Tag: Carbon Capture

Will West Virginia Ever See A New Coal-Fired Power Plant?

There’s been much deliberation over the last week regarding new Environmental Protection Agency proposals for regulating coal fired power plant carbon emissions. State officials are very discouraged by the ideas. But as Ben Adducchio reports, there are also proposals on the table for how to regulate future power plants, and some are asking whether any will be built again in West Virginia.

The EPA has issued new ideas on how to regulate existing power plants, which would call for a 30 percent national reduction on carbon emissions by 2030, from 2005 levels. Congressmen David McKinley and Nick Rahall  co-introduced  legislation to essentially strike down not only emissions standards  concerning current power plants, but additional proposals that would apply to  future power plants.

Those proposals came out last year, and would require new plants to use cleaner methods—like carbon capture and storage, and natural gas technologies, to ensure fewer carbon emissions. Jamie Van Nostrand with the West Virginia University Center for Energy and Sustainable Development says these new technologies will present many challenges for anyone wanting to build a new plant.

“It’s very difficult given the rules under 111 b, which really restrict the greenhouse gas emissions associated with new power plants, and pretty much require carbon capture and sequestration, either through a gasification process before you generate electricity, or capturing it and sequestering it afterwards, and those are very very expensive, particularly in the absence of having oil recovery nearby,” said Van Nostrand.

American Electric Power attempted this type of technology at a plant in southern West Virginia. That didn’t  completely succeed, due to funding issues. Jeffrey La Fleur with AEP says the technology needs more research and funding.

“I think we would be a lot further down the road now if we had a little more foresight on the government’s part to develop the technology. For new coal units, the EPA proposed rule is that you will have to have carbon capture to build a new plant and because of all of this has stopped, that technology is not commercially available,” he said.

But Jamie Van Nostrand believes with the new power plant proposals, it can be done.

“The CCS technology is continuing to improve, there’s a lot of money being spent on clean coal technology, and I think the expectation is down the road, the regulation under 111 b would allow the technological advances that would allow a coal plant to be constructed in the future,” he said.

UMWA Joins Coal Industry to Oppose EPA Regs

The United Mine Workers of America is joining the coal industry in a rare occasion to oppose proposed regulations meant to curb carbon emissions.  The industry worries the regulations will financially cripple coal’s economy, as well as West Virginia and everyone dependent on a coal job.

With 95 percent of the energy produced in West Virginia coming from coal fired power plants, many within the industry feel the state will be the hardest hit by the new proposal.

Roger Horton, a retired miner from Logan County paints a grim picture already evolving in coal country.

He sees an EPA ignoring its economic impact on countless coal mining families.

“The uncertainty now that is created by these new regs is going to make even more people apprehensive about being able to keep their homes,” Horton said during a conference call, “and I’m sure there’s going to be more who lose their jobs and have to relocate. That’s just absolutely wrong.”

President of the West Virginia Coal Association Bill Raney told reporters during a conference that the regulations punish people and show no respect for the state.

“Every time we lose a coal miner’s job in this state we lose a piece of West Virginia,” Raney said, “because we lose payroll taxes, hospitalization and contribution to the miner’s retirement and health benefit funds.”

Credit Ashton Marra
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UMWA President Cecil Roberts addresses reporters during a news conference.

That also worries United Mine Workers of America President Cecil Roberts who told reporters that 94,000 people depend on health and retirement funds from the coal industry.

The union, often at odds with the industry, is joining in the fight opposing the regulations.

"Make no mistake about this, without a coal industry there is no one for me to bargain with to extract those kinds of benefits from," Roberts said.

It’s no surprise that coal jobs are disappearing. It’s a trend the state has been facing for years. Since 2012, thousands of West Virginia coal miners have lost their jobs. Some of them are finding relief through federal dollars that pay for training or school to start a new career.

Even without EPA regulations, reports indicate that coal jobs would decline anyway. It’s a finite resource, the coal seams are depleting and energy competitor natural gas is booming.

When introducing the regulations EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy said America can “lead this fight” but industry and the UMWA worries no one will follow.

Other reports indicate that China “has begun regional experiments with a more market-friendly approach” pioneered in the U.S.  They’re looking at putting a cap on total emissions of sulfur dioxide from power plants, allocating tradable pollution permits to individual polluters.”

West Virginia has already started experimenting with ways to reduce carbon emissions with carbon capture and other technologies.

