Budget & Policy

ALEXANDRIA, Va. — The stopgap federal budget bill expected to pass next week buys Congress more time, if not much, to sort out its differences on how much the Energy Department should spend on legacy nuclear cleanup, and where, the House’s top DOE appropriator said here Thursday. The so-called continuing resolution, or CR, would freeze spending at […]

A drop in oil and gas spending caused global energy investment to drop 8 percent last year, to $1.8 trillion, even while investment in renewable energy, electricity markets, and energy efficiency increased, the International Energy Agency announced Wednesday in its World Energy Investment 2016 report. “We see a broad shift of spending toward cleaner energy, […]

Undertaking a comparative analysis of five recent modeling studies of the Clean Power Plan, the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions (C2ES) has concluded that the rule will positively reduce total U.S. power sector emissions compared to a business as usual case. The Clean Power Plan requires states to develop action plans to meet federally […]

ALEXANDRIA, Va. — The Energy Department and one of its contractors have carefully insulated a critical liquid waste treatment system in Washington state from an impending stopgap spending measure that will freeze federal budgets at the current fiscal 2016 level, an official with Washington River Protection Solutions said Wednesday. Congress, following Senate Majority Leader Sen. […]

The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) has not fully implemented its Enhanced Surveillance Program, in part due to decreased funding over the years, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) found in a report released Wednesday. The semiautonomous Department of Energy agency’s 2007 Surveillance Transformation Project, an effort to address the growing backlog of required surveillance weapons […]

The odds are stacked against Texas’ coal-fired power plants, according to a report from the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis. “Fundamental changes in the Texas electricity market are putting coal-fired power plants under increasing economic and financial stress and the industry today is under siege from a number of challenges,” the report says. […]

Trying to achieve an ambitious climate change agenda while butting heads with an unfriendly Congress, the Obama administration turned to regulation to reach its goals, and that’s no surprise, Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt (R) said Tuesday during a briefing hosted by the Federalist Society in Washington, D.C. “I don’t blame the administration for taking […]

Contractor executives and government officials from the Energy Department’s major nuclear cleanup sites descend on Washington, D.C., this week for meetings public and private, as Congress begins work on a short-term spending deal to keep the federal government open beyond Sept. 30. The action begins today in Alexandria, Va., with the 2016 National Cleanup Workshop: […]

Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz on Tuesday offered strong support for a new plutonium dilution and disposal method in place of the mixed oxide fuel program that the Obama administration is pushing to cancel, calling the latter an essentially “impossible” effort. The controversy over the MOX program will be one of the next administration’s primary challenges […]

Bills proposed in both chambers of Congress to extend and expand the existing 45Q tax credit for carbon sequestration are key to developing a policy landscape supportive of carbon capture, use, and storage deployment, a panel of experts said Monday during a congressional briefing on CCUS technologies. “The 45Q tax credit that’s out there today […]

An article in Monday’s GHG Daily should have said that a report on carbon capture and storage policy in the United Kingdom was issued by a Parliamentary advisory group on CCS.

There is no foundation to the argument that in crafting its carbon emissions standards for existing coal-fired power plants, the Environmental Protection Agency stepped outside the bounds of its regulatory authority, according to a policy brief issued Monday by the Institute for Policy Integrity. “The Clean Power Plan rigorously observes the many constraints on EPA’s […]

Management and operations contracts administered by the Energy Department’s Office of Environmental Management escaped some of the criticism leveled in a new Government Accountability Office report at the more expansive M&O deals used in DOE’s semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA). The report, “Department of Energy: Actions Needed to Strengthen Acquisition Planning for Management and Operating Contracts,” was published Aug. […]

The American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity said Friday it will welcome new leadership in 2017. Current President and CEO Mike Duncan will step down at the end of the year. Paul Bailey, current senior vice president of federal affairs and policy, will take over for Duncan effective Jan. 1. “With a new Administration and […]

The Department of Energy (DOE) is not doing enough to explore alternative approaches to its management and operating (M&O) contracts, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) said in a report released Thursday. The government spent nearly $19 billion on 22 DOE M&O contracts in fiscal 2015, three-quarters of its total spending, the report said. DOE did […]

