CARBONDALE - Southern Illinois University Carbondale has received $300,000 in federal stimulus funds to study carbon sequestration, U.S. Rep. Jerry Costello, D-Belleville, announced Wednesday.

The money, a grant of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act from the U.S. Department of Energy, will be used for a carbon capture and sequestration research project entitled: Risk Assessment and monitoring of Stored CO2 in Organic Rocks under Non-Equilibrium Conditions.

The research entails experiments to evaluate the structural behavior of the Illinois Basin's organic rocks under extreme transient conditions.

"This research is critical to advancing carbon capture technology and fully utilizing our vast resources of coal," Costello, a senior member of the House Science and Technology Committee, said. "Our economy depends on maintaining low-cost, reliable power, and for the foreseeable future, there is no substitute for coal. We need to use it as cleanly as possible, and carbon capture and sequestration hold great promise in this regard. There is no better place in the country than the Coal Research Center at SIUC to conduct this research and I will continue to support these efforts."