May 18, 2009

Congress is moving steadily toward carbon constraints. Such emissions are likely to be controlled through a free market system in which carbon credits are traded. In such a world, some utility researchers are saying that a place exists for both new coal generation and older units that can be economically retrofitted to better the environment.

While the older coal-fired plants pale when compared to modern power facilities, the aging plants won't likely be retired anytime soon. Utilities with those plants say that they need the capacity. They also reason that it is cheaper to retrofit them with pollution controls than to replace them altogether -- improvements that can involve either the use of newer supercritical coal units or pending but ultra-clean coal-gasification plants.

May 15, 2009 
 
Wide-scale deployment is at least five years away. But the architects behind the first-ever power plant to attempt to capture and store carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions will fire up a pilot project in September in a test that could last up to three years.

If the 20-megawatt trial at the Mountaineer Plant in New Haven, W.V., is deemed successful, then American Electric Power (AEP) will implement the same technology in 2011 at another facility in Oklahoma in a 200-megawatt project. After that and around 2015, AEP says that the operations that will use chilled ammonia to scrub the CO2 emissions can be ready for prime time. Those releases would then be compressed and stored permanently underground or be used to help retrieve oil deposits.

May 08, 2009

Pending climate legislation could transform the nation's energy sector, prompting an assortment of special interests to line Capitol Hill. Industry and environmentalists are constitutionally permitted to petition their government, meaning that any final bill will represent an amalgam of concerns and likely reflect a measured response.

Lobbyists are traipsing to Washington as U.S. lawmakers debate how the nation sets about to reduce carbon emissions by 20 percent by 2020 and 80 percent by 2050, all from 1990 levels. The turn of events is fascinating, given that five years ago neither the House nor the Senate could muster the votes. Today, however, the issue has consumed key committees and is clearly on the minds of American business.

April 24, 2009

Carbon constraints are coming to the United States. But the key question is whether Congress or the Environmental Protection Agency compels them.

EPA now officially considers carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases to be harmful to human health, which is the legal prerequisite to regulate those releases under the Clean Air Act. That designation is a marked shift in U.S. environmental policy and signifies a clear move toward regulating the heat-trapping emissions from all sources. But while EPA says that it is prepared to draft the official rules, it would rather defer to Congress.

April 17, 2009
Source: ABC News
By DAVID KERLEY and HUMA KHAN

In another decisive shift from the Bush administration's environmental policies, the government took a new stance on greenhouse gases that is expected to radically change the landscape of U.S. environmental policy.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) determined that carbon dioxide, and five other greenhouse gases spewing out of tailpipes, "endanger public health and welfare" of the American people. These gases, they said, contribute to climate change, which is causing more heat waves, droughts and flooding, and is threatening food and water supplies.

The EPA's mandate is a critical step toward amending climate change regulations. It gives President Obama the ammunition, under the 40-year-old Clean Air Act, to order emissions reductions and tighten regulations. That could include measures such as requiring more fuel-efficiency in cars and less carbon dioxide emission at plants and industries.

"It's a serious problem for us and for the world," EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson recently told ABC News. "And the impacts of climate change are not just life and death, but they are economic costs that are hard to extrapolate into the future."