New York Times: Key participant falters on carbon-capture vision

Though the story goes unmentioned—so far—in the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post, an article on the front page of the 11 November New York Times business section begins, “The leading American effort to capture carbon dioxide from coal plants has hit a stumbling block that could imperil the project and set back a promising technology for addressing global warming.”

The article reports that “Ameren, the Midwestern power company that was to be the host for the project, has told its partners that because of its financial situation, it cannot take part as promised.” Previously the “company had agreed to supply an old oil-fired power plant in Meredosia, Ill., that would be converted to demonstrate the carbon-capture technology on a commercial scale.” The Times says that the project has been “long seen as the nation’s best hope for taking a worldwide lead in developing ways to capture and bury carbon dioxide from coal burning.”

The venture is known as FutureGen 2.0. Online, the FutureGen Industrial Alliance says of itself that it “was formed to partner with the U.S. Department of Energy” and “is a non-profit membership organization created to benefit the public interest, and the interests of science through research, development and demonstration of near-zero emissions coal technology.”

The article summarizes the project’s past during two presidential administrations and the prospects, such as they are, for continuation. It quotes MIT physicist Ernest J. Moniz, who served as undersecretary of energy, on the importance of a demonstration project for carbon capture: “It’s only more true four years later—we can’t get one going, but we actually need more than one.”

Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. His reports to AIP are collected each Friday for “Science and the media.” He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.