Carbon Story Archives - West Virginia Public Broadcasting

EPA To Require Coal And New Gas Power Plants To Cut Emissions

The power plant rules align with changes that have been happening in the sector in the past decade. Electric utilities have moved sharply away from coal, largely switching to natural gas.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency on Thursday rolled out its final rules to cut emissions from existing coal-fired and new gas power plants.

Those plants will have to ultimately cut their carbon dioxide emissions by 90 percent or shut down.

The new rules include updated limits on mercury and other toxic pollutants from plants that burn coal. They also include changes to how power plants dispose of the wastewater that results from treating coal emissions to remove toxic pollutants.

Finally, the rules require the cleanup of coal ash disposal sites that were closed prior to 2015.

“By developing these standards in a clear, transparent, inclusive manner, EPA is cutting pollution while ensuring that power companies can make smart investments and continue to deliver reliable electricity for all Americans,” said EPA Administrator Michael Regan.

The power plant rules align with changes that have been happening in the sector in the past decade. Electric utilities have moved sharply away from coal, largely switching to natural gas.

“This year, the United States is projected to build more new electric generation capacity than we have in two decades – and 96 percent of that will be clean,” said White House Climate Adviser Ali Zaidi.

Renewables such as wind and solar account for an increasing percentage of power generation and have surpassed coal.

Still, fossil fuel producing states, and some industry groups, are expected to challenge the new rules. Some will argue that the rules will have a negative economic impact on power plant communities. Others will say the rules will make the power grid less reliable.

“We will be challenging this rule,” said West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey in a statement issued soon after the new rules were published. “The U.S. Supreme Court has placed significant limits on what the EPA can do—we plan on ensuring that those limits are upheld, and we expect that we will once again prevail in court against this out-of-control agency.”

Morrisey, who’s running in West Virginia’s Republican primary for governor, led a successful challenge of the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan. The Supreme Court’s ruling in West Virginia v EPA two years ago constrained the EPA’s rulemaking process. Morrisey and others are likely to argue that the agency still overstepped its authority.

Others say the grid simply isn’t ready for a massive shift away from traditional baseload power to more intermittent sources of energy such as wind and solar.

“This barrage of new EPA rules ignores our nation’s ongoing electric reliability challenges and is the wrong approach at a critical time for our nation’s energy future,” said Jim Matheson, CEO of the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association.

Adding to the uncertainty, a change in administrations after this year’s election could result in a rollback of the new rules.

If the rules hold up, the EPA projects $370 billion in climate and public health benefits over the next two decades. The agency’s analysis predicts a reduction of 1.38 billion tons of CO2 through 2047, the equivalent of the annual emissions of 328 million gasoline powered cars.

The EPA is also gathering public input on a proposal to cut emissions from existing gas-fired power plants. Natural gas is currently the nation’s top source of electricity, and though it produces lower carbon emissions than coal, the production and transportation of gas emits methane, a more powerful heat-trapping gas than CO2.

The EPA’s principal solution for coal and gas plants to comply with the new rules is carbon capture and storage. But the technology has not been deployed successfully on a commercial scale, and power plant operators say that the rules will force fossil fuel plants to effectively shut down.

“It is obvious that the ultimate goal of these EPA regulations is to stop the use of fossil fuels to produce reliable energy in the United States by forcing the premature closure of coal plants and blocking new natural gas plants,” said U.S. Sen. Joe Manchin, D-West Virginia, chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee.

Another powerful foe of the EPA rules vowed Thursday that she’d introduce a bill to repeal them.

“To protect millions of Americans, including energy workers, against executive overreach that has already been tried and rejected by the Supreme Court,” said U.S. Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, R-West Virginia, “I will be introducing a Congressional Review Act resolution of disapproval to overturn the EPA’s job-killing regulations announced today.”

Capito is the senior Republican on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, which oversees the EPA and confirms its administrator.

CSX Builds Zero-Emission Hydrogen Locomotive In Huntington

CSX No. 2100 was repowered from a kit developed in Canada by Canadian Pacific. It emits only water vapor and no carbon dioxide, depending on how the hydrogen was produced.

CSX unveiled a hydrogen-powered locomotive this week, rebuilt from a diesel locomotive at its Huntington Shop.

CSX No. 2100 was repowered from a kit developed in Canada by Canadian Pacific. It emits only water vapor and no carbon dioxide, depending on how the hydrogen was produced.

