“EPA appears to have dropped its controversial requirement that new coal plants install partial carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) from its draft final new source performance standards (NSPS) that it recently sent to the White House for interagency review, according to one informed source,” Dawn Reeves reported last week in InsideEPA ($).
Despite repeated trust-us-we’re-the-experts assurances that partial CCS is the “adequately demonstrated” (i.e. commercially viable) “best system” for controlling carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from new coal-fired power plants, EPA apparently realizes such claims won’t survive judicial scrutiny (as this blog has often argued). According to Reeves:
The source believes EPA decided to drop the CCS mandate in the face of growing legal concern that the technology requirement would not withstand court review, because the projects the agency had relied on to show that CCS is “adequately demonstrated” and “commercially available” are faltering.
Reeves further notes that:
A final NSPS must be in place in order for EPA to go forward with its final existing source performance standards (ESPS) to cut greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from the current power fleet — a rule that the agency also plans to complete this summer and one that would achieve far more emissions reductions than the NSPS, particularly because there are no new coal plants planned in the U.S.
In EPA parlance, the agency’s Carbon Pollution Standards rule for new power plants imperils its Clean Power Plan (CPP) rule for existing power plants.
What will the White House do? President Obama’s longstanding ambition is to “bankrupt” anyone who would build a new coal-fired power plant. The NSPS rule is a de-facto ban on new coal generation, because new natural gas combined cycle (NGCC) power plants are already cheaper to build than new coal-fired power plants, and CCS can more than double the cost of a new coal plant.
Nonetheless, because hardly anyone is building new coal power plants anyway, the NSPS rule’s chief function is to provide a regulatory stepping stone to establish CO2 performance standards for existing power plants.
For Obama and his environmentalist allies, the CPP must be protected at all cost. They view it as vital to the triumph of ‘progressive’ politics in two ways. First, the CPP is transformational — a strategy to impose California-style climate and energy policies on the nation as a whole. Second, the CPP makes up the biggest component of the U.S. Government’s emission reduction pledge in the COP 21 climate treaty negotiations.
Simply put, an imploding Carbon Pollution Standards rule would take the CPP down with it, which in turn would likely doom the forthcoming Paris conference to another Copenhagen-like failure.