MONIZ TO NETL STAFF: OBAMA COMMITTED TO CCS RD&D

Tamar Hallerman
GHG Monitor
8/2/13

New Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz assured National Energy Technology Laboratory employees this week that the Obama Administration is supportive of carbon capture and storage and other advanced fossil technologies despite recent claims from critics who say the White House is waging a “war on coal.” During a speech following his first tour of the lab’s Morgantown, W.Va., campus since his May confirmation, Moniz touted the Administration’s investment in CCS RD&D in recent years as evidence that President Obama is not trying to kill coal, as some of his political opponents have stressed. “If there’s any question about this commitment, I do point out that this Administration has committed $6 billion to carbon capture, utilization and sequestration,” Moniz said in a July 29 speech, in which he also highlighted DOE’s recent draft solicitation for $8 billion in new loan guarantee authority for CCS and other advanced fossil projects.

Moniz underscored the “critical role” that NETL plays in CCS RD&D work, and touted the lab’s work in multiple aspects of the CCS value chain. He repeatedly highlighted the lab’s chemical looping pilot facility. “That’s exactly the kind of thing that a place like this should be doing—really building a non-trivial experimental laboratory, a pilot-scale facility, and linking it into modeling and simulation,” he said. “Commercial power plants with chemical looping are probably 15 years away, but this is exactly what we need to do.” Moniz also listed the lab’s work with the Department’s regional carbon sequestration partnerships as a notable success. “These are decadal challenges, and to answer them on that kind of timescale means we have no time to waste. What you’re doing here at NETL is really essential to that,” Moniz said.

Moniz’s stop at NETL was his latest in an unofficial tour of the DOE complex in his first months as Energy Secretary. The former Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor visited the Hanford decommissioned nuclear production site in Washington state, as well as Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, shortly after confirmation. Moniz was officially on hand in Morgantown to dedicate the lab’s newest supercomputer, which DOE said will aid researchers in modeling work for the development and design of large-scale chemical looping reactors and carbon capture technologies.