WRAP UP

Tamar Hallerman
GHG Monitor
05/25/12

IN CONGRESS

The Senate this week confirmed two Obama Administration nominees to serve on the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, as well as a new head for the Energy Information Administration. The Senate agreed by unanimous consent May 24 to approve John Norris for a second term as a Democratic Commissioner on FERC, as well as Tony Clark to fill a Republican vacancy on the Commission. Clark previously served as president of the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners and worked on the North Dakota Public Service Commission. The upper chamber also confirmed Adam Sieminski to be EIA Administrator. He previously worked as Deutsche Bank’s chief energy economist.

AT EPA

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission finalized its plans for advising the Environmental Protection Agency on requests to extend the compliance deadline for its Mercury and Air Toxics Standards (MATS) late last week. When it issued its final MATS rulemaking in December, EPA included a ‘safety valve’ provision that allows generators to seek a compliance timeline extension of a year if a particular electricity generation unit is deemed necessary to run continuously in order to protect the reliability of the power grid. At the time, EPA said it would seek advice from FERC on the applications to gauge the necessity of individual one-year extensions. In a policy statement released late last week, FERC said it would advise EPA on grid reliability but would not recommend that the Agency accept or deny particular orders, saying that decision is solely the discretion of EPA.

ON THE INTERNATIONAL FRONT

World leaders spoke in support of “comprehensive actions” to reduce short-lived pollutants such as black carbon, methane, hydrofluorocarbons and ground-level ozone during last weekend’s G-8 Summit. Leaders from the U.S., U.K., France, Canada, Germany, Italy, Japan and Russia expressed their approval via a clause in the Camp David Declaration, the document signed by all participating nations at the conclusion of the meeting. “We support, as a means of promoting increased ambition and complementary to other CO2 and GHG emission reduction efforts, comprehensive actions to reduce these pollutants, which, according to UNEP and others, account for over thirty percent of near-term global warming as well as 2 million premature deaths a year,” the document says. The announcement comes several months after the U.S. and five other countries launched a coalition aimed at implementing national action plants to limit short-term pollutants. A United Nations Environment Program report released last year concluded that relatively simple efforts to cut down on the pollutants could significantly slow global warming and save millions of lives.

The Scottish government and two universities in the region announced the creation of the Center for North Sea Enhanced Oil Recovery with CO2 (CENSEOR-CO2), a program that will focus on the potential for EOR operations in the North Sea. Funded with money from the Scottish government and 2Co, the company spearheading the Don Valley CCS project, CENSEOR-CO2 will initially focus on the technical, regulatory, social and economic challenges associated with the widespread deployment of EOR in the North Sea, the center’s website said. “Our research will provide an independent voice to establish the conditions by which CO2-EOR can be made environmentally, commercially and technically feasible in the North Sea,” said program head Stuart Haszeldine, a professor at the University of Edinburgh’s School of Geosciences, in a statement. CENSEOR-CO2 said EOR operations in the North Sea have the potential to produce roughly 3 billion additional barrels of oil with a total projected value of $300 billion.