[caption id="attachment_5280" align="alignleft" width="240" caption="Downtown Mattoon"][/caption]
A tour of Mattoon – a central Illinois town with around 18,000 people – can be kind of underwhelming. The town is off the interstate and surrounded by cornfields. There are a few bars, a 24-hour grocery store with the banner “Bob Evans sausage $1.79-a-pound,” a “feed-and-seed” store, and, for the Second Amendment enthusiast, “Freedom Firearms.” There’s a community college – Lakeland – as well as a downsizing General Electric plant. When I asked Preston Owens, the city attorney, about local attractions, he answered, “Well, it’s just another Midwestern town.”
Such modesty, though, disguises Mattoon's ambition to be the international testing ground for clean coal technology. The town will almost assuredly land FutureGen, an alliance of coal companies created to build the first commercial-scale “clean coal” power plant -- a plant that does not emit the carbon dioxide that triggers global warming. With coal used for half of America's electricity and one-third of its greenhouse gas emissions, FutureGen will demonstrate that
what coal critics call “the dirty rock” can remain part of America's, and the world’s, long-term energy supply. At least that’s the idea.