WRAP UP

Tamar Hallerman
GHG Monitor
09/21/12

AT DOE

Funding for the Department of Energy’s Fossil Energy R&D program will be cut by 8.2 percent—or $44 million—if Congress fails to reach a deal to thwart automatic spending cuts by the end of the year, according to the White House. In a report released Sept. 14, the Office of Management and Budget offered the most detailed look yet at how an across-the-board spending cut would affect federal spending. As part of debt ceiling negotiations last summer, Congress and the Obama Administration agreed to allow $110 billion in automatic spending cuts to take effect Jan. 3, 2013 as a way to prompt a “supercommittee” of lawmakers to reach an agreement on how to cut the national deficit by $1.2 trillion. However, members were unable to agree on recommendations, and if Congress fails to pass legislation making cuts by the end of the year, the budgets of most discretionary programs will be cut by more than 8 percent, the White House said in the report. The White House warned that if a deal is not reached cuts would be “deeply destructive” to discretionary programs. “As the Administration has made clear, no amount of planning can mitigate the effect of these cuts. Sequestration is a blunt and indiscriminate instrument,” the report says. “It is not the responsible way for our nation to achieve deficit reduction.”

ON THE INTERNATIONAL FRONT

The central North Sea has the potential to sequester one-fourth of the European Union’s CO2 emissions if storage space is fully exploited, a report released this week by the Scottish government’s business development arm contends. Scottish Enterprise said that the North Sea has “geologically near-perfect” conditions for storing emissions and that by 2050 the area could sequester as much as 500 million metric tons of CO2—or 25 percent of the EU’s power and industrial emissions. “With the region’s geology comes a naturally diverse opportunity which will provide multiple operators with a range of storage options for many years to come,” the report says. The group said that developing the area for large-scale CO2 storage operations is also made easier because of previously existing infrastructure from the oil and gas industry that includes subsea pipelines and offshore platforms for injection.