A Future in Clean Coal

Bill Hoback works for the state as the chief of the Office of Coal Development, a division of the Illinois Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity. The white-collar job hides his mining past.

“I started work in the mines when I was 23,” Hoback said. “I realized early on that it wasn’t an industry without problems. The Clean Air Act was being talked about, and I saw some people sticking their heads in the sand, saying, ‘No, we don’t have to deal with that.’ I started looking into clean coal technology while I was working in the mines, trying to understand what was available there, and I began believing technology is the best way to go.”

In his current position, he has more power to push for cleaner technology, and he has tried to do so. “We’ve been very focused—not on supporting the actual coal industry per se—more on different kinds of technologies that can utilize coal. But instead of doing the research, we’re focusing more on building the plants.”

The Office of Coal Development is in business to make Illinois coal desirable to power companies and exploitable to mining companies. It provides grants and tax incentives in order to encourage investment in mining, power plants, and even experimental coal technology. Since Illinois’s sulfurous coal is undesirable to power plants, development efforts must be innovative.

“Clean coal technology is the road back for Illinois coal,” he said. “For coal to be king, it’s got to be clean.”

Success seemed to come this winter, when an international partnership of mining and utility companies called the FutureGen Alliance selected Mattoon, Illinois, over sites in Texas for their groundbreaking project to build a zero-emissions coalfired power plant. FutureGen was to be both a coal research facility and power plant, generating power while serving as a center for clean technology research. Most importantly it was to be capable of capturing carbon emissions to store underground. In energy circles, it was seen as the greatest promise for developing coal technology that would reduce pollution and no longer contribute to global warming.

Hoback’s office worked with the Mattoon team to make its proposal the most attractive. “It’s a technology we worked really hard to bring to Illinois,” he said.

But in the end, the Office of Coal Development’s work in Springfield wasn’t enough to overcome the political hurdles in Washington. Only a month after the alliance’s announcement, the Department of Energy pulled its support, citing soaring costs. Along with federal help went 75 percent of FutureGen’s funding. Undersecretary of Energy C. H. “Bud” Albright soon thereafter let slip on a conference call with FutureGen Alliance members that the federal government had no interest in “building Disneyland in some swamp in Illinois.” Albright’s subsequent retraction did little to convince locals that Washington is committed to reviving the project.

Hoback’s environmental concern seems sincere, although the environment is not his office’s only consideration. “The responsibility is here in Illinois. We wouldn’t get started on anything if we didn’t think it made sense for us.” Ultimately, Hoback’s work in Springfield for the next great environmental hope was nullified by the politics and gridlock of Washington.

And the Office of Coal Development has had to turn to other projects. The office was responsible for helping secure grants for Prairie State, the first project to receive funding from the Coal Act of 2000.

Prairie State and FutureGen represent, respectively, the past and future of coal power. But in Illinois, the projects are less symbolic. The loss of FutureGen meant a loss of hundreds of new jobs. Somehow, those jobs will need to be found again.

Mining the Prairie State

“The name ‘Prairie State Energy Campus’ sounds pretty innocuous, but it’s a $2.9-billion coal-fired power plant,” said Mike Murphy, a farmer who lives in Marissa, only a mile-and-a-half from the plant’s site. He owns a 40-acre organic farm, on which he and his wife raise grass-fed livestock.

Given his interest in safeguarding his land, he said, “It’s kind of interesting we’re winding up next to a coal-fired power plant.” Interesting is a euphemism. Murphy is not interested in the plant at all, except to see it go.

He is not an environmental crusader, and he knows his town well. Marissa has been economically depressed for over a decade, and no one in the area would turn down a good opportunity for new jobs, so he was initially receptive to the project.

“We’ve been trying to learn how this could affect us so we could make decisions about where we raise our kids, and our property, and things like that.”