Martin Schneider
GHG Monitor
4/11/2014
Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Gina McCarthy was again pressed on the commercial viability of carbon capture and storage technology at an April 9 hearing before the Senate Energy and Water Appropriations Subcommittee on EPA’s FY 2015 budget request, with Sen. John Hoeven (R-N.D.) suggesting that EPA regulations for new power plants will discourage the commercial development of CCS because no new coal plants will be built. “The only way that CCS is going to be developed and deployed is if it becomes commercially viable,” Hoeven told McCarthy at the hearing. “So we’ve got to get it to that point. By having a rule that prevents it from ever being put in place or from ever having any company move forward with it, we’re never going to develop the very technology we need, both to produce the energy and get the environmental stewardship we want.”
McCarthy responded that “we believe that carbon capture and sequestration is actually technically feasible, and it’s available.” Hoeven quickly broke in to clarify that it was the commercial viability of CCS that he was questioning, not its technical feasibility, but McCarthy added: “Well, technically feasible and available is the standard under the law. And nobody is indicating that CCS isn’t adding cost. The challenge we have here is that we need to provide a path forward for coal in what we know is a future that will be carbon- constrained.”
The New Source Performance Standards rule will set separate CO2 emissions standards for coal and gas units and provides incentives for plant developers to install carbon capture and storage technology. Depending on whether plant operators decide to measure CO2 emissions over a 12- or 84-month operating period, individual coal units would have to cap emissions at between 1,000 and 1,100 lbs CO2/MWh and gas-fired turbines, depending on their size, must also meet a CO2 emissions limit of between 1,000 and 1,100 lbs MWh over a 12 month period. The rule also identifies the “partial” capture and storage of roughly 30 to 50 percent of a plant’s emissions as the “best system of emission reduction” technology for coal plants.
McCarthy: EPA Focused on Partial Capture to Lower Cost
McCarthy emphasized in her remarks that “there are already facilities that are being constructed with CCS. This is where new-coal and clean-coal investment is happening. We’re hoping to continue to provide an emphasis for that in this regulation. But certainly it’s still a proposal, and we’re looking at the comments we receive. But we think this is the future, and we think that facilities are investing in it now. We see it for new power plants. And CCS has been around for a very long time in other applications.” She added that EPA also looked at “what we could do to keep the cost of CCS down as much as possible while still providing an emphasis for this technology to continue to be developed, continue to be enhanced and be more cost-effective by lowering the amount of capture that is required in this rule from what we had been considering before. So it is partial capture. It is lower cost. It is available now. And we believe it’s been technically demonstrated.”
Hoeven, though, was not dissuaded. “You have got to show us that whatever rule you bring out is commercially viable and that it’s not going to shut down plants and what the cost to consumers and small business across this country is going to be. It is vitally important as you move forward now with the existing-plant rule as well. We need to see, you know, that it’s something that’s truly achievable, not technically achievable. It has to be commercially viable.”
