Tamar Hallerman
GHG Monitor
7/3/13
The Environmental Protection Agency has confirmed reports that it sent its retooled carbon pollution standard for new power plants to the White House earlier this week. Politico initially reported that the EPA submitted its revised greenhouse gas emissions performance standard to the Office of Management and Budget July 1. “EPA is moving forward on the President’s plan to address carbon pollution from power plants using the same Clean Air Act tools that have protected Americans’ health and environment from air pollution for a generation,” EPA said in an e-mailed statement. “For newly built power plants, the plan calls for EPA to issue a new proposal by September 20, 2013. As part of this process, EPA has sent the new proposal for interagency review.” OMB will now review the proposal, as well as confer with other government agencies, in the months ahead before handing it back to EPA with any potential changes before it is publicly released.
The news unexpectedly came less than a week after President Obama announced a new plan to address climate change using executive-level actions that do not require Congressional approval. In a June 25 memorandum to acting EPA Administrator Bob Perciasepe, Obama directed EPA to issue a retooled proposal limiting carbon emissions from new power plants by Sept. 20, with a final rule coming in a “timely fashion” thereafter. The proposal also calls on EPA to introduce similar standards for the country’s existing power plants, which currently generate about 40 percent of the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions, by June 2014.
Big Changes Expected
The details of the new source standard are still unknown, but EPA is expected to significantly change the standards compared to its original March 2012 draft. That proposal sets a single standard for all fossil plants above 25 MW of 1,000 lbs per MWh, essentially the emissions rate of an unmitigated natural gas combined cycle unit. In order to comply, project operators must either install CCS technology or switch to gas or other low-carbon generation. Many have speculated that EPA is now moving to promulgate separate standards for coal and gas-fired units in order to bolster the rule’s legal footing after industry groups said the technology-neutral approach had no legal precedent and would codify the recent “dash for gas” instead of incentivize CCS. EPA missed its April 13 deadline to finalize the performance standards, saying that it needed more time to sift through the more than 2.5 million public comments it received about the draft rulemaking.
The contents of the new proposal, though, are expected to be challenged in court and in Congress—regardless of the limits EPA sets—from industry and Republican opponents who have argued that the standards will damage the economy and effectively kill coal-fired power. Congressional opponents could try and strike down the rulemaking, once finalized, through the little-used Congressional Review Act, a mechanism that allows Congress to invalidate federal rules pending they receive a simple majority of votes in both chambers, along with the signature of the President. A bill reintroduced in the House earlier this summer links the carbon standards to the feasibility of CCS as determined by multiple government agencies.
