Clean coal money in stimulus bill

WASHINGTON, March 5 (UPI) -- The economic stimulus bill contains funding for an Illinois power plant President Barack Obama supported as a U.S. senator, The Washington Post said Thursday.

The legislation provides $1 billion for a "clean coal" research project known as FutureGen, the newspaper said. The project was killed last year by former President George W. Bush's administration but U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu said Obama would support the plant with "some modifications."

FutureGen is aimed at producing 275 megawatts of electricity, enough to power 150,000 homes.

Instead of releasing the resulting carbon dioxide emissions into the air as pollution, the project would pump emissions into deep geologic formations thousands of feet below Earth's surface, the newspaper reported.