“The successful debut of our first hydrogen-powered locomotive stands as a testament to the exceptional skill and dedication of our employees at the CSX Huntington locomotive shop,” CEO Joe Hinrichs said in a statement.

Emissions from transportation are the largest single source of carbon dioxide emissions, and major railroads are looking for opportunities to repower diesel locomotives with alternative fuels.

In addition to hydrogen, some locomotives operate with liquefied natural gas or run on batteries.

Thanks to a federal grant, CSX will replace a small fleet of diesel locomotives with battery powered ones at the Curtis Bay coal export terminal in Baltimore.

Presentation: Pleasant Plant’s Hydrogen Conversion Still Involves Coal

Burning hydrogen emits no carbon dioxide. However, the source of that hydrogen at Pleasants will still be coal.

A state Senate committee heard new details Wednesday about how the Pleasants Power Station will be converted from coal to hydrogen.

Pleasants is a 1,300-megawatt power plant along the Ohio River north of Parkersburg. Its coal-fired boilers went cold in June when its then-owner, Energy Harbor, shut them down.

But state lawmakers, including Sen. Donna Boley, a Pleasants County Republican, fought to save the plant from closure.

Not long after the plant went idle, a California company called Omnis Technology stepped in.

Omnis reactivated the plant. The ultimate goal, though, is to produce graphite on the site and use the hydrogen byproduct to generate electricity.

Burning hydrogen emits no carbon dioxide. However, the source of that hydrogen at Pleasants will still be coal.

Steve Winberg, the former Assistant Secretary of Fossil Energy in the Trump administration, explained to the Senate Energy, Industry and Mining Committee how the process would work.

“Their goal is to convert Pleasants from coal to 100 percent hydrogen, and then make the hydrogen from the coal. So, at a minimum, we’ll see the same amount of coal going to Pleasants, but it will be converted to hydrogen, and then the hydrogen will be burned in the boiler. So, there’s going to have to be a retrofit on that boiler to allow it to burn hydrogen and still maintain the 600 megawatts that it’s capable of maintaining or producing.”

Winberg explained to the committee that the technology is emerging. It requires heating the coal to 3,000 degrees Celsius. The bar the process has to clear is producing hydrogen that’s cheaper than natural gas.

“If this technology works, it will be cost competitive with natural gas. And so proof is in the pudding, we’ll see if they’re able to get it to work at 3,000 degrees. But if they do, it’s a pretty intriguing technology.”

Omnis is investing $800 million into the facility. If successful, it will need 600 workers to operate in addition to the 160 who run the current plant.

EPA Seeks To Cut Methane Emissions From Oil And Gas

It’s part of an effort to tackle one of the most problematic drivers of global warming.

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story should have said companies can eliminate half their emissions with existing technology at no net cost.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said over the weekend that it will curb methane emissions from oil and gas production.

The EPA seeks to cut methane emissions from oil and gas by 80 percent over the next 15 years.

It’s part of an effort to tackle one of the most problematic drivers of global warming. Methane is many times more potent a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, though CO2 lasts longer in the atmosphere.

The rules would subtract 58 million tons of methane emissions, equivalent to 1.5 billion metric tons of CO2, the EPA said.

John Rutecki, regulatory and legislative manager in Appalachia for the Environmental Defense Fund, says companies can eliminate half their emissions with existing technology at no net cost.

“This will stop wasted gas,” he said. “So by keeping more energy in the pipeline, you’re obviously ensuring that you’re bringing more gas to market.”

The EPA’s methane rule will begin to take effect next year. One oil producer, BP, welcomed the rule.

West Virginia Forests Aid Scientists in Understanding Role Nitrogen Plays in Carbon Storage

A new study featuring research conducted at an experimental forest in West Virginia is shedding light on how the carbon-storing ability of soils, and the billions of microbes within them, may fare as both carbon dioxide and nitrogen increase in the future.

The research, published recently in the journal Global Change Biology, examined how increased nitrogen affects the ability of forests and soil to store carbon.

“So in general, adding nitrogen to soils forests causes less decomposition, more soil carbon storage, but the mechanism for as to why that happens, again, largely unknown,” said Joe Carrara, a Ph.D candidate in the Department of Biology at West Virginia University and co-author of the paper. “Most research shows that it’s due to a decline in certain fungal guilds that are really good at breaking down lignin, or leaves or really recalcitrant, sort of hard to decompose soil organic matter.”

