Sequestration Project Killed Using Inflated Cost Estimates, Report Says

The Bush administration used exaggerated cost estimates last year to kill the FutureGen carbon sequestration project at a proposed Illinois coal plant, possibly setting back efforts to capture CO2 by at least a decade, according to a government report. The General Accounting Office says that the Bush administration scrapped the project after estimating that its costs had doubled from $950 million to nearly $1.8 billion. In fact, the report said, the costs were expected to rise to $1.3 billion. By canceling the pilot project — designed to develop carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology that would pump CO2 emissions underground — the Energy Department may have caused hundreds of billions of additional tons of CO2 to be released into the atmosphere. The report to Congress said that the delay means CCS may not be available until 2040, and quoted Energy Department experts as saying sequestration technology will not be deployed “in time to meet the expected turnover of the existing fleet of coal power plants in the U.S., nor for the incorporation into the development of the world’s massive coal resources in countries such as China and India.”