Archive for the ‘CCS’ Category

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CCS update: Coal supporters dropping the ball?

Monday, October 10, 2011

On Friday, I had a fun and interesting discussion via Twitter with my good friend Ry Rivard, statehouse reporter across the hall at the Charleston Daily Mail.

Young Ry  had “retweeted” a link to a Guardian story headlined, Flagship UK carbon capture project ‘close to collapse‘, which reported:

A £1bn flagship government project for fighting climate change – the construction of a prototype carbon capture and storage (CCS) project at Longannet in Scotland – is on the verge of collapse, it emerged on Thursday.

Talks between the Department of Energy and Climate Change (Decc) and Scottish Power have run into deep trouble and the electricity supplier is expected to pull the plug on the government-promoted scheme, which hoped to bury carbon emissions from the coal power station in the North Sea.

The potential demise of the scheme comes amid growing fears among renewable power enthusiasts that David Cameron and George Osborne want to scale back the “green” agenda on the grounds that low-carbon energy schemes such as CCS and offshore wind cost too much at a time of austerity. Osborne told the Conservative party conference in Manchester that if he had his way the UK would cut “carbon emissions no slower but also no faster than our fellow countries in Europe”.

I tweeted back at Ry, pointing out an earlier Guardian story headlined, Carbon capture progress has lost momentum, says energy agency. That story reported:

The financial crisis and fading government support for climate action have seriously eroded global plans to capture and store carbon, the International Energy Agency (IEA) warned on Thursday.

Sequestration – the depositing of greenhouse gases underground rather than into the atmosphere – was supposed to account for a fifth of the world’s emissions reductions under the agency’s roadmap for keeping global temperature rise within 2C (4F) by the end of the century.

But delegates including the US energy secretary, Steven Chu, heard at a meeting, held in Beijing, that the global temperature is on course to rise by 3.5C, due to poor progress both on carbon capture and storage, and on acceptance of a carbon price and other carbon-cutting efforts.

Importantly, the story said:

IEA deputy executive director, Richard Jones, told the meeting, hosted by the Washington-based Carbon Sequestration Leadership Forum, that this would wreak havoc on human wellbeing. He added that time was running out to avoid this scenario because of slow progress on carbon capture and sequestration (CCS).

“Every year that passes makes it more difficult,” Jones said. “With current policies, CCS will have a hard time [being] deployed … There is less of a global push for climate action, and tighter government finances.”

And, it included this important stuff as well:

US energy secretary Steven Chu told the meeting the price of carbon would have to be $80 a tonne for CCS to be economically viable with current technology.

But, he continued, the US has yet to even set a price, which makes it difficult for companies to invest and financial institutions to make loans to CCS projects.

“The US needs a price on carbon sooner rather than later,” said Chu. “This is something where we are losing time. It is very important that we get moving.”

(more…)

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Posted in CCS, Media coverage, Politics | 6 Comments »

More evidence that ‘clean coal’ won’t move forward without limits on greenhouse emissions

Wednesday, October 5, 2011

We’ve written before on Coal Tattoo — many times (see here, here and here) — about the fact that continued opposition by the coal industry and its political friends to any limits on greenhouse gas emissions is part of what is sinking any efforts to move forward with carbon capture and storage, or CCS projects.

Now, there’s a new report out from the Global CCS Institute that further makes this important point.

The report is mostly positive, touting things like this:

Through the Institute’s annual projects survey 74 large-scale integrated CCS projects were identified around the world, 14 of which are either operating or under construction. The total CO2 storage capacity of these 14 projects is over 33 million tonnes a year. This is broadly equivalent to preventing the emissions from more than six million cars from entering the atmosphere each year.

Progress is being made on CCS globally. The number of CCS projects in operation or under construction is growing and is likely to continue to grow.

But the report notes that nearly a dozen projects have been canceled or put on hold in the last year, saying:

The most frequently cited reason for a project being put on-hold or cancelled is that it was deemed uneconomic in its current form and policy environment. The lack of financial support to continue to the next stage of project development and uncertainty regarding carbon abatement policies were critical factors that led several project proponents to reprioritise their investments, either within their CCS portfolio or to alternative technologies.

