds into a single FutureGen site in
Mattoon, Illinois, energy secretary Samuel Bodman said his department would explore ways of developing clean-coal and carbon
sequestration technologies in multiple sites around the country.

The project was a public-private partnership
between the us Department of Energy and the FutureGen Industrial Alliance, a consortium of 12
international and the us companies. The department's decision has irked the FutureGen Alliance,
which says the department's share has not doubled, but increased only from us $800 million in
2003 to us $1.1 billion, largely because of inflation.