Governing the United States of Coal

Some electric utilities and states are doing their own carbon sequestration projects.

American Electric Power CEO Michael Morris told the governors meeting that his firm and Alstrom, the French engineering company, are set to begin operating a relatively small (30 megawatts) carbon-capture and storage project at a plant in West Virginia next year.

Morris said the underground storage has been done for decades; it is “the capture technology has not been developed at power plant size” which is the technological challenge. “We’re trying to see if we can scale the technology up so we can handle the big power plants. If we don’t do that, we are going to prematurely shut down some facilities that are essential to this economy” — that is, if Congress imposes greenhouse gas limits.

A Pennsylvania coal renaissance?
Meanwhile, Rendell sees a technology called integrated gasification combined cycle (IGCC) as a potential savior of coal in Pennsylvania. IGCC can be used to run coal-fired turbines to generate electricity, or to produce synthetic natural gas, and to produce non-sulfur diesel fuel. “The potential for it is absolutely enormous, but the question is what you do with the carbon (dioxide),” he said.

Mark Stehle / AP Gov. Ed Rendell

Rendell is seeking a federal loan guarantee for an IGCC facility in an old Pennsylvania anthracite coal bastion, Schuylkill County.

Pennsylvania’s anthracite regions, which had a boom in the early 1900s, could enjoy a renaissance. “Anthracite, which is now not very usable, comes back into business,” said Rendell, once the carbon sequestration problem is solved.

As yet, there’s no comprehensive set of federal regulations for storage. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has jurisdiction under the 1974 Safe Drinking Water Act to regulate the injection of CO2 for underground storage.

As EPA administrator Stephen Johnson briefed western governors at the NGA meeting, Colorado Gov. Bill Ritter told him that he needed to promptly issue regulations so that states and private investors would know what they had to deal with.

“We’re looking for reliability as a part of the equation that investors take into consideration,” Ritter said later in an interview. “Reliability comes with regulation.” EPA regulations will help Colorado and other states “get to the place where the investors understand what the playing field is like. We think that enhances investment which hopefully takes it from a nascent stage to first generation technology.”

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