EPA Wants To Limit Greenhouse Gases From New Coal Power Plants

Mississippi Power's Kemper County energy facility near DeKalb, Miss., seen under construction last year. Carbon dioxide will be captured from this plant and used to stimulate production of oil from existing wells.

Rogelio V. Solis/AP

The Environmental Protection Agency's second stab at a proposal to set the first-ever limits on greenhouse gas emissions from new power plants would make it impossible for companies to build the kind of coal-fired plants that have been the country's biggest source of electricity for decades.

Under the proposal, released Friday, any new plant that runs on coal would be permitted to emit only about half as much carbon dioxide as an average coal plant puts into the air today.

EPA administrator Gina McCarthy tells NPR the steps the EPA is proposing in the rule to address climate change "can actually form the basis for a sound economy, while at the same time we can begin to tackle what is essentially the most significant public health challenge of our time."

The gasifier facility, still under construction last year at the energy plant. Under the EPA's proposed rules, new plants that run on coal would have to find ways to emit less than half the carbon dioxide current coal plants emit.

Rogelio V. Solis/AP The gasifier facility, still under construction last year at the energy plant. Under the EPA's proposed rules, new plants that run on coal would have to find ways to emit less than half the carbon dioxide current coal plants emit.

Rogelio V. Solis/AP

The EPA proposal aims to help the White House meet its plan to cut greenhouse gas emissions by attacking the largest single source in the United States: Power plants pump out 40 percent of the nation's greenhouse gases.

The EPA's new proposal sets a limit for future power plants of 1,000 pounds of carbon dioxide per megawatt hour for large electricity generators that are powered by natural gas. And it sets a slightly higher limit of 1,100 pounds of CO2 per megawatt hour for small natural-gas generators and for coal-fired generators.

Although the EPA says its rule is legally sound, electric utility companies are already arguing that it goes further than the law allows.

The only technologies that exist to make coal plants clean enough to meet this proposed standard, industry executives say, are far too expensive and haven't been proved at a commercial scale. Making coal plants clean enough, they say, would add hundreds of millions of dollars to the already steep price tag of coal plants.

"Our customers have to agree to foot that bill," says Nick Akins, president and CEO of American Electric Power, one of the country's largest utilities.

Akins says his customers won't go for it.

A few years ago, American Electric Power built a temporary, small-scale project that successfully captured carbon and stored it deep underground at its massive Mountaineer coal-fired power plant in West Virginia. The company proposed building a larger version at the same site and passing the costs on to consumers. But state regulators rejected that project in the end because it would increase electricity costs.

If the EPA's proposal goes forward, Akins says, companies won't build coal plants; natural gas plants are cheaper. But that strategy would make companies and their customers vulnerable to future spikes in natural gas prices, he says.

The revised proposal comes after loud complaints from industry about the first version of the proposed rule, which was released 18 months ago. That initial version proposed one standard for all power plants, regardless of their size or the type of fuel they use.

Greenhouse gas emissions from the electricity industry already have declined because economic considerations have led utility companies to start turning away from coal. These days, utilities are building natural gas plants and wind farms instead. New technologies for drilling into deep shale deposits have opened up abundant supplies of relatively low-cost natural gas. And subsidies and technological improvements have made wind farms competitive.

Electricity companies fought hard against the EPA's first proposal largely because they see it as a bad precedent for upcoming regulation of greenhouse gas emissions from power plants that already exist.

President Obama has told the EPA to come up with a proposal by June to clean up the older plants. (Even though companies are already developing fewer new coal-fired plants, they're likely to rely on many of the existing coal plants for decades to come.)

Environmental groups, too, are closely reading Friday's proposal, hunting for clues to how stringent the administration is likely to be when it turns in 2014 to developing new rules for existing plants.

"The sooner we get these protections in place," says Vickie Patton, general counsel of the Environmental Defense Fund, "the clearer the signal [will be] that new power plants must do their fair share in addressing the heavy burden of carbon pollution on human health and the environment."

