Nov 3 - McClatchy-Tribune Regional News - Leslie Brooks Suzukamo Pioneer Press, St. Paul, Minn.

Until recently, "clean coal" power plants like the 600-megawatt Mesaba Energy Project had seemed like the energy industry's perfect retort to Al Gore: a plant on the Iron Range that could produce reliable power using abundant coal and yet not muck up the environment.

But the controversial project failed to win regulatory approval from the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission this week and similar projects using the same technology elsewhere are collapsing over concerns about cost and feasibility.

So has the time for "clean coal" passed before it could even begin?

Julie Jorgensen doesn't think so. The co-CEO and founder of Wayzata-based Excelsior Energy believes her company's $2.1 billion project will be back and so will its technology, called integrated gas-combined cycle, or IGCC for short.

The state's power companies, including Xcel Energy, need fossil fuels to meet growing energy needs, she said, and IGCC scrubs coal of many pollutants like sulfur dioxide and nitrous oxides by a process that turns it into a gas before burning.

The energy industry believes that within a few years, Washington will enact regulations levying heavy penalties on producers of carbon dioxide emissions, which are believed to be accelerating global warming. Utilities are turning to alternatives ranging from wind to solar power to "clean coal" technologies to reduce their carbon emissions.

"We think IGCC is a silver bullet in any climate-change scenario," Jorgensen

said.

That bullet has misfired badly of late, though. Xcel Energy, which opposed the Excelsior project because it didn't want to be forced to buy Mesaba's power, this week shelved an IGCC proposal of its own for the state of Colorado.

Xcel said that after two years of study, it decided its own $1 billion IGCC proposal was too costly to build without a partner.

And last month, Teco Energy Inc. in Tampa, Fla., said it wasn't moving ahead with plans for a $2 billion IGCC unit because of uncertainty over possible emissions regulations and the potential for rising construction costs.

Counting Mesaba, there are nine U.S. IGCC projects that have been canceled or put on hold this year. In September, a Dutch utility tabled a 1,200 megawatt IGCC project in the Netherlands.

There are three main reasons.

Unexpected costs have been dooming many of these projects, said Carol Overland, a Red Wing attorney who is representing landowners on the Iron Range that would have been affected by the Mesaba Power project.

Overland and other critics also contend the plants are not as environmentally friendly as they first sounded. The plants would not reduce emissions of sulfur dioxide or nitrous oxides significantly lower than that of a brand-new coal plant using "pulverized" technology that pounds coal into a dust before burning, she said.

Excelsior officials dispute that assertion, but a two-judge panel that studied the proposal for the PUC sided with the critics.

Finally, there's the carbon dioxide. IGCC by itself does nothing to reduce CO2 on its own.

Jorgensen and her husband, Tom Micheletti, Excelsior's other co-CEO and founder, maintained that they would build-in the ability for their plant to capture and sequester the CO2. They would then ship it via a pipeline into Canada, where it could be sold to oil companies that already are injecting captured CO2 into oil wells to push out the oil while the gas remains trapped underground.

But opponents of Mesaba have pointed out Excelsior's proposal did not include formal plans to spirit away the carbon dioxide. That could tack on another $1 billion to the proposal's price tag, one commissioner suggested.

Everybody hasn't given up on carbon capture, though. In Bismarck, N.D., Basin Electric is studying six proposals to capture and sequester the carbon dioxide emitted from Antelope Valley Station, its 20-year-old, 900-megawatt conventional coal-fired power plant.

Next door to Antelope Valley Station is a plant that converts coal into synthetic natural gas, similar to the IGCC process. That plant, a subsidiary business of Basic Electric, ships its leftover CO2 to oil wells in Canada in a 205-mile pipeline.

Basin Electric believes carbon regulations are coming and wants a way to reduce its carbon output, spokesman Daryl Hill said.

"We're looking at getting ahead of the game," he said. "We want to know what it costs, what it takes."

Leslie Brooks Suzukamo covers telecommunications, technology and energy. He can be reached at lsuzukamo@pioneerpress.com or 651-228-5475.