And, importantly for the coal industry in Appalachia, the report noted:

In the case of the Mountaineer power project, American Electric Power cited regulatory and policy uncertainties as key factors contributing to its decision not to progress to the Execute stage.

Among other things, the report concludes:

Substantial, timely and stable policy support, including a carbon price signal, is needed for CCS to be demonstrated and then broadly deployed. This in turn will give industry confidence to continue to invest in CCS and drive innovation.

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CCS project stops, but global warming keeps going

Thursday, July 21, 2011

Dry soil cracks in the heat near Lake Hefner in Oklahoma City on Monday, July 18, 2011. (AP Photo/The Daily Oklahoman, John Clanton)

West Virginia elected officials may want to pretend that their opposition to any limits on greenhouse gas emissions had nothing to do with American Electric Power’s scuttling of a major carbon capture and storage project in Mason County. But in the wake of that AEP announcement, one thing can’t be ignored: The world continues to get warmer.

Here’s what Climate Science Watch said on Monday:

In a Capitol Hill briefing on the recently released State of the Climate in 2010 report, Tom Karl, Director of NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center, rebutted the skeptic argument that global warming has stopped …

These indicators on a global scale constitute an “unmistakable signal that there is warming from the top of the atmosphere to the bottom of the oceans,” Karl concluded. 2010 was tied for the warmest year on record with 2005, while Greenland’s ice sheet lost the most mass in the last ten years. Changes to the Arctic’s climate are “occurring faster than in most of the rest of the world,” he said. The September Arctic sea ice extent was the third smallest of the past 30 years.

On his indispensable blog, Climate Progress, Joe Romm headlined his story, “Sorry Deniers, the Earth Just Keeps Warming – Thanks to Us“.

I mentioned last week how Hoppy Kercheval at MetroNews opined that the move by AEP to ditch its CCS project was “understandable”:

Customers are already squeezed because of the natural growth in rates and the sluggish economy. Requiring them to pay for a carbon sequestration experiment that might one day lead to lowering the planet’s temperature by a fraction of a degree won’t fly.

West Virginia, in fact the entire country, has more immediate problems.

More immediate? How about which problem is really more serious in the long-term picture?

Malee, a three-month old Asian elephant, cools off with a spray of water in her wading pool at the Oklahoma City Zoo in Oklahoma City, Monday, July 18, 2011. Much of the nation is in the grip of a broiling heat wave. (AP Photo/Sue Ogrocki)

Joe Romm has a post called What if the CO2 Ceiling Debate Were Like the Debt Ceiling Debate that gets to the heart of those questions:

The national debt isn’t the greatest short-term problem we face. That is spurring jobs and economic growth.

And the debt certainly isn’t close to the greatest long-term problem we face. That would obviously be unrestricted emissions of greenhouse gases, which threaten human civilization with multiple simultaneous catastrophes — from endless superstorms to permanent DustBowls.

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Posted in CCS, Climate science | 4 Comments »

AEP puts brakes on touted carbon capture project

Thursday, July 14, 2011

Gazette photo by Lawrence Pierce

The New York Times broke the story late last night:

A major American utility is shelving the nation’s most prominent effort to capture carbon dioxide from an existing coal-burning power plant, dealing a severe blow to efforts to rein in emissions responsible for global warming.

American Electric Power has decided to table plans to build a full-scale carbon-capture plant at Mountaineer, a 31-year-old coal-fired plant in West Virginia, where the company has successfully captured and buried carbon dioxide in a small pilot program for two years.

The technology had been heralded as the quickest solution to help the coal industry weather tougher federal limits on greenhouse gas emissions. But Congressional inaction on climate change diminished the incentives that had spurred A.E.P. to take the leap.

Let’s read that last sentence again:

But Congressional inaction on climate change diminished the incentives that had spurred A.E.P. to take the leap.

