Opportunities with FutureGen

The next four to six weeks will be extremely important in the quest for FutureGen, Scott Tinker told a crowd of Odessans and Permian Basin residents who attended a program on FutureGen opportunities in Odessa on Tuesday.

“We have about a month before the FutureGen Alliance is going to call for our proposals,” said Tinker, who leads the FutureGen Texas Team and also serves as state geologist and director of the Bureau of Economic Geology at the University of Texas.

Noting that both the Odessa site at Penwell and the other Texas site at Jewett still in the running to host the $1.5 billion FutureGen federal demonstration project have specific strengths, Tinker said, “We want to be good sports when Texas wins.”

But he also noted that in the national competition to host the construction of the world’s first near-zero emissions coal-fired power plant pits the two Texas sites against two in Illinois — at Mattoon and Tuscola — and that community support is still a critical factor.

So Tinker, FutureGen regional coordinator Hoxie Smith and others present for the event strongly urged local residents to send letters of support for bringing the project to Texas to FutureGen Alliance chief executive officer Michael J. Mudd.

Jerry Hill of the FutureGen Texas team said, “A lot of the skills of the workers in this area and the trades are going to be very useful to the FutureGen plant.”

He added that the plant, which will be a 275 megawatt plant that uses different grades of coal to produce electricity, will also produce hydrogen and CO2 as byproducts. In fact, he said, it would produce at least 1 million metric tons of CO2 per year.

The plant will also produce a quantity of slag, which can be used in concrete or on highways, Tinker said.

A final FutureGen site is to be selected in October with the plant to be online by 2012.

Tinker also noted that the plant will be a research project that will hold the potential to answer some important environmental questions;.

“If we’re going to have an impact on the environment, we’ve got to capture a lot of CO2 and put it in the ground permanently,” Tinker said.

Roy Savage with Teton Industrial and Larry Graves, who is plant manager of Navasota Energy’s Quail Run Power Center now under construction south of Interstate 20 outside Odessa, praised the quality of workers they have hired here.

Graves said the “talent pool is just phenomenal. You need to let everybody else know that. That’s what the FutureGen Alliance needs to see. It’s a tribute to the whole community.”

Numerous jobs will be available in Odessa and the surrounding area if FutureGen chooses the Penwell location, Smith told the crowd. He said about 1,300 people will be employed during construction of the plant.

Jeff Woltz, who represents Standby Monitoring in Odessa, which provides CO2 monitoring equipment, said the FutureGen plant would provide numerous opportunities for local businesses.

“It will be a plant process that will be used worldwide in other plants,” Woltz said.

Meanwhile, Mike Moore with Energy Equipment/Custom Creations in Odessa said he went to the FutureGen event because it offered an opportunity to meet people he might could work with in the future.

“Events like this offer an opportunity to talk with people. The personal contact is very important in my work,” Moore said.

Tinker told the crowd during his months of working to bring FutureGen to Texas “the rampup of interest has been tremendous locally. If you don’t know, you should, the whole world knows the name Odessa, Texas.

“And it’s starting to know the name of Penwell,” he said.