COAL GROUP CALLS ON EPA TO MANDATE EFFICIENT COAL PLANTS UNDER NSPS

Lindsay Kalter
GHG Monitor
03/22/13

The National Mining Association (NMA) said the Obama Administration should abandon the Environmental Protection Agency’s proposed new source performance standards and instead enact policies that better encourage the deployment of advanced coal and carbon capture, utilization and storage technologies. NMA President and CEO Hal Quinn echoed previous remarks that instead of adopting greenhouse gas emission limits for future power plants, the government should incentivize new and more efficient coal units that employ advanced supercritical, integrated gasification combined cycle and, eventually, ultra-supercritical technologies. “Efficiency improvements are the most cost-effective and shortest lead time actions for reducing emissions. Higher efficiency coal-based power plants emit less CO2 per megawatt, and they are more suited for demonstrating and eventually deploying CO2 capture systems,” Quinn said in a recent letter to Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) and Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.). The duo had asked stakeholder groups to identify ways the federal government could reduce carbon pollution in the absence of Congressional legislation as part of their recently-created climate change task force.

In the letter, dated March 12 but released earlier this week, Quinn asserts that “unilateral action or fuel switching” to natural gas will not allow the U.S. to reach its climate mitigation goals. “Instead, a truly sustainable pathway for driving deep reductions in CO2 will require technology solutions in the form of efficiency gains in power generation and end use and, eventually, greenhouse gas abatement technology, such as carbon capture use and storage,” the letter states. Quinn said that EPA’s new source performance standards as proposed are “inflexible and misguided.” “EPA’s reasoning for this unprecedented proposal to set a standard for two completely different electricity generation technologies is curious and dangerous,” he wrote.

Instead of mandating that developers switch to gas or install carbon capture and storage technologies, a better way to provide policy support for the latter technology is to provide some sort of legal framework and financial incentive structure, Quinn said. “A uniform and clear federal policy framework would address ownership of stored CO2, allocation of responsibility and liability and any necessary financial assurance requirements,” he wrote. Quinn also called for additional investments to demonstration projects in order to “allow for the necessary cost reductions that will support future large-scale deployment.”