"How the White House Walked Away From 'Clean Coal'"

"A $1 billion Illinois project, meant to be the poster child for coal’s climate-friendly future, gets scuttled."

"On the banks of the Illinois River, about 60 miles west of the state capital in Springfield, an old coal-fired power plant sits waiting for its future to arrive. First opened in 1948, it’s been dormant since 2011, when its owner, St. Louis-based Ameren, shut down the plant rather than retrofit it to meet federal standards. Last year workers came to give it a makeover. Using almost $1 billion in stimulus money, the project was supposed to become the poster child for clean-coal technology. Rather than spewing into the sky, the carbon dioxide produced as the plant burned coal would be captured into a pipeline buried below corn and soybean fields. It would run 30 miles east to Jacksonville, where the gas would be injected 4,000 feet underground. “It was like we were the phoenix rising,” says the plant’s director, Mike Long.

The resurrection was short-lived. On Feb. 3, the Department of Energy announced it was withdrawing support. Environmentalists who want investment in renewable power technologies rather than fossil energy cheered the decision. “We don’t need it, and we can’t afford it,” Bruce Nilles, head of the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal campaign, says of carbon-capture projects.

President Obama has made addressing climate change a key part of his legacy. In November he struck an historic agreement with Chinese President Xi Jinping to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The White House has backed solar and wind power projects and touted the benefits of the country’s surging production of natural gas, which burns about 50 percent cleaner than coal, still the largest source of electricity in the U.S. Last year the Environmental Protection Agency proposed tighter standards for existing power plants."

Jim Snyder, Mark Drajem, and Matthew Philips report for Bloomberg News February 14, 2015.