Thank you, Mr. Tonks.
We've been following the FutureGen project very carefully since its beginning. Just a thumbnail sketch, it's essentially a project to generate hydrogen for the purposes of furthering the hydrogen economy plus electricity. It includes CO2 capture and storage.
You're correct to say that the sponsors are the U.S. DOE, plus a consortium of U.S. power generation utilities and coal companies that have come together around the project.
Clearly, that's a project well matched to U.S. needs and purposes, and there may well be some opportunities for exchange of information and collaboration, and so on. But when scarce resources present themselves, it's important that we dedicate and aim our resources where they're best suited. We think the focused initiatives, either that are running in our labs or that are running in the projects that I briefly talked about today, are certainly important, top-of-the-page considerations.
The news from FutureGen just recently too--I heard last week--is that there has been some cost escalation in the project beyond what was originally anticipated. So I think this is challenging the moving forward. It sounds as if it is moving forward fine, but I think cost escalations are part of the current lexicon, if you like.
There are four sites that have been selected for pre-screening, two in Illinois and two in Texas. The process over the course of the next few months will be to try to make a choice, difficult though it may be, out of those four candidate locations that are on the books now.
We're monitoring very carefully. We're in contact with our colleagues in the U.S. Department of Energy. At this time, we're keeping an eye on it in the hopes that it will mature and that we'll be able to learn something from it in due course.
It's a very important project for the U.S. electricity industry, and for the hydrogen side of the equation as well.