Geologist Rob Finley says the Obama administration's decision to pull $1 billion in federal stimulus funding for FutureGen, effectively shutting it down, was "really unfortunate".
FutureGen is the public-private demonstration project in Morgan County in west-central Illinois, to show how a coal-fired power plant could be outfitted with technology to remove carbon dioxide emissions and store them underground.
Federal funding for the project was halted in early February by the U-S Department of Energy, which said the project could not be completed before federal stimulus funds for it expired later in 2015.
Illinois Public Media's Jim Meadows spoke with Finley, director of the Advanced Energy Technology Initiative at the Illinois State Geological Survey,part of the University of Illinois' Prairie Research Institute.
Finley has been working on a project with Archer Daniels Midland in Decatur, using another form of carbon capture technology to remove CO-2 from ethanol plant emissions. He says FutureGen would have been an important step in showing what carbon capture sequestration could do for coal-burning plants.