IN THE INDUSTRY
A subsidiary of Babcock & Wilcox (B&W) has signed a 10-year license agreement with Chem-Mod LLC that will allow Chem-Mod to use the subsidiary’s combustion additive, which is expected to boost the performance of Chem-Mod’s own coal additive technologies that reduce nitrogen oxides, mercury and other emissions during combustion. “We’re pleased to have an opportunity to work with an outstanding company such as Chem-Mod to deliver advanced environmental solutions to its customers,” said B&W Power Generation Group, Inc. President and Chief Operating Officer J. Randall Data. “B&W PGG’s Mitagent technology, used with The Chem-Mod Solution, offers utilities and industry a powerful option to improve the environmental performance of their plants and comply with stringent emissions regulations.”
IN THE EPA
The Environmental Protection Agency has changed the date for the public hearing on its proposed rule limiting greenhouse gases from new power plants. The revised date is Feb. 6 from 9 a.m. to 8 p.m. with a lunch break scheduled from noon to 1:00 p.m. and a dinner break scheduled from 5:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m. The hearing will be held at EPA’s headquarters in Washington, D.C., at the William Jefferson Clinton East Building, Room 1153, located at 1201 Constitution Ave., NW.
ON THE INTERNATIONAL FRONT
The European Commission proposed its 2030 policy framework for climate and energy this week, which lays out various means by which the EU can reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2030—including increasing the share of renewable energy, reform of the EU emissions trading system, and improvements in energy efficiency, among other recommendations. The Commission’s communication on the framework also said that carbon capture and storage “may be the only option available to reduce direct emission from industrial processes at the large scale needed in the longer term,” and called for increased R&D efforts and commercial demonstration of CCS. “Member States with fossil reserves and/or high shares of fossil-fuels in their energy mix should support CCS through the pre-commercialization stage in order to bring down costs and enable commercial deployment by the middle of the next decade,” the communication said. “This must include the development of adequate CO2 storage and transport infrastructure that could benefit from EU funding such as the Connecting Europe Facility and any potential successor.”
IN THE STATES
A new report from Colorado State University’s Center for the New Energy Economy that makes recommendations on presidential actions that could transition the country to a clean energy economy advised against relying on “unproven or commercially unavailable technologies”—specifically pointing to carbon capture and storage as an example. “Don’t gamble on uncertainties,” the report said. “One objective of setting performance-based goals rather than fuel-specific goals should be to avoid assumptions about unproven or insufficiently scaled technical fixes to GHG emissions.” The report also said that states and utilities should be allowed to “use energy efficiency investments outside the power plant as creditable compliance measures under EPA’s upcoming regulation of greenhouse gas emissions from existing power plants,” and said that the standards should be designed so that states can achieve emission reductions across the system rather than by “cleaning up individual power plants at the stack.”