We’re waiting this morning for an official announcement from Columbus, Ohio-based AEP.

Updated: Jeri Matheny, a spokeswoman for AEP, confirmed the development to me this morning:

We are tabling the project. It’s disappointing that we had to do that. It was a business decision that we had to make.

Updated 2: I’ve posted a copy of AEP’s news release here.

But one thing to be clear about is that the Times seems just a little confused about the size of the project involved here.

Reporters Matthew L. Wald and John M. Broder describe it as a “full-scale carbon-capture plant” at the company’s Mountaineer Power station in New Haven, Mason County. But, they go on to discuss a $668 million project that the U.S. Department of Energy had pledged to provide half of the funds to complete.

Regular readers of Coal Tattoo know that AEP has been working on a test project that would capture and store a small stream of the carbon emissions from Mountaineer, and that the partially DOE-funded expansion was really for a larger pilot project — not for full-scale CCS on the entire facility. As we described previously:

AEP’s Mountaineer Plant CCS project is among the most important tests of technology aimed at controlling greenhouse gas emissions from coal-fired power plants. But, the current test deals with an emissions stream equivalent to only 20 megawatts of the 1,300-megawatt plant. The federal funding would cover about half of the costs of expanding AEP’s chilled ammonia carbon capture process to cover the equivalent of 230 megawatts of the plant. (Still less than 20 percent of the overall facility).

Still, this is a major story … and it’s worth reading how the Times describes the reasons for this AEP decision yet again:

… Congressional inaction on climate change diminished the incentives that had spurred A.E.P. to take the leap.

(more…)

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Posted in CCS, Media coverage | 19 Comments »

Sen. Manchin praises coal-to-liquids project

Monday, May 9, 2011

This just in from Sen. Joe Manchin’s office …

U.S. Senator Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) today highlighted the critical role that coal will play in our nation’s energy future at the groundbreaking of the country’s first coal-to-gasoline plant in Mingo County, which is projected to create hundreds of new jobs and provide additional domestic resources to help bring down the price of gas.

“The price of gas has skyrocketed to more than four dollars a gallon in the last year, and there’s no question that West Virginia families are hurting,” Senator Manchin said. “West Virginia is a state where people have to drive to survive, and I know these high prices are hitting families hard. This country has to get serious about making energy independence a priority, which is why we must develop a national energy policy that harnesses all of our vast domestic resources and push forward with new technology – just like coal-to-gasoline – that will help us achieve energy independence within a generation. All West Virginians can be proud that Mingo County, West Virginia is at the center of a very exciting new frontier in energy technology that will help reduce our nation’s dependence on foreign oil.”

According to Manchin’s office:

This coal-to-gasoline plant – the first of its kind in the United States – is projected to convert 7,500 tons of West Virginia coal into clean gasoline each day, which can be used to run cars, trucks, tanks and jets. It is expected to produce 18,000 barrels (756,000 gallons) of Premium 92 Octane gasoline each day. When it is fully operational, this plant is expected to create 300 full-time jobs. And, over a four-year construction period, its estimated that 3,000 skilled trade workers will be employed.

So, this one plant — if it’s every built — would produce about one-third of the gasoline that West Virginia uses every day, at least according to figures published by the state Division of Energy.

Now, Sen. Manchin doesn’t mention questions about the lack of financing (subscription required) for this project.  He doesn’t mention lingering problems with the company’s state environmental permits — such as the fact that its stormwater permit for its construction not being issued yet.

And Sen. Manchin certainly didn’t mention the biggest question facing the TransGas proposal: The fact that it has no plan for capturing and storing its greenhouse gas emissions, meaning the fuel it produces could end up generating twice as much carbon dioxide as traditional fuels.

(more…)

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Posted in Alternative energy, CCS, Climate policy, Politics | No Comments »

Sen. Rockefeller loses again on EPA bill

Wednesday, April 6, 2011

The U.S. Senate just voted down — by a count of 88-12 — the latest effort by Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., to delay any EPA action to deal with global warming.