President and chief operating officer for Appalachian Power, Charles Patton says AEP the largest coal burner in the Western Hemisphere has reduced its carbon footprint by about 21 percent since 2005, and right now, that’s not cheap.

“In doing that we’ve spent across the AEP fleet somewhere  north of $10 billion,” Patton said. “What we see is a carbon footprint that is shrinking. We see an industry that has invested billions of dollars and we see customers as a result of those investments that are seeing those electric bills increase 50 percent over a very short period of time.”

Appalachian Power serves about a million customers across West Virginia, Virginia and Tennessee.

The new regulations give flexibility to the states and Patton says he plans to work with Governors in both Virginia and West Virginia.

The EPA is the target of bi-partisan wrath. West Virginia’s congressional delegation is a mix of Democrats and Republicans and all but Senator Rockefeller have sharply critized the proposed regulations.

While lawmakers have talked about it in the past, there was no talk of diversifying the economy on the day the EPA released the proposed regulations.

With New Regulations Coming, What's the Future for Coal?

The Environmental Protection Agency is going to be releasing new rules on carbon emissions from coal-fired power plants in the next few weeks. It’s an issue of great concern for many who rely on coal for work. But some also see it as an opportunity.

About 84 percent of the nation’s total greenhouse gas emissions into Earth’s atmosphere are from carbon dioxide, according to the Environmental Protection Agency, and much of that carbon dioxide comes from burning fossil fuels like coal. The EPA is taking action as, under the Clean Air Act, to enforce cuts in carbon emissions for cleaner air.

In September of last year, the agency put proposed new rules on how much carbon dioxide future power plants may release into the air. This includes capping carbon dioxide emissions to about 1,100 pounds of CO2 per megawatt hour, depending on the size of the turbines in those new plants.

New Rules on the Horizon

While at this point, everything is conjecture in terms of what the agency will seek in its newest regulations, pertaining to existing power plants  it is expected that states will have to figure out ways to reduce carbon emissions from their plants substantially in the next 15 years.

There are several ideas over how this can be done, but it certainly won’t be easy for many utilities to reduce emissions right away. One strategy is to do something known as fuel switching. This essentially means instead of burning coal at power plants, technical adjustments would be made to the plant so the facility would essentially burn natural gas instead, or co-fire coal with natural gas, to reduce carbon dioxide emissions.

“Some coal plants depending on the technology and the vintage can be switched to burn natural gas. A lot of utilities are looking at this,” said James Van Nostrand, director of the Center for Energy and Sustainable Development at WVU.

“That’s going on now with the wide availability of natural gas, utilities are doing that for economic reasons. That would also presumably will be a compliance option under these regulations. Or you could co-fire some natural gas with the coal, or biomass with the coal.”

Another proposal the EPA is pursuing is for utilities to use carbon capture and storage technologies. This is a method that involves taking the carbon emissions and storing them underground, instead of releasing them into the atmosphere. It’s something American Electric Power tried at a Southern West Virginia plant a few years back: essentially storing the carbon right there at the site, and the whole project took eight years simply to get  up and running. But it didn’t work out in the end. Jeffrey La Fleur is a vice president of generating assets at AEP.

“The debate in Congress ended, and they decided not to take up the carbon issue. That debate stopped. We got the stagnation in public policy; the carbon issue got stuck in the mud. Nothing was moving,” said La Fleur.

“When we go to our commissions to get recovery of any cost, we are a public utility, to recover any cost; they are not interested in paying for any technology that’s not required.”

Despite the carbon capture project not working, La Fleur says there are no regrets about that project.

“I think we were successful in doing out with what we set to do. I think it was a great project, I don’t necessarily think we would have done anything differently. I think we would be a lot further down the road now if we had a little more foresight on the government’s part to develop the technology,” said La Fleur.

“That technology is not commercially available. It’s not commercially viable. It’s got to be further developed.”

Needing Resources

That means funding. La Fleur says public utilities that are interested in CCS need the help of the U.S. Department of Energy to get more money to do it. But even with funding, La Fleur says utilities, policy makers, and the general public needs to have patience…because change won’t be coming fast enough for some.

“The EPA is going to come out with a proposed rule in June. Are they going to give the states enough time to get with the companies, to come up with a plan. That I think has been the issue,” said La Fleur.

“We need to have the proper funding to develop the technology going forward.”

Whatever rules the EPA comes out with- some in the coal industry are expected to file lawsuits opposing them.

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