On March 27, 2012, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)
proposed a new rule that would limit emissions to no more than
1,000 pounds of carbon dioxide (CO2) per megawatt-hour of
production from new fossil-fuel power plants with a capacity of 25
megawatts or larger. EPA proposed the rule under Section 111 of the
Clean Air Act. According to EPA, new natural gas fired
combined-cycle power plants should be able to meet the proposed
standards without additional cost. However, new coal-fired plants
would only be able to meet the standards by installing carbon
capture and sequestration (CCS) technology. The proposed rule has
sparked increased scrutiny of the future of CCS as a viable
technology for reducing CO2 emissions from coal-fired power plants.
The proposed rule also places a new focus on whether the U.S.
Department of Energy's (DOE's) CCS research, development, and
demonstration (RD&D) program will achieve its vision of
developing an advanced CCS technology portfolio ready by 2020 for
large-scale CCS deployment. Congress has appropriated nearly $6
billion since FY2008 for CCS RD&D at DOE's Office of Fossil
Energy: approximately $2.3 billion from annual appropriations and
$3.4 billion from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (or
Recovery Act). The large and rapid influx of funding for
industrial-scale CCS projects from the Recovery Act may accelerate
development and deployment of CCS in the United States. However,
the future deployment of CCS may take a different course if the
major components of the DOE program follow a path similar to DOE's
flagship CCS demonstration project, FutureGen, which has
experienced delays and multiple changes of scope and design since
its inception in 2003. A question for Congress is whether FutureGen
represents a unique case of a first mover in a complex, expensive,
and technically challenging endeavor, or whether it indicates the
likely path for all large CCS demonstration projects once they move
past the planning stage. Since enactment of the Recovery Act, DOE
has shifted its RD&D emphasis to the demonstration phase of
carbon capture technology. The shift appears to heed
recommendations from many experts who called for large,
industrial-scale carbon capture demonstration projects (e.g., 1
million tons of CO2 captured per year). Funding from the Recovery
Act for large-scale demonstration projects was 40% of the total
amount of DOE funding for all CCS RD&D from FY2008 through
FY2012. To date, there are no commercial ventures in the United
States that capture, transport, and inject industrial-scale
quantities of CO2 solely for the purposes of carbon sequestration.
However, CCS RD&D in 2012 is just now embarking on
commercial-scale demonstration projects for CO2 capture, injection,
and storage. The success of these projects will likely bear heavily
on the future outlook for widespread deployment of CCS technologies
as a strategy for preventing large quantities of CO2 from reaching
the atmosphere while U.S. power plants continue to burn fossil
fuels, mainly coal. Given the pending EPA rule, congressional
interest in the future of coal as a domestic energy source appears
directly linked to the future of CCS. In the short term,
congressional support for building new coal-fired power plants
could be expressed through legislative action to modify or block
the proposed EPA rule. Alternatively, congressional oversight of
the CCS RD&D program could help inform decisions about the
level of support for the program and help Congress gauge whether it
is on track to meet its goals.
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