Sen. Rockefeller’s office issued this statement just before the vote:

I’m convinced that my approach to stopping the EPA in its tracks is the best idea on the table to protect the mining industry. We need a timeout on EPA regulations right now, and I don’t understand why Republicans are saying they will block what we’re trying to do just to score a point against the White House. If that happens, it’s a shame. The plan I have for blocking the EPA will protect West Virginia, allow miners to keep their jobs, and is reasonable enough that it can become law. None of the other plans have any chance of that. We ought to put aside bickering and agree on a plan that offers real solutions and good outcomes.

As we’ve discussed before here on Coal Tattoo, Sen. Rockefeller’s version of these events is that the coal industry and utilities need more time to perfect and deploy carbon capture and storage equipment … but there’s plenty of evidence that what is really keeping CCS from moving forward is the lack of a comprehensive climate and energy plan that puts a price on greenhouse gas emissions by requiring cuts in those emissions.

See previous posts here, here, here and here.

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Posted in CCS, Climate policy, Coal pollution, Congress, Politics | 4 Comments »

Waiting for Acting Gov. Tomblin and coal’s future

Wednesday, January 12, 2011

Here in West Virginia, as our state Senate argues over who is running the place, we’re all waiting to hear tonight from Acting Gov. Earl Ray Tomblin, who is scheduled to give his State of the State address at 7 p.m.

It seems likely that the acting governor will touch on coal industry issues, probably to confirm he’s willing to continue fighting the Obama administration’s efforts to curb the impacts of mountaintop removal. But it will also be interesting to hear if Gov. Tomblin mentions the Upper Big Branch Mine Disaster and makes any commitment to push legislation to improve mine safety in the state.

But even more interesting: Will the acting governor talk at all about West Virginia embracing the future, moving toward accepting efforts to limit the negative impacts of coal rather than hiding our heads in the sand?

These questions came to mind today as I clicked through some links that my friend Jeff Goodell of Rolling Stone was posting on Twitter about new questions being raised about one of the most widely touted carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) project in the world.

It seems that this consultant’s report has found that CO2 from the Weyburn Field CCS project in Saskatchewan at levels twice that which would asphyxiate a person. According to the Toronto Globe and Mail:

First there were the strange blooms of algae on water that had pooled in a gravel pit near Jane and Cameron Kerr’s house. Then there were the dead animals – a cat, an African goat, a rabbit, a duck, a half-dozen blackbirds. Then there were the night-time blowouts, which sounded like cannons and left gashes in the side of the pit.

But what started as a series of worrisome problems on a rural Saskatchewan property has now raised serious questions about the safety of carbon sequestration and storage, a technology that has drawn billions in spending from governments and industry, which have promoted it as a salve to Canada’s growth in greenhouse-gas emissions.

(more…)

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Posted in CCS, Climate policy, Legislature, Mountaintop Removal, Politics | 8 Comments »

Can Sen. Rockefeller lead on global warming?

Thursday, September 9, 2010

Gazette photo by Lawrence Pierce

The University of Charleston’s forum on CCS brought a rare bit of calm and reason into West Virginia’s ongoing discussions about the future of our coal industry.

It was impressive and refreshing to have the nation’s Nobel Prize-winning Energy Secretary, Steven Chu, on stage with longtime Sen. Jay Rockefeller, hashing out the importance of this technology if coal mining is going to continue in a carbon-constrained world. (See our Gazette print story on the event here)

Unfortunately, there was hardly any time at all for questions from the audience, and it was too bad that a bunch of folks from the industry front group America’s Power were trolling around in brand-name T-shirts as if it was their event.

During a very, very, very short question-and-answer session with the local media, I wondered if Secretary Chu was puzzled about why reporters kept asking him if coal miners should be afraid of the Obama administration or if CCS was going to put an end to coal mining:

Don’t fear the Obama administration … we’re trying to help not only West Virginia, but the rest of the country.

And Chu had to repeat this line about CCS at least twice before the local media seemed to understand what he was getting at:

It will save coal.

