Abby L. Harvey
GHG Monitor
5/2/2014
PITTSBURGH, Pa.—Deputy Assistant Secretary of Energy for Clean Coal Julio Friedmann called this week for more investment into the development of new technologies to reduce GHG emissions. “For 10 years I’ve wanted to give this speech and say these words. Spend the money,” Friedmann said here at the 13th Annual Carbon Capture, Utilization and Storage Conference. “We are not in the age of farting around. We have to get on with spending the money. … the United States government is not going to be the sole actor in this space. We need more investment from companies. We need more investment in the form of human capital, people committing more time, more focus on this critically important task.”
The Obama Administration cut funding for the Department of Energy’s coal research budget in its Fiscal Year 2015 request to Congress this week, proposing $302.4 million for the program, a 23 percent decrease from 2014 enacted levels. Despite the proposal of a new program for natural gas carbon capture and storage demonstration projects, which was listed in the budget along with clean coal programs, every other coal program received cuts—with the budget for Carbon Capture trimmed 16 percent to $77 million and the budget for Carbon Storage cut 26 percent to $80 million. Funding for the Advanced Energy Systems program took the largest hit, with the request proposing a 49 percent decrease in funding to $51 million, followed by the NETL Coal Research and Development program, which was slashed 32 percent to $34 million. Funding for Cross Cutting Research was trimmed 16 percent to $35.3 million.
In his remarks, Friedmann said that a wider variety of technologies needed to be more fully developed. He also stressed the importance of the exchange of information, stating that it is not beneficial to have the same experiment done in several places when they could each be doing different experiments and sharing their findings. “It’s bonkers if France, the United States, China and Japan all do the same oxyfiring experiment. They could be doing four different oxyfiring experiments instead and learning pro-actively that way. Everyone has their best-in-class technology, everyone’s pushing it, but we can really benefit and shorten the time to deployment, accelerate our learning, by working in kind of international framework.”
The lack of large-scale second and third generation projects around the world is of concern, as this sort of development must occur in order to develop CCS into an economically viable technology, Friedmann asserted. “We’ve done our part,” he said, giving brief updates on the progress of large-scale projects in the U.S. “It’s not just us, there’s projects going up all around the world and I can’t stress this enough, they are the key unit of innovation. This is actually where innovation takes place.” These projects however are few and make a minimal impact in global GHG reductions targets, he stated. In terms of research, Friedmann asserted that without facilities in which to deploy new technologies, their purpose is lost. “All of this [research] has to go someplace … We have to build these things as the second generation and third generation pilots. If we don’t have the second generation pilots, we will not have the second generation demonstrations and right now we have a bunch of stuff sitting in high bays that’s just about ready to go.”
Friedmann stated several times that he believes timing is ideal to begin a large ramp up in development of CCS technology. “This certainly is a once in a generation opportunity to build stuff and I’m very, very keen to get on with the business of building stuff so we have to figure out how to harness this age of abundance in a way that is as positive as possible. By positive I mean we have to return as much value to the people as possible. We have to create as much opportunity for learning as possible,” Friedmann said.
He added, “We have to make the discoveries. We have to do the innovation. We have to build American competiveness. We have to do all these things in a big, big compelling way.”
