WASHINGTON, D.C. - Members of Illinois congressional delegation left a meeting with President-elect Barack Obama's nominee for energy secretary encouraged that an experimental coal-fired power plant once planned for Illinois could be revived.

U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin says Steven Chu said during Wednesday's meeting that coal will be an important part of the country's economic future. Durbin says Chu understands the importance of FutureGen to Illinois.

Chu is a Nobel Prize winning physicist. In the past, he's called coal a pollution nightmare.

The Department of Energy last year pulled support for the FutureGen plant tapped for Mattoon in eastern Illinois.

If built, the plant would burn coal for power but store emissions of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide underground.