The E.P.A proposes limits on climate pollution from power plants

The impact of the EPA on the regulation of power plant emissions during the last oil-drilled oil spill at the Willow Site, Washington, D.C.

Burning oil drilled at the Willow site would emit an estimated 280 million tons of planet-warming carbon dioxide, according to the White House. The amount of emissions that are eliminated by the E.P.A. is estimated at 15 billion tons by 2055. Several analyses have projected that the Inflation Reduction Act will cut emissions by at least another billion tons by 2030.

The newly proposed rules would help the country get closer to the Biden administration goal of reducing greenhouse gasses 50 to 52% by 2030, based on 2005 emissions. Rules that will require more cars to be electric, a tighter energy efficiency standards for appliances, and a switch to electric buildings are some of the initiatives to hit that goal.

Warming to 1.5 Celsius over pre-industrial levels is needed to avoid the worst effects of climate change, according to scientists. The global average temperature has gone up by about 1.1 degrees Celsius.

Resources for the Future, a nonpartisan research organization, said that all of the regulations from the E.P.A. are crucial to keeping this ocean liner away from the worst climate disaster.

power plant owners can decide how to meet the requirements, which could include shutting down their facility, under the proposed rules. Carbon capture and storage technologies that have been too expensive in the past are nowmore affordable thanks to tax credits that were passed last year, according to the EPA.

Still, the coal industry may have the most to lose under this proposal. The Sierra Club says that there are 158 active coal power plants. The National Mining Association says carbon capture technology isn’t yet fully economically demonstrated. A “carbon capture moonshot” was called for by the organization.

The EPA rules were influenced by legal battles. The Supreme Court told the agency what its options were for regulating power plant emissions. Justices said that without a specific law, it couldn’t force the entire power generation industry to shift away from fossil fuels.

According to experts, the US Congress boosted the federal incentives for CCS in the power and other industrial sectors to US$85 per tonne of CO2, which they said mostly offset the cost of capturing the gas and pumping it underground. Modelling shows the technology isn’t enough to convince most utilities that it’s worth the investment.

Owners of those plants have been allowed to spew climate-warming carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere for more than a century. If these proposed regulations are finalized, they would come close to putting a stop to that practice.

The rules will face legal challenge from the fossil fuel industry and its allies, which is welcomed by environmental groups.

The rule would bring health benefits, by decreasing other air pollutants such as sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide. 1,300 premature deaths would be prevented, more than 800 hospital visits and 300,000 asthma attacks by the proposed rules by the EPA. While the rules could increase electricity prices a “negligible” amount, the agency values the net climate and health benefits would be up to $85 billion.

Even before the proposed rules were announced, there was some criticism from within President Biden’s own party.

“This Administration is determined to advance its radical climate agenda and has made it clear they are hell-bent on doing everything in their power to regulate coal and gas-fueled power plants out of existence,” said Sen. Joe Manchin, D-WV, in a statement released by his office. Manchin’s family own a coal company, and they are representing a state in which coal remains a powerful business. “I will oppose the EPA nominees until the White House stops their government overreach,” Manchin said.

Coal remains a major industry in West Virginia and preserving it is a priority for a lot of people there. State regulators recently approved a $3 million per month surcharge on customers’ bills to keep a coal plant from shutting down at the end of May. The 146 employees of the facility will be on the payroll, even if the plant doesn’t generate electricity.

The Attorney General of West Virginia, who’s also a governor, led the legal challenge to the Clean Power Plan. He is expected to lead a legal challenge to the rules once they are finalized.

The framework is long overdue but very welcome according to the head of the Climate and Clean Air programme at the Natural Resources Defense Council. Nonetheless, Doniger says that his group will push the EPA to implement tougher measures in the final regulation.

Ben King is an energy analyst with the Rhodium Group, a consulting firm in New York City. But clean-energy sources could face their own challenges in scaling up quickly, owing to potential bottlenecks with licensing, securing sites for facilities and delivering power over long-distance electric transmission lines. According to an analysis by the Rhodium Group, regulatory requirements may allow CCS to gain a foothold in the power sector.

McNamara says that the current EPA proposal is just one piece of a larger puzzle that includes other regulations on hazardous pollutants, as well as massive public-health incentives for low-carbon energy. Will investing in CCS technology prolong the life of a fossil-fuel industry with significant impacts on climate and public health, or will investing in clean energy save the world? “We feel very strongly clean energy will be the superior choice,” McNamara says.

The technology is ready to be implemented at a reasonable cost, according to EPA officials. Many scientists and environmentalists agree. Doniger says that the technology was more prevalent in the past, because there are no regulations and it is cheaper to dump emissions into the atmosphere.

How things play out will vary by plant. Electric utilities will probably choose to close down older coal-fired power plants, for instance, whereas some new gas-fired plants that run frequently could be candidates for a CCS retrofit, says John Thompson, an energy analyst with the Clean Air Task Force, an advocacy group based in Boston, Massachusetts. The scales could be tipped by a combination of economic incentives that lower the cost, and regulations that require action, he adds.

The rule that saysThou shalt do this is similar to the tax credit that says “This isn’t very expensive”, according to Thompson. There is potential for deep reductions in emissions.