WASHINGTON (AP) — The Environmental Protection Agency said Thursday it is delaying planned rules to curb emissions from existing natural gas plants that release harmful air pollutants and contribute to global warming.

The agency said it is still on track to finalize rules for coal-fired power plants and new gas plants that have not come online, a key step to slow planet-warming pollution from the power sector, the nation’s second-largest contributor to climate change.

But in a turnaround from previous plans, the agency said it will review standards for existing gas plants and expand the rules to include more pollutants. The change came after complaints from environmental justice groups, who said the earlier plan allowed too much toxic air pollution which disproportionately harms low-income neighborhoods near power plants, refineries and other industrial sites.

“As EPA works towards final standards to cut climate pollution from existing coal and new gas-fired power plants later this spring, the agency is taking a new, comprehensive approach to cover the entire fleet of natural gas-fired turbines, as well as cover more pollutants,” EPA Administrator Michael Regan said in a statement.

He called the new plan a “stronger, more durable approach” that will achieve greater emissions reductions than the current proposal. It also will better protect vulnerable frontline communities suffering from toxic air pollution caused by power plants and other industrial sites, Regan said.

Still, the plan was not universally welcomed by environmentalists, who said the new approach will likely push rules for existing gas plants past the November presidential election.

“We are extremely disappointed in EPA’s decision to delay finalizing carbon pollution standards for existing gas plants, which make up a significant portion of carbon emissions in the power sector,” said Frank Sturges, a lawyer for the Clean Air Task Force, an environmental group.

“Greenhouse gas emissions from power plants have gone uncontrolled for far too long, and we have no more time to waste,” he said.

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, a Rhode Island Democrat, called EPA’s decision “inexplicable,” adding: “Making a rule that applies only to coal, which is dying out on its own, and to new gas power plants that are not yet built, is not how we are going to reach climate safety.”

But some environmentalists hailed the decision, saying the new plan would ultimately deliver better results.

“We have always known that the fight for a clean power sector wouldn’t be a quick one,” said Charles Harper of Evergreen Action. “EPA’s first order of business should be finalizing strong and necessary limits on climate pollution from new gas and existing coal plants as quickly as possible.”

“We are glad that EPA is committed to finishing the job with a new rule that covers every gas plant operating in the U.S.,” Harper added.

“Tackling dirty coal plants is one of the single most important moves the president and EPA can make to rein in climate pollution,” said Abigail Dillen, president of Earthjustice. “As utilities propose new fossil gas plants, we absolutely have to get ahead of a big new pollution problem.”

EPA issued a proposed rule in May 2023 that called for drastically curbing greenhouse gas emissions from existing coal and gas-fired plants, as well as future gas plants planned by the power industry. No new coal plant has opened in the U.S. in more than a decade, while dozens of coal-fired plants have closed in recent years in the face of competition from cheaper natural gas. The Biden administration has committed to create a carbon pollution-free power sector by 2035.

The EPA proposal could force power plants to capture smokestack emissions using a technology that has long been promised but is not used widely in the United States.

If finalized, the proposed regulation would mark the first time the federal government has restricted carbon dioxide emissions from existing power plants, which generate about 25% of U.S. greenhouse gas pollution, second only to the transportation sector. The rule also would apply to future electric plants and would avoid up to 617 million metric tons of carbon dioxide through 2042, equivalent to annual emissions of 137 million passenger vehicles, the EPA said.

Almost all coal plants — along with large, frequently used gas-fired plants — would have to cut or capture nearly all their carbon dioxide emissions by 2038, the EPA said. Plants that cannot meet the new standards would be forced to shutter.

Much of the EPA plan is expected to be made final this spring and is likely to be challenged by industry groups and Republican-leaning states. They have accused the Democratic administration of overreach on environmental regulations and warn of a pending reliability crisis for the electric grid. The power plant rule is one of at least a half-dozen EPA rules limiting power plant emissions and wastewater treatment.

The National Mining Association warned of “an onslaught” of government regulation “designed to shut down the coal fleet prematurely″ when the EPA proposal was announced last year.

Regan has denied that the power plant rule is aimed at shutting down the coal sector, but acknowledged last year that, “ we will see some coal retirements.”

Coal provided just over 16% of U.S. electricity in 2023, down from about 45% in 2010, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. Natural gas provided about 43% of U.S. electricity. The remainder comes from nuclear energy and renewables such as wind, solar and hydropower.

