The CCPI, ICCS, FutureGen Project and FutureGen 2.0 Project Essay - 233

The CCPI, ICCS, FutureGen Project and FutureGen 2.0 Project - Essay Example It was established to retrofit an 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 did 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 into 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.