Facing ever-increasing costs, the us Department of Energy has given up a plan to build the world's largest clean-coal power plant and carbon sequestration facility.

At the time of the announcement, the estimated cost of the plant, called FutureGen, was us $1.8 billion. The department said that the costs had doubled since it was originally conceived in 2003. Rather than pouring funds into a single FutureGen site in Mattoon, Illinois, energy secretary Samuel Bodman said his department would explore ways of developing clean-coal and carbon sequestration technologies in multiple sites around the country.

The project was a public-private partnership between the us Department of Energy and the FutureGen Industrial Alliance, a consortium of 12 international and the us companies. The department's decision has irked the FutureGen Alliance, which says the department's share has not doubled, but increased only from us $800 million in 2003 to us $1.1 billion, largely because of inflation.