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E.P.A. Is Expected to Set Limits on Greenhouse Gas Emissions by New Power Plants

But even before the proposal becomes public, experts on both sides of the issue say it faces a lobbying donnybrook and an all-but-certain court challenge. For a vast and politically powerful swath of the utility industry — operators of coal-fired plants, and the coal fields that supply them — there are fears that the rules would effectively doom construction of new coal plants far into the future.

While details of the E.P.A.’s proposal remain confidential, experts predict that it will include separate standards for carbon dioxide emissions from plants fired by natural gas and by coal. Plants using comparatively clean gas would be permitted to emit perhaps 1,000 pounds of carbon dioxide per megawatt-hour, a ceiling within easy reach using modern technologies.

Coal-fired plants, meanwhile, may be allowed to emit as many as 1,400 pounds per megawatt-hour. But coal is so heavily laden with carbon that meeting even that higher limit would require operators to scrub carbon dioxide from their emissions before they reach the smokestack, and then pump it into permanent storage underground.

While each plant is different, a generic version of the most advanced coal-fired plant in existence — “ultra-supercritical” plants that use enormous heat and pressure — still emits more than 1,600 pounds of carbon dioxide on average, said Howard Herzog, a senior research scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Energy Initiative.

By comparison, a 550-megawatt version of the most advanced natural-gas plant might be expected to emit 790 pounds of carbon dioxide, the federal Energy Department has estimated.

Carbon-capture technology has been proven to work in trials. But the industry says that the infrastructure to ship and store such vast deposits of carbon does not exist, and that the technology is in any case so costly that it would make new coal plants economically unfeasible.

The American Public Power Association, a group of publicly owned utilities serving 14 percent of electric customers, urged the White House in a meeting on Sept. 4 to cap coal-plant emissions at no less than 1,900 pounds per megawatt-hour, arguing that carbon-capture technologies will not be commercially feasible for at least eight years.

Some experts with ties to the power industry suggest that the E.P.A. is inviting a lawsuit if its new rule forces coal plants to use carbon-capture technologies before they are ready.

During four decades of enforcing the Clean Air Act, the E.P.A. “has always talked about using demonstrated technologies, something out there in commercial use,” said Jeffrey R. Holmstead, a lawyer with the firm Bracewell & Giuliani who was the E.P.A.’s  assistant administrator for air and radiation under President George W. Bush. “If E.P.A. finalizes a rule that requires carbon capture, I am sure there will be a legal challenge. I think E.P.A. is taking a pretty big legal risk here.”

Those who support strict limits on greenhouse-gas pollution take issue with that, saying the act requires only that clean-air technologies be “adequately demonstrated” — a loosely defined standard that they say was deliberately devised to encourage innovation. Indeed, they note, power industry officials themselves have said that carbon-capture principles have been widely used for decades in other fields.

“The idea that pollution control technology is too expensive to implement is a familiar theme,” said Megan Ceronsky, a lawyer with the Environmental Defense Fund’s climate and air program. “It’s not a novel response to an environmental regulation.”

Much as automobile companies integrated pollution controls into cars without going broke, she said that power companies are likely to find it far easier and cheaper to adopt new technologies than they now believe.

In some ways, the debate seems moot. In an era of cheap natural gas, hardly anyone in the United States is building coal-fired power plants. According to the Energy Information Administration, not one of the 136 American plants that will open or expand generating capacity this year burns coal. Of the 127 similar plants set to open or expand next year, only two will be coal-fired.

Still, analysts say, coal could someday regain its competitive edge against gas as rising demand forces gas prices to rise and supplies to dwindle. And the push to force coal plants to embrace carbon capture — if the E.P.A. proposal meets expectations — is just the warm-up act for what is likely to be a much bigger battle: a proposal to control carbon emissions by the 6,600 or so existing power plants.

In his June climate action plan, Mr. Obama ordered the E.P.A. to propose new greenhouse-gas rules covering existing plants by next June, and to issue final standards by June 2015.

Electric power generation was responsible for 39 percent of all energy-related emissions of greenhouse gases in 2012, and burning coal generated three-fourths of that pollution, according to the Energy Information Administration.

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