Humans have more than doubled the amount of nitrogen being deposited across ecosystems worldwide through the burning of fossil fuels and agriculture.

More nitrogen is on the way as developing countries invest in new coal-fired power plants. Carrara said understanding how nitrogen affects soils and ultimately the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere can help scientists improve future climate change predictions.

In the summer of 2015, Carrara and the team spent a few days in the Fernow Experimental Forest near Parsons, West Virginia. They sampled soils in two parts of the U.S. Forest Service site — one area that has been left alone and another, which has been treated with nitrogen pellets since 1989.

“What we were interested in seeing is how the relationships between trees and these soil microbes, fungi, bacteria, mycorrhizal fungi, change under conditions with elevated nitrogen and can these relationships or changes in these relationships sort of give us some insight into why soil carbon decomposition goes down under elevated nitrogen,” he said.

The scientists found more nitrogen meant trees used less of their energy taking up carbon and creating things like roots. Bigger root systems mean more carbon stored underground. They found the trees also spent less carbon creating relationships with symbiotic, or beneficial, fungi that live in soils.

One surprising thing they found is that bacteria in the soil they sampled seemed to undergo changes when there was more nitrogen to contend with.

‘Mother Nature Threw Up on Wheeling, West Virginia’

West Virginia, as it turns out, is a great place to study this because of how close it is to the coal-burning power plants that have historically dotted the Ohio Valley. The state has some of the historically highest levels of past nitrogen deposition of course in the country.

“I think that the lowest ever recorded acid rain was actually in Wheeling, West Virginia,” Carrara said. “I don’t know exactly what the pH was, but it the same as stomach acid. One of our co-authors likes to say, I can’t remember what year it was, but he says basically mother nature threw up on Wheeling, West Virginia.”

Since the passage of the Clean Air Act, pollution in the U.S. has decreased and the amount of nitrogen falling onto forests and soils has dropped. But as developing nations bring coal-fired power plants and other manufacturing facilities online — which are sources of nitrogen — Carrara says it’s important to study how more nitrogen impacts soil carbon storage.

“This sort of gives us an idea of what, in the future, if nitrogen deposition is to continue to rise in some places in developing countries, places in the developing word, even some areas in the United States, how the forest will respond to that elevated nitrogen,” he said. “So, it’s sort of like speeding up the process so we can see now what the future might look like.”

Still, more research is needed to know how nitrogen fertilization worldwide might affect the total amount of carbon stored by soil worldwide, and thus serve as an important sink of carbon dioxide.

Carrara said the study helped illuminate the ways in which forests take up carbon dioxide and allocate it to different sorts of compartments in the forest like leaves and soils.

“Knowing that this link between the plants themselves and the microbes in the soils is important, provides us with some sort of mechanistic understanding of how nitrogen will impact where the carbon’s allocated in the forest,” he said.

For his next research study, Carrara hopes to take tackle more questions related to the forest soil micro biome. Last summer, he collected similar information in an experimental forest in Maine. Together with data from West Virginia, he says he hopes to soon know more about how different tree species that associate with the same fungi react to high levels of nitrogen.

The study was made possible in part by a grant from the National Science Foundation. Additional authors of the study include Christopher Walter at the University of Minnesota, Colin Averill of Boston University and Jennifer Hawkins, William Peterjohn and Edward Brzostek at WVU.

In Graphic Novel Sequel, West Virginia Writer Tackles Coal, Climate & Race

A few years back, West Virginia writer and filmmaker Danny Boyd stepped into the world of graphic novels, releasing books under his cult-classic Chillers franchise, as well as other stories. One of which was Carbon, a mythological world set in an alternative West Virginia and dealing with an ancient race of people and their effect on the coal industry thousands of years later. The follow-up, Salt, was released in late-2016 and picks up where Carbon left off. We spoke with Boyd about his latest graphic novel, some of the social and environmental issues addressed in the story and why he’s just now getting around to promoting it the way he would have liked.

The last time we talked, we were talking about Carbon — which was the first installment in this mythological world, so to speak. Now comes Salt and take us to the world. Let’s start with Carbon. Describe that world for us what happened and then get us into where we’re going with Salt.

Carbon was a story that I had nearly 30 years after living in Williamson and seeing the destruction of strip mining and those kinds of things. But in the movie world, as a filmmaker, I was never going to be able to have the kind of budget to do something that big and then when I got into comics it’s like, ‘Oh, man, with this I finally can.’ So, it’s Gods, monsters and evil coal barons.