Who knows if Secretary Chu’s calm, somewhat geeky presentation — complete with PowerPoint, of course — will convince any of the business and industry leaders at yesterday’s event that global warming is real and that if they want coal to survive they better start working harder to make CCS work.

But the impression I remain left with is of Sen. Rockefeller essentially stealing the show. As I wrote for our print edition:

Speaking alongside Chu, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, Rockefeller made perhaps his strongest statements to date in support of the scientific consensus that carbon dioxide emissions are changing the global climate in dangerous ways.

Rockfeller, chairman of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation, also blasted industry leaders and members of West Virginia media who promote the notion that global warming isn’t real.

“I’m concerned that powerful voices in West Virginia continue to argue that climate change is a myth,” Rockefeller said. “I’m not on the same bandwagon that some of you are.”

The senator said that climate change skeptics are harming West Virginia by putting off efforts to perfect and deploy CCS, giving natural gas more time to cut into coal’s market and hurt mining’s long-term viability.

“Burying one’s head in the sand is not a solution, and can only backfire,” Rockefeller said.

(more…)

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Posted in CCS, Politics | 29 Comments »

For Energy Secretary Chu, coal goes from ‘nightmare’ to key fuel for America’s future?

Tuesday, September 7, 2010

It wasn’t so terribly long ago that Energy Secretary Steven Chu described coal as  “my worst nightmare,” and questioned whether carbon capture and storage, or CCS, would save the mining industry.

During a talk back when he was director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and a Stanford University professor, Chu — a Nobel Prize-winning physicist — described his concerns about CCS this way:

It’s sort of a research and development issue. I think we have to do this if we’re going to go forward with coal, but it’s not a guarantee that we have a solution with coal.

You can go back and read my story about those comments here, or watch the whole speech on YouTube (The coal comments are at about 28 minutes in):

Chu backed off of those statements a bit during a confirmation hearing in January 2009, saying coal is a “nightmare” only if its greenhouse emissions aren’t controlled.

Since then, Chu and his DOE have joined with the Obama administration’s U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in issuing a major report that embraced CCS as doable as one of the nation’s key future energy strategies.

Some West Virginia political and business leaders felt quite a snub when Chu did not show up for the October 2009 dedication ceremony for American Electric Power’s major CCS test project at its Mountaineer Plant in Mason County. Maybe Chu will make up for it tomorrow, when he appears at a 3 p.m. event at the University of Charleston as part of the university’s series of speakers on coal and energy.

Looking back on Chu’s “my worst nightmare” comments, there really was little there that did not reflect the state of the science on CCS. As reported many times here on Coal Tattoo, there are lots of hurdles — from cost to scale to safety — and many questions about CCS. But most serious experts believe CCS is the only thing that can help the coal industry survive any limits on greenhouse emissions.

But the press releases about the administration’s new report on CCS certainly sound a lot more optimistic than Chu was back then.  For example, according to the release:

President Obama’s Interagency Task Force on Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS), co-chaired by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Department of Energy (DOE), delivered a series of recommendations to the president today on overcoming the barriers to the widespread, cost-effective deployment of CCS within 10 years. CCS is a group of technologies for capturing, compressing, transporting and permanently storing power plant and industrial source emissions of carbon dioxide. Rapid development and deployment of clean coal technologies, particularly carbon capture and storage (CCS), will help position the United States as a leader in the global clean energy race. The report concludes that CCS can play an important role in domestic greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions reductions while preserving the option of using coal and other abundant domestic fossil energy resources.

I plan to cover Chu’s talk here in Charleston, and I’m especially interested in hearing what he has to say about the continued inaction on a more comprehensive energy and climate bill. And I’ d like to ask him if he thinks the bill being promoted by Sen. Jay Rockefeller — which would pump money into CCS, but not cap carbon dioxide emissions — is enough to help get this technology perfected and deployed.

