The FutureGen Alliance scheduled an announcement for Tuesday to identify the finalists among 12 sites in seven states vying for the plant. West Virginia is offering 387 acres of state land for the Point Pleasant site it has in play.
FutureGen is a nonprofit collaboration among electric utilities, coal companies and other investors putting up $250 million to design and build the plant. Among the investors are Columbus-based American Electric Power and the U.S. Department of Energy, which is providing $750 million.
Touted as the power plant of tomorrow, FutureGen involves technology that converts coal into highly enriched hydrogen gas that burns more cleanly than coal and would be used to produce electricity for about 275,000 single-family homes.
Plans call for the 275-megawatt plant to capture most of its emissions of carbon dioxide — a greenhouse gas widely blamed for global warming — and inject them permanently into underground reservoirs, a process called sequestration.
The project would create more than 1,000 construction jobs and as many as 200 jobs at the plant.
The finalists will have to get moving. FutureGen wants to measure the progress of the finalists’ proposals at a meeting next week in Pittsburgh. Environmental impact statements are due in early September, said Jacqueline Bird, the Ohio Coal Development Office director, who is working on that state’s project.