The CCPI, ICCS, FutureGen Project and FutureGen 2.0 Project - Essay Example

The CCPI, ICCS, FutureGen project and FutureGen 2.0 projectThe CCS projects were instituted with the main aim of capturing industrial sources of carbon dioxide (CO2) and storing the CO2 for beneficial use (Folger, 2012). On the other hand, The Clean Coal Power Initiative (CCPI), established in 20002, targeted to simultaneously the environment from pollution while seeking a long-term solution to the reliability of energy supply in the United States while the FutureGen project was a coal-driven power plant in Illinois established to achieve a near-zero carbon dioxide emissions.

FutureGen 2.0 was projected to be a unique power plant with near-zero emissions. It was established to retrofit and existing Illinois coal plant and ensure carbon dioxide emission reduction by 90 percent. The project aimed at massively reducing carbon emission by utilizing safe pipeline technology to ship carbon dioxide and permanently store it underground in a designated storage site located near Ashland (Folger, 2012).FutureGen projects were viewed as the solution to ensuring clean future while using dirty fossil-fuel plants, thus received enormous backing from potential private investors to boost the clean technology.

However, numerous challenges rocked the project and would never let it reach its maturity stage and deliver the much anticipated results of reducing the emission of carbon dioxide by 90 percent. According to Folger (2012), one of the challenges that led to the failure of the FutureGen projects is increasing production costs. The existing technologies for capturing carbon dioxide were not cost cost-effective in the dimension of giant power plants (Folger, 2012). Another challenge that led to the failure of FutureGen projects was development issues surrounding the project and inadequate incentives for private investors to venture into the projects.

The sluggish development in the projects, both new and old, can be attributed to the laxity on part of the private investors to inject their finances in the project. This is because private investors were risk averse, especially because of the uncertainty surrounding the future of the projects and high project costs (Folger, 2012). According to Marxa et al. (2007), uncertainty makes people wary of the future. It was a huge challenge to secure funding from the private sector to meet the increasing cost of the project.

Time constraint was also a major challenge for successful implementation of the project that was proving to be over-the budget and competition from other countries made the project appear less feasible. According to Damiani et al. (2012), “Australia and China are both building what will become zeroemissions coal-fi red power plants using IGCC technology, dubbed ZeroGen and GreenGen, respectively” (p.57). Moreover, the expectations of the FutureGen projects were set too high. The FutureGen projects aimed achieving zero carbon emission from dirty fuels, with FutureGen 2.

0 project set to efficiently and absolutely transport and permanently confine carbon dioxide emitted from the plant in a designated underground storage. As it emerges, these expectations were set beyond reach because it would require the power plant to operate with 100 percent efficiency, which is quite unrealistic. Also, FutureGen projects presented a complex integration of technology, which made it difficult to manage the project. The integration of everything into one and very large power plant was a miscalculation that led to mismanagement and high complexity in the project.

It was just a matter of time before the project hit its deathbed. Future projects can thrive by learning from the mistakes of past projects. First, goal setting remains a very crucial project development phase that must be handled with care. Future project implementers should ensure that the goals set are realistic and attainable. They should not set the project goals too high to reach. Also, they should avoid integrating all the parts of the project into one plant and attempt to execute them simultaneously.

It would be better to implement project parts step-by-step until it is ready to deliver its intended outcomes.ReferencesBiello, D. (2009). Can Captured Carbon Save Coal? Scientific American, 19, 52-59.Damiani, D., Litynski, J. T., McIlvried, H. G., Vikara, D. M., & Srivastava, R. D. (2012). The US department of Energy's R&D program to reduce greenhouse gas emissions through beneficial uses of carbon dioxide. Greenhouse Gases: Science and Technology, 2(1), 9-16. Folger, P. (2012). Carbon Capture and Sequestration: Research, Development, and Demonstration at the US Department of Energy.

Congressional Research Service.Marxa, S.M.,Webera,E.U., Orlovea, B.S.Leiserowitza, A., Krantza,D.H., Roncolia,C. & Phillipsa, J. (2007). Communication and mental processes: Experiential and analytic processing of uncertain climate information. Global Environmental Change, 17, 47–58