Members of Congress and the heads of several National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) sites said Wednesday that the agency will be unable to significantly reduce the $3.7 billion backlog of deferred maintenance at the current pace and funding level of infrastructure work. Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Ala.) said during a House Armed Services Strategic Forces Subcommittee […]

Just hours before North Korea apparently conducted its fifth underground nuclear detonation, a group of 33 GOP senators on Thursday threatened to block U.S. funding for the international organization tasked with monitoring such activity if the Obama administration moves forward with any U.N. Security Council resolution that imposes international obligations on the United States when […]

With the federal appropriations process up in the air, Ohio’s Senate delegation has asked the Senate Appropriations Committee to make sure there is enough funding in the rapidly approaching 2017 fiscal year to continue planned cleanup of the Energy Department’s Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant. “As the fiscal year ends, it does not appear that Congress […]

LAS VEGAS — Both the Energy Department and one of its contractors openly acknowledged here during a meeting of nuclear cleanup experts that the agency most likely will be funded under yet another short-term federal spending bill to start fiscal 2017, once again necessitating the sort of budgetary puts and takes that bedevil project managers and […]

Support for innovation in cleaner electric power technologies, including carbon capture and storage, nuclear, and renewable energy generation, should be ramped up in the United States at the national and state levels, a report Thursday by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine says. “Some of these technologies have seen recent cost and price […]

With the conclusion of the Congressional summer recess comes the commencement of the energy bill conference committee. Members of the committee tasked with finding common ground between the Senate and House versions of the Energy Policy Modernization Act met Thursday morning to make opening statements. The meeting, during which no bill text or amendments were […]

Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton Thursday backed a bill proposed by Sens. Heidi Heitkamp (D-N.D.) and Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) that would extend and expand the section 45Q tax credit for carbon dioxide sequestration and utilization. “[W]e need to invest in carbon capture and sequestration, which will reduce emissions from coal and natural gas combustion, and […]

California Gov. Jerry Brown (D) Thursday signed a bill updating the state’s climate change law. The bill updates the emissions reduction goal set in the Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006, which called for California to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by 2020. The new bill calls for an additional 40 percent […]

The amount of coal power capacity in pre-construction planning fell 14 percent in the first half of 2016, according to a report Wednesday by environmental research group CoalSwarm. “Overall, the ‘coal plant pipeline’ … dropped from 1,090 gigawatts (GW) at the beginning of 2016 to 932 GW in July. The total reduction, 158 GW, or […]

Murray Energy and Southern Company last year contributed enough to the Republican Attorneys General Association (RAGA) to nab private meetings with state Attorneys General just days before the same officials launched a massive legal fight against the Environmental Protection Agency’s Clean Power Plan, according to documents obtained by the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD). […]

With the federal appropriations process up in the air, Ohio’s Senate delegation has asked the Senate Appropriations Committee to make sure there is enough funding in the rapidly approaching 2017 fiscal year to continue planned cleanup of the Energy Department’s Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant. “As the fiscal year ends, it does not appear that Congress […]

The Obama administration has not yet convincingly shown it does not intend to seek any sort of binding measure without Senate approval to promote a global prohibition on nuclear testing, Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) said Wednesday. The Senate would have to ratify U.S. membership in the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, which […]

Returning to Washington, D.C., on Tuesday, Congress will have less than a month to reach an agreement on fiscal 2017 spending, raising uncertainty for some notable nuclear waste programs. Lawmakers will need to pass new budget bills by Sept. 30 or reach an agreement on a continuing resolution that will serve as stopgap funding for […]

Congress returns to Washington after Labor Day to the legislative morass that entangled the Energy Department’s fiscal 2017 budget before lawmakers stormed out of town in mid-July for their traditional summer recess, again raising the possibility of a stopgap spending bill that freezes the agency’s legacy waste-cleanup funding at the 2016 level of roughly $6.2 billion. While that […]

U.S. Rep. Joe Wilson (R-S.C.) said Monday he expects Congress to restore funding for the Savannah River Site’s Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility (MFFF) when lawmakers return to Washington next week. Members of the House and Senate entered into conference committee in July to hash out details of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA); Wilson, one of the conferees, […]