Government advisers are urging the Obama administration to make changes to its package of contentious climate change rules for power plants to spur clean-coal technologies, not just renewables, to meet the rising demand for energy.
The National Coal Council, a government advisory panel, issued a report Thursday on how to create parity for clean-coal technology — including new tax credits — after Energy Secretary Ernst Moniz asked the council in September to recommend specific policy changes to incentivize the technology.
“Federal energy and environmental policy has severely tilted the energy playing field” away from coal, say the advisers, requiring the council to “make recommendations to level the playing field for carbon capture and storage (CCS) and provide ‘policy parity.'”
The report, sent to Moniz Thursday, makes a number of recommendations to help propel carbon capture and storage technology to wider commercial use, including changes to the Environmental Protection Agency’s far-reaching Clean Power Plan, which is the centerpiece of President Obama’s climate agenda.
The administration wants to reduce the rate of carbon dioxide emissions from coal and oil that most scientists blame for heating the Earth’s temperature, resulting in ocean acidification, more droughts and flooding.
The carbon capture process extracts carbon dioxide from the burning of coal before it is emitted, and stores it underground or uses it for an industrial purpose, including oil production. The council says coal and fossil fuels “will keep rising globally as the world adds … three billion more people to cities in the next 40-50 years.” It says to achieve “climate goals and address fossil emissions, the world must have CCS. Commercializing CCS requires a level playing field.”
The report recommends the creation of a first-of-its-kind regulatory blueprint to “remove barriers to the construction and development of projects with CCS.” The blueprint would include streamlining siting and permitting requirements for facilities necessary to a carbon capture coal plant, including the capture facility, pipelines and storage facilities.
The blueprint also would address “barriers” created by the Environmental Protection Agency’s power plant rules, including the Clean Power Plan, to better accommodate carbon capture and storage and give the technology adequate room for commercialization and growth.
The report also says the blueprint should address other “barriers” presented by the EPA, such as criteria under the agency’s permitting requirements that may make it too expensive to reduce carbon from coal using carbon capture.
Democrat Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia sent a letter to the EPA earlier this week saying the agency is setting an unrealistic standard for new coal plants by requiring power plant operators to use carbon capture technology that has not been made commercial.
The report appears to agree with Manchin and other critics of the climate rules on the challenge of commercialization. The report says that clean coal technologies have not had the same incentives as renewable energy to lower the cost and drive commercialization.
“While CCS is commercially deployed in some industrial sectors and technically demonstrated at electric power plants, power generation with CCS remains expensive today compared to other technologies such as natural gas combined cycle (NGCC) or heavily subsidized renewables,” the report says.
The report suggests parity between renewables and clean coal technology, recommending new tax credits for both the development and use of carbon capture by coal-fired plants.
“Existing incentives for CCS are simply too small to ‘bridge the chasm’ … between the cost and risk of promising but immature CCS technologies and other technology alternatives,” the report reads.
The timing of the report’s release is meant to coincide with President Obama’s trip to Paris to join talks scheduled for Nov. 30-Dec. 11 to reach a deal on a global emissions reduction treaty, according to the council. The regulations are considered the linchpin in the U.S. commitments for the climate deal.
