Where did the EPA lose the ability to regulate C02? What section?

Can someone point me to the part in the summary, or in the full bill, where $60B is given out for CCS?

While we are at it, where do the allowances get handed to Coal or Oil companies for free (aside from about 2% of allowances to Oil refining, 5% for merchant coal, see below)? I see allowances going to Utilities (coal 32% and gas 9%), a fund for low-mid income families (15%), Energy intensive industries (like steel and paper production 15%), oil refineries 2%, merchant coal 5%, Green technologies 10%, CCS 2% (later to 5%), electric vehicles 3%, 2 domestic adaptation, 5% deforestation, 2% international assistance, and .5% for worker training.

I know that making sure the Utilities use the money wisely is a problem, but it’s not going to Coal fired Electric Generating plants directly, right, they’ll have to buy them, right? Or is it the 5% for merchant coal that’s the problem?

I’m just trying to get this straight. Thanks for any answer.

I do not understand how $60 Billion is going to change hands. All we are talking about is allowances which allow business as usual, where if these allowances had to be purchased they would cost $60B. Since they will not have to be purchased, whoopee, happy days are still here.

As I read it the bill is not doing much for or against anyone. Maybe the exception is where allowances are passed out to organizations that do not need them to enable operations such as states, where these free allowances could be sold to some other organization that did not get enough. If there are buyers, this could be free money to the selected organizations. Were there organizations that failed to get their lobbyists into the act such that these would be the buyers that we are trying to conjure up in our imagination.

Of course the pain will come when allowances run out and CCS is required etc., but this is so far in the future nobody is much concerned. Its like floating a long term bond issue that will not much burden the current folks in charge. It has a little of the long term mortgage feel about it. Such is the American Way.

Actually, CO2 deep injection is being done pretty routinely for secondary oil recovery and to avoid paying CO2 taxes, and has been for quite a while:

From Wikipedia:

Example CCS projects

As of 2007, four industrial-scale storage projects are in operation. Sleipner [10] is the oldest project (1996) and is located in the North Sea where Norway’s StatoilHydro strips carbon dioxide from natural gas with amine solvents and disposes of this carbon dioxide in a deep saline aquifer. The carbon dioxide is a waste product of the field’s natural gas production and the gas contains more (9% CO2) than is allowed into the natural gas distribution network. Storing it underground avoids this problem and saves Statoil hundreds of millions of euro in avoided carbon taxes. Since 1996, Sleipner has stored about one million tonnes CO2 a year. A second project in the Snøhvit gas field in the Barents Sea stores 700,000 tonnes per year. [21]

The Weyburn-Midale CO2 Project is currently the world’s largest carbon capture and storage project.[21] Started in 2000, Weyburn is located on an oil reservoir discovered in 1954 in Weyburn, southeastern Saskatchewan, Canada. The CO2 for this project is captured at the Dakota Gasification Company plant in Beulah, North Dakota[22][23] which has produced methane from coal for more than 30 years. At Weyburn, the CO2 will also be used for enhanced oil recovery with an injection rate of about 1.5 million tonnes per year. The first phase finished in 2004, and demonstrated that CO2 can be stored underground at the site safely and indefinitely. The second phase, expected to last until 2009, is investigating how the technology can be expanded on a larger scale.[24]

The fourth site is In Salah, which like Sleipner and Snøhvit is a natural gas reservoir located in In Salah, Algeria. The CO2 will be separated from the natural gas and re-injected into the subsurface at a rate of about 1.2 million tonnes per year.

In July 2008, the Government of Alberta announced a $2 billion investment in three to five large-scale carbon capture and storage projects [11]. Full Project Proposals for the projects are due March 31, 2009 and selected projects announced by June 30, 2009.

A major Canadian initiative called the Alberta Saline Aquifer Project (ASAP) [12] is a consortium of 34 companies that are developing a pilot site for commercial scale carbon capture and storage in a saline aquifer. The initial pilot will sequester 1,000 tonnes per day in 2010, while the commercial phase could see 10,000 tonnes per day as soon as 2015.

Other possibilities include in situ mineral carbonation:

http://www.ldeo.columbia.edu/ news-events/ rocks-could-be-harnessed-to-sponge-vast-amounts-of-carbon-dioxide-from-air

Scientists say that a type of rock found at or near the surface in the Mideast nation of Oman and other areas around the world could be harnessed to soak up huge quantities of globe-warming carbon dioxide. Their studies show that the rock, known as peridotite, reacts naturally at surprisingly high rates with CO2 to form solid minerals—and that the process could be speeded a million times or more with simple drilling and injection methods. The study appears in this week’s early edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Peridotite comprises most or all of the rock in the mantle, which undergirds earth’s crust. It starts some 20 kilometers or more down, but occasionally pieces are exhumed when tectonic plates collide and push the mantle rock to the surface, as in Oman. Geologists already knew that once exposed to air, the rock can react quickly with CO2, forming a solid carbonate like limestone or marble. However, schemes to transport it to power plants, grind it and combine it with smokestack gases have been seen as too costly and energy intensive. The researchers say that the discovery of previously unknown high rates of reaction underground means CO2 could be sent there artificially, at far less expense. “This method would afford a low-cost, safe and permanent method to capture and store atmospheric CO2,” said the lead author, geologist Peter Kelemen.

