Quest for FutureGen

It was Sept. 24, 2004, when Texas Railroad Commissioner Michael Williams paid a visit to his hometown of Midland to promote an innovative power project called FutureGen.

At a meeting conducted at UTPB’s Center for Energy and Economic Diversification and attended by civic and business leaders from both Odessa and Midland, Williams laid out his case for bringing the federal Department of Energy demonstration project to Texas.

The following month, West Texas Energy Technology Initiative director Stephanie Sparkman and Hoxie Smith, director of Midland College’s Petroleum Professional Development Center, traveled to Austin to again meet with Williams and also to visit with legislators.

A core group of four people — Sparkman, Smith, UTPB’s CEED director Bob Trentham and geological engineer and consultant Steve Melzer — had been meeting since the September session with Williams.

They wanted to see the railroad commissioner again to ask whether “there is a crack in that door to show why FutureGen should come to West Texas,” Sparkman said.

Williams listened to their argument and said, “Of course, but you’re going to have to prove to me why.”

That was the start of Odessa’s race to lure the $1.5 billion federally funded near-zero-emissions, next-generation, coal-fired power plant. That national race ultimately ended up with four sites left in the running — Odessa among them.

On Tuesday that long race will be acknowledged by the beginning of DOE hearings at the four sites in the country still in the running — Odessa and Jewett in Texas and Tuscola and Mattoon in Illinois.

Williams, who had been appointed by Texas Gov. Rick Perry to the Clean Coal Technology Council, said his ties to Midland have not created difficulty for him in the quest for FutureGen.

“I’m a Midlander by birth and love, but I’m a state-elected official responsive to the needs of Texas,” Williams said.

“It was exciting to have my hometown in the process, but at the end of the day the Texas proposal will be the best for the state,” he said.

Williams passionately asserts that Texas has “got to continue to have a balanced pro-growth energy strategy. Natural gas is always a central part of that, but clean coal and nuclear power have to be a good part of it.”

Sparkman noted that early in the FutureGen siting process when it was clear that a Texas site along the Gulf Coast was being targeted, she focused on getting the project to the Permian Basin.

“They were saying ‘Let’s bring it to Texas.’ I said we need to get it into West Texas,” she said.

In November 2005, Jay Kipper, an assistant to FutureGen Texas Director Scott W. Tinker, told officials the state had decided to go the route of using councils of government to sponsor individual regions’ proposals for the power plant in a competition to determine the state submission for the national competition.

It was at that time, Sparkman said, that the Permian Basin FutureGen Task Force was formed and she was named chair.

“We asked all the economic development people in the area to represent their communities. We felt they would be the best to represent their communities,” she said.

Neil McDonald, economic development director for the Odessa Chamber of Commerce, represents Odessa.

He said though a 600-acre site just outside Odessa and near the Navasota Energy Quail Run Energy Center was originally considered for Odessa’s site, when the FutureGen Texas team saw that location they recommended finding another site not so close to neighborhoods, other industry and developments.

It just so happened that McDonald knew of another 600-acre site that “fit all the same criteria that the FutureGen Alliance and the DOE had set for the FutureGen site.”

That site was at Penwell, 15 miles west of Odessa in Ector County.

Now, two years later, that site makes the final running in a race that comes to a finish in mid-October when the FutureGen Alliance selects its final choice for the plant.

What began as a serious query by some big players in the Permian Basin energy industry has turned into a blending of multiple communities and a coming together of minds, money and moxie to bring the futuristic objective here.

“It’s been a lot of small steps, but that’s how we got here,” Smith said. “And I think we’re going to bring that project here.”