Peggy Shepard, co-founder and executive director of WE ACT for Environmental Justice, a New York-based group, said she was pleased that the concerns of environmental justice communities will be factored into EPA’s rulemaking.

“The power sector is one of the top sources of carbon emissions and pollution,” she said. “With this pause to take a deeper dive into developing the most comprehensive and thoughtful rulemaking for existing gas plants, we have an opportunity to do this work correctly and effectively to protect the human and environmental health of the most overburdened, neglected and vulnerable people across the country.”

The EPA’s revised plan was first reported by Bloomberg News.

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Biden administration is setting tougher standards for deadly soot pollution, saying that reducing fine particle matter from tailpipes, smokestacks and other industrial sources could prevent thousands of premature deaths a year.

Environmental and public health groups hailed the new Environmental Protection Agency rule finalized Feb. 7 as a major step in improving the health of Americans, including future generations. Industry groups warned it could lead to the loss of manufacturing jobs and even shut down power plants or refineries. Business groups and Republican-leaning states are likely to challenge the rule in court.

EPA Administrator Michael Regan said the rule would have $46 billion in net health benefits by 2032, including prevention of up to 800,000 asthma attacks and 4,500 premature deaths. He said the rule will especially benefit children, older adults and those with heart and lung conditions, as well as people in low-income and minority communities adversely affected by decades of industrial pollution.

The rule “really does represent what the Biden-Harris administration is all about, which is understanding that healthy people equal a healthy economy,” he told reporters Feb. 6. “We do not have to sacrifice people to have a prosperous and booming economy.”

The rule sets maximum levels of 9 micrograms of fine particle pollution per cubic meter of air, down from 12 micrograms established a decade ago under the Obama administration.

The rule sets an air quality level that states and counties must achieve in the coming years to reduce pollution from power plants, vehicles, industrial sites and wildfires. The rule comes as Democratic President Joe Biden seeks reelection, and some Democrats have warned that a tough soot standard could harm his chances in key industrial states such as Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin.

Administration officials brushed aside those concerns, saying the industry has used technical improvements to meet previous soot standards and can adapt to meet the new standard as well. Soot pollution has declined by 42% since 2000, even as the U.S. gross domestic product has increased by 52%, Regan said.

“So we’ve heard this argument before, but the facts are well-established that these standards really will increase the quality of life for so many people, especially those who are disproportionately impacted,” he said.

Manish Bapna, president and CEO of the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental group, said the EPA was “putting public health first by requiring polluters to cut soot from the air we all breathe.”
Ben Jealous, executive director of the Sierra Club, said that opponents’ “resistance is a stark reminder that the fight for clean air and a healthier future is far from over.”

The new rule does not impose pollution controls on specific industries; instead, it lowers the annual standard for fine particulate matter for overall air quality. The EPA will use air sampling to identify counties and other areas that do not meet the new standard. States would then have 18 months to develop compliance plans for those areas. States that do not meet the new standard by 2032 could face penalties, although EPA said it expects that 99% of U.S. counties will be able to meet the revised annual standard by 2032.

Industry groups and Republican officials dispute that and say a limit of 9 micrograms per cubic meter could sharply increase the number of U.S. counties in violation of the soot standard. Companies in those places would have difficulty obtaining permits to build or expand industrial plants.

The American Forest and Paper Association called the new rule “unworkable” and said it undermines Biden’s promise to increase manufacturing jobs in the U.S.

“We are very concerned that many of the modernization projects in the paper and wood products industry and across U.S. manufacturing will no longer be able to move forward,” said Heidi Brock, the group’s president and CEO.

The paper lobby was among 71 industry groups that warned the White House in a letter that a lower soot standard could force companies to locate new facilities in foreign countries with weaker air-quality standards, thereby undermining Biden’s economic and environmental goals.

The standard for particle pollution, more commonly known as soot, was set in late 2012 under Democratic President Barack Obama and left unchanged by Republican President Donald Trump, who overrode a scientific recommendation for a lower standard in his final days in office.

EPA scientists have estimated exposure at current limits causes the early deaths of thousands of Americans annually from heart disease and lung cancer, along with other health problems.

