Abby L. Harvey
GHG Monitor
2/6/2015
Assistant Energy Secretary for Fossil Energy Chris Smith late this week stressed the importance of carbon capture and storage R&D activities in the Department of Energy’s new Fiscal Year 2016 budget request. The request, sent to Congress earlier this week, includes $117 million for carbon capture R&D, up $29 million from current funding levels; and $109 million for carbon storage, up $9 million from current levels. “You can see that we’ve got a robust budget that we’re requesting this year that we’re going to be very aggressively defending,” Smith said at the Global CCS Institute’s Americas Forum. “This is something that we expect to pass and this is something we fully expect to have an opportunity to implement.”
Notably, DOE’s FY16 request represents a significant shift from last year, when the Department had proposed deep funding cuts for CCS research efforts. “The budget we’re asking for this year is actually a little more consistent with the budget that was passed by Congress and actually quite a bit higher … a 6.4 percent increase over the budget that was enacted last year,” Smith explained. “Our R&D effort — and the Department of Energy is primarily a research technology organization — most of our budget for the Office of Fossil Energy, the office that I lead, is geared toward research and development. We have $560 million we’re requesting specifically for research and development and of that, by far the lion’s share goes to the office of clean coal. A total of $369 million goes to the office of clean coal.”
Smith also said in his remarks that CCS can help address two DOE goals that may be at odds with each other—addressing energy poverty and security and addressing climate change. “We’re going to see increasingly a duel mission of reducing energy poverty while also addressing issues having to deal with climate change,” Smith said. “People are going to want access to electricity, access to power and we have to figure out how to do that in a way that’s sustainable, reduces anthropogenic CO2 and reduces the impact that we have on the environment.”
