Government clean-coal projects flopped, federal watchdog finds

A decade ago, when the U.S. was climbing out of the Great Recession, the government dedicated more than a billion dollars to developing carbon-capture technologies aimed at making high-emissions energy facilities — coal plants, in particular — less polluting.

But the effort has flopped, a government watchdog found. According to a recent report from the Government Accountability Office, none of the clean-coal projects that received funding from Department of Energy (DOE) programs are currently operating, although two of the three industrial projects are. Of eight coal projects that were initially selected for federal funding, just one resulted in a completed operating facility. And that project — the Petra Nova plant near Houston — shut down in 2020 for economic reasons. 

Of eight coal projects initially chosen by the Department of Energy, three were withdrawn in their early stages because their owners couldn't make them economically feasible even with hundreds of millions in government funding. The Energy Department ended agreements with four others before construction. The last one, a coal plant near Houston, was completed and went online in 2016. That plant operated for four years before shutting down in 2020, when plummeting oil prices made it unprofitable.