The administration is not waging a war on coal, Secretary of Energy Ernest Moniz said Wednesday morning. “Quite the contrary,” Moniz said, the administration and the Department of Energy have launched several programs and invested billions of dollars aimed at keeping coal country thriving.
“We invest billions of dollars in programs around carbon capture and sequestration and utilization,” he said. “We have proposed to the Congress roughly $5 billion in tax credits for carbon capture. The administration has put forward a POWER+ plan that is specifically aimed at these communities in terms of financial assistance, in terms of retraining, etc.”
The government has issued several rules not received favorably in coal country, including the Environmental Protection Agency’s carbon emission emissions standards for new and existing coal-fired power plants. Other policies, such as a moratorium on coal leasing on federal lands have also played into the “war on coal” narrative.
The Department of Energy’s Office of Fossil Energy has recently faced backlash from several angles regarding its funding of carbon capture and storage technology. Republican appropriators in both chambers have criticized the administration for underfunding fossil energy research and development programs, including CCS, annually. This year, the administration requested $600 million in funding for fossil energy R&D, cutting the programs by $32 million from the current level, though $240 million of that total would come from funding cut from the Texas Clean Energy Project, a CCS project under development near Houston.
Both the Senate and House versions of the Energy and Water Development Appropriations Bill restored the Fossil Energy R&D funding. “This bill rejects the budget request’s proposal to reduce investment in the energy sources that we rely on today. Within energy programs, the recommendation rebalances the portfolio to provide a true all-of-the-above energy strategy,” Rep. Mike Simpson (R-Idaho), chairman of the House Appropriations energy and water subcommittee, said during the panel’s April 13 markup.
More recently, members of the House Science, Space, and Technology Subcommittee on Energy criticized DOE support for large CCS projects aimed at commercializing the technology, charging that instead of dumping large amounts of money into projects like TCEP, DOE should focus on basic R&D “DOE does not have adequate expertise or capacity to successfully manage commercial-scale projects. So instead the department should be focusing limited federal dollars on the fundamental research to lay the foundation for the next technological breakthrough,” subcommittee Chairman Randy Weber (R-Texas) told Assistant Secretary for Fossil Energy Chris Smith during a May 11 hearing.
Speaking at a Politico event, Moniz suggested that administration programs for coal country have been mischaracterized. “One way of ending up on the wrong side [of coal country] is to have others talk about the programs in a way that does not reflect, frankly, the reality of their purpose or implementation, so we obviously try — and I guess I’m doing it right now — try to tell the story about what we’re doing on coal,” he said.
Nevertheless, the energy boss asserted that his agency is interested in helping coal country, not in making false promises. “We never say anything other than the reality that we are committed to a low-carbon future,” Moniz said, adding that “every pathway is part of our enabling that low-carbon future, whether it’s coal, renewables, nuclear, and certainly energy efficiency. It’s across the board, and we are enabling it. We’re putting our money where our mouth is.”