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Posted in CCS, Climate policy | 10 Comments »

AP report: Old-style coal plants expanding

Tuesday, August 17, 2010

In this photo taken Wednesday, April 28, 2010, Jon LaCour, manager of the Wygen III coal-fired plant, looks over pollution control equipment built onto the recently completed $247 million plant in Wyodak, Wyo. Utilities across the country are building dozens of old style coal plants that will cement the industry’s standing as the largest industrial source of climate changing gases for decades. (AP Photo/Matthew Brown)

Here’s a story just out by Matthew Brown of The Associated Press:

WYODAK, Wyo. (AP) — Utilities across the country are building dozens of old-style coal plants that will cement the industry’s standing as the largest industrial source of climate-changing gases for years to come.

An Associated Press examination of U.S. Department of Energy records and information provided by utilities and trade groups shows that more than 30 traditional coal plants have been built since 2008 or are under construction.

The construction wave stretches from Arizona to Illinois and South Carolina to Washington, and comes despite growing public wariness over the high environmental and social costs of fossil fuels, demonstrated by tragic mine disasters in West Virginia, the Gulf oil spill and wars in the Middle East.

The expansion, the industry’s largest in two decades, represents an acknowledgment that highly touted “clean coal” technology is still a long ways from becoming a reality and underscores a renewed confidence among utilities that proposals to regulate carbon emissions will fail. The Senate last month scrapped the leading bill to curb carbon emissions following opposition from Republicans and coal-state Democrats.

“Building a coal-fired power plant today is betting that we are not going to put a serious financial cost on emitting carbon dioxide,” said Severin Borenstein, director of the Energy Institute at the University of California-Berkeley. “That may be true, but unless most of the scientists are way off the mark, that’s pretty bad public policy.”

In this photo taken Wednesday, April 28, 2010, Marty Snell with Black Hills Power monitors a bank of computer screens used to track operations of the Wygen III power plant in Wyodak, Wyo. Utilities across the country are building dozens of old style coal plants that will cement the industry’s standing as the largest industrial source of climate changing gases for decades. (AP Photo/Matthew Brown)


(more…)

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Posted in Air pollution, Business, CCS, Climate policy, Coal business, Coal pollution, Media coverage | 16 Comments »

Energy Secretary Steven Chu coming to W.Va.

Monday, August 16, 2010

West Virginians will get a great chance early next month to hear about the Obama administration’s coal and energy policies directly from Nobel Prize-winning Energy Secretary Steven Chu.

Secretary Chu is scheduled to take part in a forum on the future of coal at the University of Charleston. The Sept. 8 event is part of a series of coal and energy discussions hosted by U.C. and I’m proud to say is co-sponsored by The Charleston Gazette.

We had a brief item on the event in Sunday’s Gazette-Mail, and more details are expected soon via the U.C. Web site.

It should be a great opportunity for folks who want to hear more about the promise — and the great problems — associated with carbon capture and storage technology, and hopefully for Secretary Chu to explain the fact that for CCS to be widely deployed, some sort of national policy to reduce greenhouse emissions is needed.

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Posted in Alternative energy, CCS | 3 Comments »

Obama task force recommends stepped up federal efforts on carbon capture and storage

Thursday, August 12, 2010

An Obama administration task force has concluded that carbon capture and storage, or CCS, is viable, especially if the federal government beefs up its efforts to encourage the technology.

But among the key hurdles, according to a news release just issued by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency:

A Carbon Price is Critical: Widespread cost-effective deployment of CCS is best achieved with a carbon price, but there are market drivers and actions that can and are taking place now, which are essential to support near-term CCS demonstration projects that will pave the way for broader deployment after a carbon price is in place.

Of course, this is the very thing that many in the coal industry — and many of the industry’s political supporters, including West Virginia Sens. Jay Rockefeller and Carte Goodwin — oppose.