Would it be better that the money was going to be spent on something with a better chance of working, sure. But it is for political cover as anything concerning energy and coal is going to need. Could you imagine being a Democrat in a coal state running against a Republican without this?

Leland,

It’s not at all sure that CCS is a practical way of putting CO2 back into the ground. They haven’t been able to get it to work with allowable costs on any projects of size yet.

Maybe biochar would do some good, although there are limits with that like everything else seems to have.

We have to actually start putting carbon back underground:

http://www.etsap.org/worksh_6_2003/2003P_read.pdf

A portfolio of Bio-Energy with Carbon Storage (BECS) technologies, yielding negative emissions energy, may be seen as benign, low risk, geo-engineering that is the key to being prepared for ACC [Abrupt Climate Change]. The nature of sequential decisions, taken in response to the evolution of currently unknown events, is discussed. The impact of such decisions on land use change is related to a specific bio-energy conversion technology. The effects of a precautionary strategy, possibly leading to eventual land use change on a large scale, is modeled, using FLAMES. Under strong assumptions appropriate to imminent ACC, pre-industrial CO2 levels can be restored by mid-century using BECS.

Without carbon negative bioenergy, people are talking about irreversible effects taking thousands of years to go resolve themselves. CO2 residence time in the atmosphere is on the order of one hundred thousand years, I think.

The only benign, reasonably safe way to “put the genie back in the bottle” is carbon negative bioenergy, that I know of. Clean energy options only slow the growth of CO2 emissions, they do not put carbon back underground.

We need to put carbon back in the ground, and the only practical way to do that right now is CCS, IMHO.

The coal plants either need to be shut down or converted. I favor conversion, because we need to put carbon back underground to fight climate change sucessfully.

Of course there has to be some ‘carbon capture and sequestration’ money in the bill — just in case there is a fairy godmother lurking in a lab somewhere who will actually make it work well enough to clean up all the old coal plants. But $60 billion with a “b”? The single largest chunk of money in the bill being dumped into the coal industry’s bottomless R&D and prototyping pockets? No, that’s way too much. Let ‘em have $10 billion tops (we’ve already given them who knows how many billions over the past 20 years to develop this technology and got zilch for it). Take the other $50 billion and put it into zero-emission solar thermal plants. Or even some new nuke plants as I said. Literally anything else would be a better investment.

This is a blatant pay-off to the coal industry and chances are they will still oppose the bill anyway and pay their puppets to have it watered down even more. But since they do know that something will be made into law, they’ve made sure they are getting the lion’s share of the federal dollars. This is what all those TV commercials they paid for were really about: “Yes, we want a clean energy bill passed in Washington, but Americans deserve it to be the Right clean energy bill.”

Hell, as Pat Richards pointed out, for $60 billion the government could offer to buy up 200 of the country’s oldest, dirtiest coal-fired plants for an average of $300 million each (much more than their owners will make off of operating them over the next 20 years) and then phase out those 200 plants out over the 10 years (letting private enterprise replace them with clean energy plants over the same period. They’ll have the $60 billion we paid them for the old plants to build the new clean plants with.

But just handing the coal industry $60 billion to play around with no guarantee we’ll get anything for it at all? It’s criminal.

But seizing and transforming the coal plants into carbon negative bioenergy power plants is the only way to turn this abrupt climate change event around, IMO.

http://news.mongabay.com/ bioenergy/ 2006/ 12/ abrupt-climate-change-and-geo.html

It’s the only thing big enough and quick enough to short circuit the positive feedback loops we are starting to see.

Needless to say, I support the money for CCS. I don’t like CCS, but it is the biggest and cheapest way to put a lot of carbon back underground in a hurry, which is what we have to do to stop this thing, I think.

Separately, sure we can criticize the clean coal technologies in this thing, but the question is, can it be left out? If the politicians don’t put in the 60 billions dollars’ in, Democratic politicians will get blamed for not even trying. Every Republican can run against a Democrat on the issue. If it doesn’t work out, at least the blame can be the technology, or the scientists and engineers, the bureaucracy, the government, but at least the money was there. No energy/global warming bill can not have clean coal technology research.