High-Profile 'Clean Coal' Project Staggers, as Trump Seeks to Slash R&D Funds

The first attempt at building a "clean coal" power plant that captures its carbon dioxide

before being burned is struggling to get up and running in Mississippi, as the Trump administration plans to sharply cut back funding for the technology. Mississippi Power's Kemper power plant is designed to allow the continued use of cheap but dirty fuels like coal in an era when the world — most of it, anyway — is trying to reduce its emissions of planet-warming CO2 and other gases. But the project has been plagued with technical problems that have pushed it back three years and more than doubled its budget, now estimated at about $7.5 billion. The plant started limited operations last fall, but the company announced this week that it would be pushing back the date it expects to be fully online until the end of June. And in the proposed budget it released last month, the Trump administration called for slashing research on capturing carbon dioxide from fossil fuel combustion and producing cleaner coal technologies. If approved by Congress, the proposal would cut the Department of Energy's fossil fuel research and development by 56 percent and "clean coal" research by nearly 70 percent. Coming from an administration that came to power promising to bring back coal jobs, the budget was "shocking," said David Schlissel, who directs resource planning analysis at the Cleveland-based Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis. Finding ways to reduce the black rock's carbon output "is the only way of giving coal any kind of chance of being a long-term fuel source," he said. "Given that," he added, "I don't see much chance of carbon capture really being an economically viable alternative on any kind of scale in the US."      https://www.livescience.com/59457-clean-coal-project-staggers.html