The report, available here, also outlines some of the other challenges that CCS faces:

Though CCS technologies exist, “scaling up” these existing processes and integrating them with coal-based power generation poses technical, economic, and regulatory challenges. In the electricity sector, estimates of the incremental costs of new coal-fired plants with CCS relative to new conventional coal-fired plants typically range from $60 to $95 per tonne of CO2 avoided (DOE, 2010a). Approximately 70–90 percent of that cost is associated with capture and compression. Some of this cost could be offset by the use of CO2 for EOR for which there is an existing market, but EOR options may not be available for many projects.

(more…)

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Obama touts miners’ union, praises ‘clean coal’

Thursday, August 5, 2010

President Barack Obama is introduced by AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka before he spoke about jobs and the economy during an address before the AFL-CIO Executive Council in Washington, Wednesday, Aug. 4, 2010. (AP Photo/Charles Dharapak)

In appearance yesterday before the AFL-CIO Executive Council, President Obama touted unionization of coal-mine workers, saying:

But it is my profound belief that companies are stronger when their workers are getting paid well and have decent benefits and are treated with dignity and respect. It is my profound belief that our government works best when it’s not being run on behalf of special interests, but it’s being run on behalf of the public interest, and that the dedication of public servants reflects that.

So FDR I think said — he was asked once what he thought about unions. He said, “If I was a worker in a factory and I wanted to improve my life, I would join a union.”

Well, I tell you what. I think that’s true for workers generally. I think if I was a coalminer, I’d want a union representing me to make sure that I was safe and you did not have some of the tragedies that we’ve been seeing in the coal industry.

(more…)

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Posted in CCS, Climate policy, Labor, Politics | 7 Comments »

Coal-burner Appalachian Power ‘disappointed’ by Senate inaction on U.S. climate change bill

Wednesday, August 4, 2010

I just got out of a meeting between Gazette editors and Charles Patton, who is succeeding Dana Waldo as president of American Electric Power’s Appalachian Power subsidiary here in West Virginia.

It might come as a shocker to those in the coal world who are celebrating the death of congressional legislation to cap greenhouse gas emissions, but here’s what Patton had to say about lawmakers’ inaction:

We were disappointed that no action was taken. We understand why there was great opposition in the Midwest and especially in coal-producing states.

But the dilemma we face as an industry is there appears to be some amount of inevitability that something in the carbon world is going to happen.

Patton — who spent a good share of his career working as a policy person and lobbyist for AEP and related companies — lamented that climate change legislation has become such a partisan issue in Washington, D.C., and noted that during the Bush administration many more Republicans (including Sen. John McCain) supported passage of a climate bill.

Clearly, power companies like AEP would prefer congressional action to greenhouse gas regulations written by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency — and certainly to lawsuits and court rulings like the one AEP is appealing to the U.S. Supreme Court.

But Patton noted that the industry needs certainty and predictability, and needs time to put into place whatever emissions controls are needed or fuel switches or other actions are required. And he knows that in order for carbon capture and storage technology to be widely deployed, utilities must be given an incentive to do so in the form of some kind of emissions limits:

We can’t turn on a dime. It takes years and years to plan and develop generation capacity. So we need to know what the future holds to allow us to successfully plan for the future.

I’ll have more from our discussion with Patton in tomorrow’s Gazette …

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Posted in Business, CCS, Climate policy | 4 Comments »

More evidence that greenhouse limits are needed to make CCS possible for W.Va.’s coal industry

Wednesday, July 28, 2010

I was just checking out a new article in Chemical and Engineering News about the U.S. Chemical Safety Board, when I stumbled upon the headline of a complete separate story:

Carbon Dioxide’s Unsettled Future: Technologies to reel in greenhouse gas emissions abound, but can’t move forward without policy actions.

Here’s how it started:

With world population climbing, and energy demand along with it, countries are trying to figure out how to minimize the global-warming consequences of carbon-based energy …

… The challenges are enormous: Because of the differences in energy resources, nations around the world have different abilities to shift away from fossil fuel and to adopt technologies that reduce CO2 emissions.

And many of those technologies are not moving as fast as they could be because of uncertainty in public policies to reduce CO2 emissions.

