Abby L. Harvey
GHG Monitor
6/19/2015
Secretary of Energy Ernest Moniz voiced support for the development of carbon capture and storage as a means to ensure a role for fossil fuel use in a low-carbon future this week during a presentation at the Energy Information Agency’s annual conference. Earlier this year DOE choose to pull funding from the FutureGen 2.0 project, which would have been the world’s first commercial scale oxycombustion CCS project. This is not an indication that DOE is turning its back on CCS, Moniz suggested. “We remain very committed to enable this technology,” he said. “There is a lot of focus, of course, on a number of projects that have been challenged. These are first-of-a-kind complex, very aggressive, plants in terms of their capture. … I certainly still see carbon capture utilization sequestration as being part of the mix going forward.”
Moniz applauded the most recent CCS milestone met by DOE sponsored projects, the successful sequestration of 10 million metric tons of carbon dioxide, announced in April. The programs contributing to the milestone were the Industrial Carbon Capture and Storage (ICCS) Major Demonstrations program and the Regional Carbon Sequestration Partnership (RCSP) Initiative. The RCSP Initiative is made up of seven partnerships across different regions tasked with developing the best regional approaches for storing CO2. The ICCS program is tasked with developing CCS technologies that can be deployed to industrial sources. Moniz stated that reaching the milestone demonstrates DOE’s “continuing commitment to develop carbon capture and the use of coal in a carbon constrained world.”
DOE Projects Much More Ambitious that EPA Proposed Standards
In light of ongoing controversy concerning the use of CCS as a best system of emissions reduction in the Environmental Protection Agency’s proposed New Source Performance Standards (NSPS) for new-build coal fired power plants, Moniz noted the vast difference between the requirements of the proposed rule and the specifications of DOE sponsored CCS projects. The proposed rule would largely mandate the use of CCS on any new build coal-fired power plant. However, this requirement has been challenged by lawmakers and utilities who say that the technology is not proven and thus cannot be mandated.
The projects DOE has sponsored have much higher capture rates than would be required under the rule, Moniz said. “If we go back to last year’s proposed … 111(b) rule for new power plants, and you look at what was put out there … and you analyze what it takes to meet that standard and you started with an ultra-supercritical — now this is a new plant, so why wouldn’t you start with the most advanced high efficacy plant? Well, then the amount of carbon capture being called for underneath that rule is about a third. It’s very different from the kind of demonstration plants where we are pushing the edge of 90 percent capture,” he said.
