The Environmental Protection Agency is expected Thursday to propose weakening an Obama-era rule that would have required new coal plants to be built with expensive technology that captures carbon emissions from their smokestacks.
Industry sources told the Washington Examiner that the Trump administration’s EPA will introduce a replacement rule regulating emissions from new coal plants that would not force them to be built with carbon capture and storage, also known as CCS.
The coal industry had argued that the Obama administration’s New Source Performance Review Standard would be a de facto ban on new coal plants, because carbon capture is technically feasible but cost-prohibitive in many cases.
The Trump EPA’s version of the rule would soften the standard, encouraging so-called higher efficiency critical or supercritical power plants that burn coal at higher temperatures than conventional technologies, requiring less energy.
The EPA said Tuesday that Acting Administrator Andrew Wheeler will make an unspecified “energy policy” announcement Thursday afternoon in Washington, D.C., alongside Harry Alford, CEO of the National Black Chamber of Commerce. It did not specify the policy, but industry officials confirmed that the topic would be the rule.
“We are supportive of EPA’s decision to revise the standards for new coal plants,” Michelle Bloodworth, president and CEO of the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity, told the Washington Examiner. “We do not feel like the practicality of CCS has been adequately demonstrated or economically feasible. If we are ever going to build new coal plants in the country again, we will need reasonable standards.”
The new proposal, which will take months to be finalized as it goes through public comment, is a companion of sorts to a Trump administration proposal early this year to replace the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan regulating carbon emissions from existing coal plants.
The Trump EPA’s Affordable Clean Energy or ACE rule proposal does not set a specific target to reduce carbon emissions, or force a shift in the electricity sector away from coal plants to natural gas and zero-carbon renewable energy, as the Clean Power Plan did.
Instead, it gives states the authority to write rules regulating their power plants. To reduce carbon emissions, it encourages states to allow utilities to make heat rate improvements in power plants, enabling them to run more efficiently by burning less coal to produce the same amount of electricity.
But utilities are expressing little interest in the Trump administration’s bid to help keep their coal plants alive, or build new ones, remaining committed to providing energy from cleaner and cheaper sources such as natural gas, wind, and solar.
For example, major U.S. utility Xcel Energy pledged Tuesday to provide all of its electricity from carbon-free sources by 2050.
