Where does gasification go from here?
Gasification has many promising uses in the coming years. NETL's vision for gasification is:

Gasification becomes the technology of choice for multiple U.S. and worldwide applications by being a low-cost energy system, providing superior environmental performance, reliability, and flexibility. Low-cost gasification systems will result in enhanced U.S. energy security through increased use of domestic resources.

To realize this vision, gasification must become more efficient, more reliable, and more economical. In addition, the benefits of the latest innovations in gasification technology must be demonstrated at a large enough scale to satisfy concerns of the financial community. Those who will fund construction and operation of new power plants do not like to take risks. To this end, the DOE is taking a two-pronged approach — one to ensure long-term technology improvements and another to demonstrate current research advances that are ready for commercial application.

To ensure continued commercial competitiveness of gasification in the future, research and development is ongoing at lab, bench, and pilot scales to make fundamental improvements to gasification and related technologies. Please visit NETL's Gasification Systems Technologies Research and Development page to explore cutting edge research and development on gasification.

Research that has already been demonstrated at smaller scales is being developed for demonstration at commercial scale. The status of gasification demonstrations can be explored at the Large Scale Demonstration Projects page, where it may be seen that FutureGen is the culmination of DOE's forthcoming demonstration efforts.

FutureGen Conceptual Illustration

Return to Table of Contents