Karen Frantz
GHG Monitor
11/22/13
Concerns over a provision in the Environmental Protection Agency’s new proposed rule that essentially mandates the use of partial carbon capture and storage technology for new coal-fired power plants is mounting, with a former assistant secretary of energy and some Republicans on the House Energy and Commerce Committee repeating the charge that CCS is not ready yet and a working group of the EPA finding that the peer review of some scientific studies used to justify the mandate appears to be “inadequate.”
Reps. Fred Upton (R-Mich.), Ed Whitfield (R-Ky.), Joe Barton (R-Texas) and Steve Scalise (R-La.) sent a letter to EPA on Nov. 15 contending that the proposed rule violates the Clean Air Act because carbon capture and sequestration has not been “adequately demonstrated” as the act requires, and asked that the rule be withdrawn. The letter says that three of the four CCS projects the EPA has held up as models demonstrating the technology’s commercial availability received funding under the Department of Energy’s Clean Coal Power Initiative. “EPA’s consideration of CCPI projects to determine that CCS for coal-fired power plants is ‘adequately demonstrated’ is prohibited” under the Energy Policy Act of 2005, the letter says. The fourth project, Boundary Dam, is in Canada and also has received government funding. “In light of these statutory prohibitions, we request that the EPA’s proposed rule, which has not yet been published in the Federal Register, be withdrawn,” the letter says. “This will ensure that the agency does not propose standards beyond its legal authority. This will also ensure that stakeholders and the public will not have to incur additional costs to respond to a proposal that contravenes applicable law.”
The letter follows a hearing the Energy committee held last week in which EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy was called as a witness to testify about the agency’s transparency and took questions on the EPA’s proposed rule. Some members of the committee took on the EPA’s definition of “adequately demonstrated”—which has become a common line of questioning at other House hearings on the proposal—in light of the government funding that all of the as-of-yet unfinished projects have received and the lack of other large-scale commercial power plants that have deployed CCS.
Mandate Not ‘Supported by Science’
Former Assistant Secretary of Energy for Fossil Energy Charles McConnell also took on the EPA and the proposed rule this week on Platts Energy Week, saying it was “disappointing” that as the EPA crafted the new rule, it did not take the Department of Energy’s advisements on the technology “as far as it should have in terms of informing this decision.” He also said that the mandate is not one that is “supported by science and technology or the commercial industry.” “We had a lot of interagency dialogue, most of it from the Department of Energy standpoint, to review the technologies that were available to look at the options going forward and to continue to reinforce how important the continued R&D roadmap would be to the success of that,” McConnell said. “The conversations were held, the interagency dialogue did occur.”
His remarks seemingly run contrary to testimony from McCarthy at last week’s transparency hearing, where she said, “I think the DOE employees have been …very supportive of the way we’re looking at the data in this industry sector moving forward.” The remark was made in response to a question from Rep. Cynthia Lumis (R-Wyo.), who pointed out that McConnell had earlier testified at a separate hearing that commercial CCS technology is not currently available to meet the EPA’s proposed rule.
On Energy Week, McConnell also called for increased funding for CCS. “The federal budget and the administration’s requests for [the] budget for Fossil Energy have gone down some 40 percent over the past three years while the Department of Energy’s total budget has actually been increased,” he said. “The amount of investment necessary that was originally agreed to in 2010 for this 10-year roadmap to 2020 for successful commercialization—we’ve in many ways defunded the program and then expected the results would happen actually sooner. It’s confusing and disappointing.”
‘Inadequate’ Peer Review
Meanwhile, a working group of the EPA’s Science Advisory Board is recommending that the board review the science supporting the CCS mandate, saying in a memorandum that the “peer review of the scientific and technical information supporting the action … appears to be inadequate.” In the Nov. 12 memorandum, sent to the full Chartered SAB, the working group said that although a study by the Department of Energy’s National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL) used as a basis for the mandate was initially peer reviewed, a subsequent revision may not have been and thus recommended that the SAB decide to review the science at its planned meeting next month.
The working group noted that EPA relied on the NETL study, “Cost and Performance Baseline For Fossil Energy Power Plants, Volume 1” and its subsequent updates for cost and performance data. But although the EPA said the results were subjected to a significant peer review by industry experts, academia and government research and regulatory agencies, the working group attached an Oct. 31 e-mail from Kristin Gerdes, director of performance division at NETL, that appeared to contradict that assertion. In the e-mail, she wrote: “Reviewers were sent the report and given several weeks for review and the regulatory agency that provided the review was the EPA. Beyond this we do not have a documented or publically-available description for this peer review process as it was specifically tailored for this report. Revision 1 to this report was minor and issued several months after the original. Neither the November 2010 update to this report (Revision 2) nor the separate report updating costs to 2011 dollars (August 2012) went through a peer review.” She also said that “the August 2011 report ‘Cost and Performance of PC and IGCC Plants for a Range of Carbon Dioxide Capture,’ which modified the CO2 capture rates for select cases present in the ‘Cost and Performance Baseline for Fossil Energy Plants,’ did not undergo peer review.”
Moreover, the working group wrote that “EPA stated that the science and technical bases of this action do not rely on new science, are based on the best system of emission reduction, and the action is technology based. In contrast, the Work Group notes that this action involves precedential and novel issues that rely on new technologies and science for carbon capture and storage (CCS).” It said an SAB review of the science could asses “EPA assumptions regarding the status of CCS technology,” “the possible/probable development path of CCS technologies” and “implications or performance and cost of these types of technologies applied to coal combustion and integrated gasification and combined cycle plants.”
