The Senate’s 23-17 vote came after a lengthy debate Friday evening about property rights, impacts on oil and gas development and the unknowns surrounding the injection of large amounts of carbon dioxide in voids a half-mile underground.
“The concept of pore space is not going to go away. It’s here and we’re going to have to deal with it,” said Sen. Clint Harden, R-Clovis, the bill’s sponsor.
Legislators hammered Harden with questions for two hours about who would be liable for the pore space once its filled with carbon dioxide.
They also asked what would happen if an oil or natural gas developer drilled through the space, what the outcome would be once carbon dioxide started mixing with deep water aquifers or other underground deposits and how appraisers would go about figuring out how much the space is worth.
Here is the amended version of the bill, as passed by the State Senate:
For decades, the coal industry has supported quality high-paying jobs for American workers, and coal has provided an important domestic source of reliable, affordable energy. At the same time, coal-fired power plants are the largest contributor to U.S. greenhouse gas emissions and coal accounts for 40 percent of global emissions. Charting a path toward clean coal is essential to achieving my Administration’s goals of providing clean energy, supporting American jobs, and reducing emissions of carbon pollution. Rapid commercial development and deployment of clean coal technologies, particularly carbon capture and storage (CCS), will help position the United States as a leader in the global clean energy race.
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To further this work and develop a comprehensive and coordinated Federal strategy to speed the commercial development and deployment of clean coal technologies, I hereby establish an Interagency Task Force on Carbon Capture and Storage (Task Force). You shall each designate a senior official from your respective agency to serve on the Task Force, which shall be Co Chaired by the designees from the Department of Energy and the Environmental Protection Agency.
There is nothing clean about coal. Aside from burning wood or feces, it is literally the most polluting, most dangerous energy source known to man. If the president wanted people to take his fiscal conservatism seriously he wouldn’t pump billions of dollars into the pet project of the coal industry. Further, every dollar spent doing the coal industry’s research into the myth of ‘clean coal’ is a dollar that could have been invested in clean energy research. Obama and his team are making some efforts to speed up the transition to a clean energy economy, while at the same time making other efforts to slow that transition down. It is counterproductive and wasteful, and I’m sure plenty of people in the administration know better. More pandering we can believe in, I guess.
In the face of mounting support for “clean coal” and the billions being invested in carbon capture and storage, or CCS, technology, a new assessment from the University of Toronto’s Munk Center for International Studies has a stern warning for policy-makers: there could be dramatic unintended environmental consequences to sequestering huge amounts of carbon dioxide in the earth’s mantel.
“The politicians are saying we can do this, and the scientists are saying, ‘we don’t know,’” says Mr. Thomson, who covers provincial politics.
We are living in an increasingly carbon-constrained world. We need to consider the deployment of every technological and behavioral option to reduce carbon emissions if we are to avert the catastrophic consequences of climate change. Yet we do not necessarily have the luxury of tackling all options at once, particularly given the current global economic crisis. We therefore need to prioritize our low-carbon options on the basis of cost-effectiveness. Energy efficiency represents the most cost-effective, low-carbon strategy compared to other options such as renewable energy, nuclear power, and carbon capture and storage. The cheapest form of energy is, after all, the energy you do not use.The compelling case for energy efficiency is best understood through analogy. It is undisputed in health care that prevention is better, and cheaper, than cure. The same is true in energy and climate. Smartly reducing energy consumption is a more cost-effective approach for reducing emissions than deploying relatively immature technologies such as solar photovoltaics or carbon capture and storage, or CCS, which address the symptoms of a carbon-intensive lifestyle, rather than tackling the root cause of high energy consumption in the first place.
The Department of Energy announced $27.6 million in research grants on Monday, for projects intended to simulate the underground storage of carbon dioxide.The 19 awards, to be distributed over four years, will be supplemented by $8.2 million paid by the recipients, which are predominantly universities.
Carbon capture and storage technology — or C.C.S. — is especially important for coal-fired power plants, which account for close to half of the country’s electricity use and a substantial portion of its carbon emissions.
