Finally. This week, the Department of Energy pulled the plug on the massive clean coal project known as FutureGen. Though a day late and a dollar short would be too generous (it is more like years late and hundreds of millions of dollars short) it was welcome news to hear that a billion more dollars earmarked for FutureGen in the Stimulus would be withdrawn.

We have opposed the project for years, here we are calling for a rescission of the Stimulus funds in 2011 at a press conference in Springfield, IL.

Undoubtedly a financial and technical disaster from the get-go, if FutureGen had nine lives we hope this was its ninth and last. Proposed by the Bush Administration in 2003, FutureGen was originally purported to be a large-scale, multibillion dollar initiative of the DOE to build and operate the world’s first coal-fueled, zero emissions power plant.  The mega-plant was intended to produce hydrogen and electricity from coal, while capturing and storing carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions underground, a process known as carbon capture and sequestration (CCS).

The plant, which had an original cost estimate of $1 billion, was to be funded by the Department of Energy and the private FutureGen Industrial Alliance, a group composed of seven members, including CONSOL Energy Inc., Peabody Energy, Rio Tinto, and Southern Company. However, as market prices continued to escalate through 2007, the DOE withdrew its support in early 2008 and the project was cancelled.

Enter the Illinois boosters, including then-Senator Obama. As parochial projects often do, FutureGen had vocal bipartisan support from the region. So like a phoenix from the ashes, FutureGen came back to life, first as the same massive facility in 2009, then a year later, as a new plan designed to support several smaller commercial clean coal plants that were already being pursued across the nation. The new plan was called FutureGen 2.0.

But 2.0 or not, FutureGen’s problems remained. Though the price tag was to be lower than the original project plan, estimates quickly increased from $1.3 billion to $1.65 billion.  In 2011, Ameren Corp., owner of the power plant to be used in 2.0, announced it would no longer participate in FutureGen. The FutureGen Industrial Alliance planned to transfer federal stimulus funds from Ameren to the Alliance and possibly purchase the Meredosia power plant.

Apparently the problems were so bad that even the Administration began to question the project’s future and the $1 billion hanging in the balance. Though the funds were set to expire by September 2015, in a shocking move, DOE got ahead of it by canceling the project this week.

So score one for taxpayers. But wait. Sadly we’ve seen this budget waste movie before. And like a bad horror flick the villain has a few lives. Before the story even hit the presses the IL delegation had a letter to the Administration urging reconsideration of funding. FutureGEN 3.0???

We hope the Administration will keep Future Gen where it belongs – in the grave. In fact, we’d like to nominate a few more projects for the budgetary graveyard. How about not spending two billion dollars to unnecessarily expand little-used navigation locks on the Upper Mississippi River System? Or replacing the F-35 – a $1.5 trillion acquisition – with cheaper, effective alternatives? Or not spending $25 billion to build a MOX facility to reprocess plutonium that no one wants? Or not squandering untold billions on border boondoggle security projects? Better yet, how about all of the above?