The new EPA rule would require states, counties and tribal governments to meet a stricter air quality standard for fine particulate matter up to 2.5 microns in diameter — far smaller than the diameter of a human hair. The standard would not force polluters to shut down, but the EPA and state regulators could use it as the basis for other rules that target pollution from specific sources such as diesel-fueled trucks, refineries and power plants.

EPA said it will work with states, counties and tribes to account for and respond to wildfires, an increasing source of soot pollution, especially in the West. “EPA recognizes the increasing challenges and human health impacts that wildland fire and smoke pose in communities all around the country,” the agency said in a fact sheet.

EPA allows states and air agencies to request exemptions from air-quality standards due to “exceptional events,” including wildfires and prescribed fires.

A 2023 report by the American Lung Association found that nearly 64 million Americans live in counties that experience unhealthy daily spikes in soot pollution and nearly 19 million live in counties that exceed annual limits for soot pollution. Most of those counties were in 11 Western states, the report said. People of color were 61% more likely than white people to live in a county with unhealthy air quality, the report said.

Bakersfield, California, tied with Visalia in the state’s San Joaquin Valley as the most polluted city for year-round particle pollution. Six of the 10 cities with the most soot pollution were in California, and two more were in the West: Medford, Oregon and greater Phoenix.

The Senate has approved President Joe Biden’s nominee to lead the Environmental Protection Agency’s air pollution office just as the agency is set to finalize rules over climate-changing emissions from power plants and cars and trucks.

Joe Goffman is a longtime EPA official who has headed the air and radiation office on an acting basis since Biden took office three years ago. His nomination for the permanent post languished for nearly two years amid opposition from Republicans unhappy with EPA rules on a range of issues, from restrictions on coal- and natural gas-fired power plants to industrial soot and vehicle emissions.

Goffman’s 2022 nomination for the air post, one of the top jobs at EPA, lapsed last year without a Senate vote. He was renominated in early 2023. The vote to confirm him was 50-49, with West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin, an ally of the coal industry, the lone Democrat to oppose him. Sen. John Barrasso, R-Wyoming, a vocal Goffman critic, was absent following the death of his wife, Bobbi, last week.

EPA Administrator Michael Regan said Goffman has played a central role in developing and executing rules and policies that deliver on Biden’s agenda to address the climate crisis and ensure clean air.

“Joe is uniquely skilled at building consensus among stakeholders and crafting policies that tackle global challenges like climate change, while at the same time addressing longstanding pollution concerns in overburdened communities,” Regan said in a statement.

Goffman’s office has overseen proposals that would impose strict limits on greenhouse gas emissions from power plants and other industries, as well as tailpipe emissions from cars and trucks and a separate rule addressing fine particulate matter, better known as soot. Those rules are set to become final later this year.

Sen. Tom Carper, a Delaware Democrat who chairs the Senate Environment Committee, hailed Goffman’s confirmation. The air office “has an outsized impact on our lives,” Carper said, with a mission that “includes reducing climate pollution while also improving our vehicle emissions standards and protecting public health.”

Goffman “has proven that he’s up to the task,” Carper added. ”Under his direction, EPA has made significant progress … to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and help lower energy costs for all Americans.”

But Sen. Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia, the top Republican on the environment panel, slammed Goffman as a key author of job-killing regulations over two Democratic administrations. Goffman was a high-ranking EPA official in the Obama administration and played a leading role in the Clean Power Plan, President Barack Obama’s signature attempt to address climate change. The 2015 rule was blocked by the Supreme Court and was never enforced.

“Rarely do we have such a robust record to draw on in evaluating a nominee — and I say this with great disappointment — rarely is the record so damaging,” Capito said in a speech on the Senate floor.

“Mr. Goffman’s actions — marked by federal overreach and job-killing regulations — have been a disaster for our country,” Capito said. She called the Clean Power Plan “a direct shot at American energy production” and an attempt to shut down coal- and gas-fired power plants, including those in her home state.

An EPA plan to curb greenhouse gas emissions from power plants is little more than the “second iteration of the Clean Power Plan,” Capito said.

“Many of us have warned about the lawlessness and danger of this regulatory plan,” she said, predicting “disastrous consequences” on the reliability of the electric grid and energy prices.

Capito and other Republicans also denounced Goffman’s role in what they called the Biden administration’s rapid push toward electric vehicles.

Environmental groups defended Goffman.

