NEW DOE CLEAN COAL CHIEF VOWS TO ‘AGGRESSIVELY PURSUE’ FUNDING

Tamar Hallerman
GHG Monitor
8/30/13

The Department of Energy’s newly appointed clean coal chief vowed this week to not yet accept the idea of drastically lower funding for the Office of Fossil Energy’s coal R&D program. Less than a day after acting Assistant Secretary for Fossil Energy Chris Smith announced his appointment as Deputy Assistant Secretary for Clean Coal, Julio Friedmann said in an interview that he instead plans to sell the program and its potential “outcomes” to decisionmakers. “If those outcomes require substantial federal investments, then that case has to be made and pursued aggressively. Similarly, if there are components of our work that are not on the critical path to an important outcome, those should have less priority,” Friedmann told GHG Monitor Aug. 28. “But I’m not prepared to accept that less is where we’ll start. The outcomes to which we’re committed—getting those large demonstrations up, fostering stronger international collaboration and developing core technologies—are not outcomes that we can waive away.”

Friedmann begins his tenure at FE next week as the program continues to face prolonged fiscal uncertainty. While the office was spared from the employee furloughs that many other government agencies were forced to enact following the March sequester, the office’s R&D program has seen a $25 million budget cut over the last six months. The White House’s budget request for Fiscal Year 2014 proposed cutting DOE’s coal research program 25 percent compared to FY 2013 enacted levels and called for switching the emphasis of FE’s CCS and Power Systems program from carbon storage to carbon capture. Meanwhile, the outlook for FY 2015 also appears bleak. The White House Office of Management and Budget told federal agency heads to plan on cutting another 10 percent from their FY 2015 budget requests compared to this year’s levels.

Friedmann acknowledged the program’s budget challenges but said he instead plans on focusing on bringing FE’s eight large CCS demonstration projects online and continuing to move forward on CCS and coal plant efficiency R&D work. “The program lines, I think, are the right ones, and the people who’ve been working them understand the basis for their focus and operation. But within those program lines there needs to be new thrusts and a rebalancing of efforts,” he said. Friedmann added, “We are at a critical juncture at which it’s more important than ever to demonstrate that these technologies can be deployed safely and in a cost effective way that banks and markets can understand.”