Among other things, the story quotes George A. Richards, focus area leader for energy system dynamics a the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Energy Technology Laboratory:

It’s not just a matter of solving technical issues.  It is a matter of cost and social acceptance. Cost remains a bottleneck for carbon-capture technology, and regulatory certainty is needed before investments will be made in large-scale sequestration.

(more…)

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New GAO report on carbon capture and storage

Friday, July 16, 2010

There’s a new U.S. Government Accountability Office report out today about the Department of Energy’s program concerning Carbon Capture and Storage, or CCS.

Among the findings:

– DOE does not systematically assess the maturity of key coal technologies, but GAO found consensus that CCS is “less mature” that power plant efficiency technologies.

– Commercial deployment of CCS is possible within 10 to 15 years, while many efficiency technologies have been used and are available for use now. Both technologies, though, face a host of technical, financial and legal hurdles.

– In particular, related to CCS, GAO interviews with stakeholders “highlighted the large costs to install and operate current CCS technologies, the fact that large-scale demonstration of CCS is needed in coal plants, and the lack of a national carbon policy to reduce CO2 emissions or a legal framework to govern liability for the permanent storage of large amounts of CO2.”

Read the report here.

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Posted in CCS, Climate policy | 14 Comments »

Sen. Rockfeller set to introduce new CCS bill

Tuesday, July 13, 2010

West Virginia Sen. Jay Rockefeller is set tomorrow to introduce new federal legislation aimed at encouraging the development and deployment of carbon capture and storage technology at coal-burning power plants across the country.

Rockefeller and his co-author, Ohio Republican George Voinovich, released a “discussion draft” of their Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) Deployment Act of 2010 back in March and details on that are available here.

Sen. Rockefeller has recently voted in favor of a resolution that would have overturned EPA’s scientific findings that greenhouse gas emissions are a threat to public health and welfare, and has urged Congress to abandon comprehensive legislation to address climate change.

Yesterday, Sen. Rockfeller told The Hill he hasn’t been convinced yet to support legislation that puts a price on carbon emissions:

Nothing before me grabs my attention sufficiently.


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Posted in CCS, Climate policy, Congress | 5 Comments »

Study: CCS could create 74,000 U.S. jobs by 2030

Thursday, April 22, 2010

This just in:

According to a new study released today, accelerated deployment of carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology would lead to 74,000 permanent jobs attributable to CCS in the U.S. by 2030.  CCS deployment will also result in the net creation of 371,000 construction “job years” (each “job year” being one construction job for a year). The construction jobs would be focused in states with plants incorporating CCS technology – with an estimated 42,616 job years in Pennsylvania, 28,654 in Ohio, and 26,293 in Indiana, and would involve the building of more than 100 new plants throughout the U.S.

The study, released by the Clean Air Task Force, is available online here.

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Posted in CCS | 5 Comments »

WVDEP approves Mingo coal-to-gas plant

Friday, February 26, 2010

The Manchin administration today approved an air pollution permit for the Trans-Gas Development coal-to-liquids plant proposed for Mingo County, W.Va.

Officials from the WVDEP’s Division of Air Quality approved the permit and issued a Final Engineering Determination combined with a response to public comments.

As we’ve discussed on Coal Tattoo before, coal-to-liquids technology will generate twice the greenhouse gas emissions of standard gasoline, unless the production plants are equipped with carbon capture technology — which the Trans-Gas facility isn’t.

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Posted in Business, CCS, Climate policy | 6 Comments »

Longview Power to study CCS for new W.Va. plant

Wednesday, February 10, 2010

process-technology-photo-1.jpg

Speaking of carbon capture and storage,  Longview Power just announced that it has hired a Florida firm to study the “applicability” of CCS technology to its new power plant outside of Morgantown, W.Va.

The Longview press release is here, and its says Longview has hired Siemens Energy for a study that:

… will include process design activities focused on the potential application of Siemens’ second generation amino acid salt post-combustion CO2 capture (POSTCAP) process.

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Posted in CCS | 5 Comments »

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