FutureGen - Did the Department of Energy Get it Right, by Accident?

Media attention has focused on the political end of the debate over FutureGen, but little attention has been paid to the science or regulatory structures that would need to be in place to make FutureGen or its successor power plants viable or feasible. Into that gap has come the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, with a set of grants totaling $6.6 million to study the problems associated with technologies such as FutureGen.

"Hopefully we will have a government that is more committed to a coordinated energy policy," said M. Granger Morgan, head of Carnegie Mellon University's Engineering and Public Policy Institute. "However, with what we have in place right now, DOE's decision might be the right one," Morgan said about current federal and state regulations that would govern such projects.

Granger is heading a team at Pittsburgh's Carnegie Mellon University, funded by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, looking at the regulatory and transportation issues revolving around carbon dioxide (CO2) sequestration. According to Granger, the issues are more complex than the Department of Energy or the Environmental Protection Agency were ready to deal with, and no regulatory framework is in place to deal with a project on the massive scale of FutureGen.

According to Granger, there are too many unknowns with carbon sequestration to deal with either the short term, or long term, impacts such a project could have. Issues on how to build pipelines to transport the CO2, to migration of the gas out of the area where subsurface rights have been acquired, have to be addressed. "In some states, owning the mineral rights doesn't mean you own the rights to the hole," Granger said. "And nobody has dealt with what happens if the sequestered gas moves into an adjoining landowner's property without the proper agreements in place."

"We're not going into this with a prior conception of the right answers, with two exceptions," Granger said. "We think it is highly likely that we will discover things that no one thought of before, and we need a regulatory structure in place to pause and rethink things before putting a final definitive framework in place. This will have to be an adaptive approach."

When asked about how regulatory agencies might deal with such an adaptive approach to adopting regulations, Granger said "Being adaptive doesn't mean they can pull the plug at any moment. That poses several challenges to regulatory design."

"We're working across the full value chain, from production to stewardship of closed sites," Granger said. "The responsibility for long term stewardship will probably fall to government."

Speculation on why the Department of Energy has thus far focused on the political side of the coin, following the statement by Energy Department official, C.H. "Bud" Albright, Jr. who said the department pulled the plug on FutureGen because the DOE was not "building Disneyland in some swamp in Illinois." Albright is a former aide to a Texas Congressman, and was appointed Under Secretary of Energy in September 2007.

Illinois' congressional leadership has called for a probe by the General Accounting Office into DOE's decision to axe FutureGen, after it was announced in December it was going to be built in Mattoon.