Hunting for $1 billion of stimulus spending in rural Illinois.

First stop: Bank of America (BAC). Ashley, our friendly teller, told us sure she's heard of FutureGen. Hard not to when you live in Mattoon. But she didn't know where it was supposed to be. It had been talked about for so long that folks had lost track of where the thing was meant to be built. See, Mattoon has been trying to get this clean coal plant built since 2006. At first it was part of a national competition to decide where the FutureGen alliance would put the plant. After several rounds of competition, FutureGen chose Mattoon in December 2007. Then all that was left was a final sign-off by George Bush's Department of Energy, which was planning to invest heavily in the project. But by January 2008, the Bush White House had pulled the plug. Mattoon had beat out another potential site in Texas, Bush's home state.

As we finished our banking, Ashley gave us our first lead. She said to head out on DeWitt Avenue; she thought it was out there among the fields somewhere. And out we went, chasing the road into the vast emptiness of the Midwest. The town had disappeared; the green of the farmland stretched deep. It was quiet out here. We drove DeWitt until we left Mattoon. No sign of FutureGen.

We doubled back, noting that any of these farms could be big enough for a power plant that's supposed to create 3,000 construction jobs and employ 150 people. The jobs are needed even though Mattoon hasn't been hit that hard by the most recent recession. One local told us it's because the downturn started a decade ago. You can't bust if you don't boom.

We pulled into RuralKing, a Home Depot (HD) for agriculture with a touch of Costco (COST) mixed in. When I explained our pursuit to our cashier, one of her colleagues turned defensive. "What, are you against it?" she said with a charming territoriality. I said we were just trying to look at the field so we could get a better sense of its size.

She explained that some Greenpeace activists had put a protest sign on the land a while back. FutureGen is to environmental activists what unicorns are to cynical children. An awesome idea for those who choose to believe it; a laughable one to those who feel like they have all the facts. FutureGen would be a carbon sequestration plant. The carbon that would usually burn off into the atmosphere would instead be piped underground and into the earth. This would make coal—50 percent of the country's energy supply—into a far cleaner activity. It would also make the earth underneath FutureGen much more likely to blow up because of the increased pressure in the rock formations. The chance of a carbon leak has caused protests in Europe. Part of the Department of Energy's reasoning for investing in FutureGen is to find out whether clean coal can indeed be safe. Then there are many who think that no matter how clean you say you're making coal, it's so dirty that it will never be carbon-neutral. And there are still others who say FutureGen is a scientific fantasy and there are more rational, clean(er) coal initiatives that could use some stimulus money.

All of this was prologue for the brewing cultural clash between the cashier and me. But before we could go further, a customer politely told me that the site was somewhere out on Dole Road, right off DeWitt. She didn't have any more details. Back to the car and a left on Dole, which had even more farmland than DeWitt. Yet after about 4 miles, still nothing. So we pulled over to ask a local for directions.