So, I started thinking about it as an entertainer: Coal, coal, coal, coal.

Coal is organic material. It’s plants, animals, people. What would happen if it came back to life and was ignited by an evil industrial power? So that launches Carbon which leads through to Salt with the lead character, Heat Hatfield. And you’re right, it is a mythological approach with it the tragic hero turned to epic hero.

There are some heavy things going on here. For one, there’s sort of an apocalyptic vibe. In Salt, there are some issues of climate change and global warming. What is it like trying to use a platform such as a graphic novel for a subject matter that is so socially ubiquitous at this point?

It is so hard to digest. Who wants to turn on TV anymore? You know, after the last election, it’s the last thing you want to bring joy in your life. So, it’s difficult for a career. I don’t know if that was successful, but [you have to ask yourself] ‘OK, how do you make these topics entertaining?’ That’s number one. If it’s not entertaining, you’re not going to bring people to it. Hopefully, at least, through the backdoor. But, if you’re a climate denier, this is a nonstarter for us. But, if you turn on TV right now and watch the Weather Channel with this new hurricane system coming through — even in a very stable society like ours, we’re only a few clicks from melting down politically, environmentally, all of those kinds of things.

There’s one scene I do want to address in Salt and that is a moment that particularly addresses issues of race. It’s one of those things that, whenever you talk to people about issues of race in West Virginia, you oftentimes hear one of two things. One of the things you hear is — normally from an outsider’s perspective, I would say — that West Virginia is very overtly racist, that we’re a bunch of hillbillies that are ignorant and have no progressive ideas as far as dealing with race. And then, on the other hand, you hear something to the effect of: ‘There’s such a low more minority population that race isn’t an issue here. It seems like you’re trying to respond to some of that in some fashion or another.

I am and thanks for picking up on that. It’s a sticky wicket and it was when I was writing this that I realized, ‘Man, I have my entire teaching career — 32 years with a historically black college and university — I’ve lived in Tanzania, I live in a black community by choice.’ When you’re around the community, you start hearing those things: ‘Oh, we’re all black in the coal mines. You know, we all come out that way. So, we’re not racist’ — that kind of thing. And then you start to hear, ‘No, not really. That’s only if you’re white.’

And I realize the white privilege that I carried — that I didn’t really acknowledge and I really wanted to see and I don’t know if I was successful. But, I wanted that scene with Willie Mays Vincent, who who’s like one of the main heroes of this whole epic thing, with Heat Hatfield where he says, ‘Well, you’re my best friend.’ Well, that’s a stereotype. People always say, ‘I’m not prejudiced. Look at my best friend.’ Well, no, you need to look at these things and live a little bit deeper.

Right before we started speaking, you handed me a sheet of paper. It’s essentially just a one-sheet, more or less a press release, that deals with the Trump Administration and how that’s playing a role and in making dystopian literature interesting and marketable. What can you say — at least in your experience as a creator, as a graphic novelist, as a filmmaker, as a person that’s delved into that particular kind of art — how is the relationship with the administration affecting the marketability or the conversations surrounding what it is that you’re doing?

Well commercially, I probably shouldn’t tell you, but I’ll stand by this: I didn’t think these things would happen. If you read the interview with me at the end of Salt, I’m saying, ‘Hey, look, West Virginia’s got the short end the stick, America.’ I said, ‘Hillary, how about helping us out. You know, giving us a stimulus package after we built the country.’ So, that’s how little that I thought that this would happen.

But this interview took place and was published before the election?

You talk about bad luck timing; my book came out the day after the election. You talk about sucking the oxygen out of the room. So, these weren’t like the most farfetched things.

One of the things I look at in Salt is that it’s a story that seems like it’s still not finished. Is that is that right? Is there more coming from this storyline?

Well, it has an ending that’s a big, big, big ending. So, I hope that encourages people out there to get the books and we won’t give it away. But it opens up another door. We always think things are black and white — it’s this or it’s that. We’re very arrogant to think that we could destroy the earth. We can’t destroy the Earth — we can destroy human kind as we know it.

So, it’s not just about when will we destroy humankind or will we not. It’s like, well, is there something in the middle? And we’re hinting a little at evolution here. Again, this is all mythological and that’s probably as much as I want to talk about the ending.