For the 4,400 residents of Tuscola, anticipation this holiday season goes beyond the annual Yule log lighting ceremony and Santa Chase 5k race.

The city, 176 miles north of Carbondale, is among four sites bidding for a $1.75 billion experimental coal-fueled power plant, called FutureGen, which will also produce hydrogen and emit virtually no pollution. Other finalists are Mattoon, 25 miles south of Tuscola on Interstate 57, and the Texas cities of Odessa and Jewett.

A winner will be announced tomorrow by the FutureGen Industrial Alliance, a consortium of a dozen of the world's largest energy and mining companies, including St. Louis-based Peabody Energy Corp., that's developing the project with the U.S. Energy Department.

To the cities bidding for the project, there is plenty riding on the decision, including 150 full-time jobs, 1,300 construction jobs and the cachet of being the home of "the world's cleanest coal-fueled power plant." Analysts, environmentalists and energy executives say there's more at stake.

Coal meets a fourth of the world's energy needs and use is projected to grow 73 percent by 2030, according to the International Energy Agency. Meanwhile, scientists are urging drastic cuts in emissions of carbon dioxide, a heat-trapping gas released when coal and other fossil fuels are burned. Otherwise, they warn of dire consequences from the continued warming of the earth's atmosphere, such as melting ice sheets and rising sea levels.

Many energy and environmental experts say weaning the United States off coal isn't a realistic option, nor is retrofitting 500 existing power plants, which are 35 years old on average. So despite the costs and technical challenges of doing so, making coal cleaner must be a priority.

"That's why FutureGen is so critical to closing the gap between what society wants industry to do and what technology is able to do," said Michael J. Mudd, head of the FutureGen Alliance and an executive at Columbus, Ohio-based American Electric Power Co.

Others are more blunt in their assessment, such as John Thompson of the Boston-based Clean Air Task Force, an environmental advocacy group. "There's a disconnect from where we are today and where we need to be," said Thompson, who works in Carbondale. "By mid-century, we need to have all plants capturing CO2 and we have zero plants doing it right now."

The Energy Department conceived FutureGen in February 2003 as a way to advance so-called clean coal technology, and will contribute more than $1 billion for the project with remaining costs shared among members of the FutureGen Alliance.

States bidding for the project are pitching in, too. The Illinois General Assembly and Gov. Rod Blagojevich agreed to offer $80 million in tax breaks, grants and low-interest loans to win the project - a lot, but just a fraction of the $981 million being dangled by Texas.

FutureGen is expected to begin operation in the fall of 2012. The plant will be able to produce 275 megawatts of electricity. That's just a fraction of the generation capacity of Peabody's 1,600-megawatt Prairie State Energy Campus in southwest Illinois despite costing more than three times as much on a per-kilowatt basis.

For now, however, the power delivered to the grid from FutureGen is a fringe benefit. The real goal is to prove the feasibility of producing electricity from coal with near-zero emissions in hopes that it can jump-start similar projects on a larger scale in the U.S. and around the world.

"FutureGen is an opportunity to keep trying to achieve the Holy Grail," said Howard Learner, executive director of the Environmental Law and Policy Center in Chicago. "That is, being able to use the U.S.'s enormous coal reserves in a way that is clean and protects the environment."