“Our nation needs Joe’s extensive experience, knowledge and hard work as we tackle the increasingly urgent problems of the climate crisis and the air pollution that makes people sick,” said Fred Krupp, president of the Environmental Defense Fund. Goffman once worked for the group in a long career that also includes service as a Democratic staff lawyer on the Senate environment panel.

“Joe has dedicated his career to protecting human health and the environment” and will continue to do so “through decisions anchored in science and the law,” Krupp said.

If the New Hampshire Legislature passes House Bill 1486, the state would be required to consider proxy carbon prices in its spending decisions relative to transportation and buildings.

Carbon pricing is an economic instrument and market-based mechanism to curb greenhouse gas emissions, one that is becoming increasingly popular across the globe. According to the World Bank, 73 carbon pricing initiatives have been implemented, covering 23 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions in 2023. 

The U.S. doesn’t currently have a federal tax on carbon, though various lawmakers in Congress have proposed related legislation in recent years.

Anticipating a future carbon tax, Rep. Nicholas Germana, a Keene Democrat, is proposing that the state start taking one into account – what he’s calling “proxy” carbon pricing. HB 1486 would apply specifically to state spending decisions, such as the construction of a new building or purchase of new vehicles. In practice, this would mean state agency purchasing departments would have to consider the cost analysis of carbon impacts in their acquisitions.

“This is a situation I think where we can walk and chew gum at the same time,” Germana said. “We can reduce the burden on taxpayers and reduce carbon emissions. Markets are based on incentives. Absent incentives, it is pretty close to the literal definition of insanity to believe someone will change their behavior.”

Though carbon pricing is often discussed primarily as a tool to fight climate change, Germana presented it to lawmakers as a way to save taxpayers money. He warned members of the House Executive Departments and Administration Committee earlier this month that a federal carbon tax “is coming,” citing existing ones in Canada and the European Union. 

If the U.S. doesn’t go that route, he argued, the country could be at a “significant economic disadvantage,” as it will hurt exports to those international markets. Last October, for example, the European Union began the initial phase of a Europe-wide tax on carbon in imported goods.

As written, the Democrat-sponsored bill would direct the Department of Administrative Services, which manages state government procurement, to take into account a proxy carbon price of $85 per ton starting Jan. 1, 2025, and increase the cost per ton by $10 every Jan. 1 until 2050. 

The $85 per ton is in line with current pricing in Europe, as well as recommendations by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Carbon pricing is ‘the fiscally responsible thing to do’

Charles Wheelan, a senior lecturer and policy fellow at the Rockefeller Center at Dartmouth College, testified that markets don’t “necessarily get things right” when there’s a cost that parties don’t have to incur. In this case, Wheelan was referring to pollution and climate change – fossil fuel generators impact the environment and public health, he argued, but aren’t held financially responsible for those impacts.

“The most important thing about this bill is that it would give the state the power to look at the real social cost of whatever they’re purchasing,” he said. 

A carbon price, Wheelan said, is a more efficient way to manage pollution than regulation. He also called it “the fiscally responsible thing to do.”

“If you’re making a procurement decision and one option involves a significant amount of carbon emissions that then does damage elsewhere in the state, whether its climate change-related damage to the ski industry, or erosion on the Seacoast, or health effects that are borne by the state, then in your purchasing decision, you can incorporate those costs,” Wheelan said, adding that he was agnostic about the price of carbon, but that “it is not zero.” 

John Gage, a Windham resident and member of Citizens Climate Lobby, said there are different ways to price carbon. It can be priced by the social cost, as detailed by Wheelan, or based on a temperature target “that we want to hold warming to.” 

Canada and Switzerland use a carbon fee and dividend method, in which the countries collect fees for the burning of fossil fuels and then return the money to citizens. In 2017, the V20, then a group of 20 developing countries vulnerable to climate change, announced a commitment to introduce carbon pricing by 2025.

Sweden established a carbon tax decades ago, in 1991. 

Of HB 1486, Gage said: “We’re not taxing anybody, we’re not spending extra money on something to do good. We’re taking a look at the chance of a federal carbon price coming down on New Hampshire and we are using our insight to save money by purchasing things that will be cheaper to operate in the long-run.”

Rep. Tom Dolan, a Londonderry Republican, said what he gathered from the bill’s testimony were “attempts at social engineering,” specific to driving the electrification of buildings and vehicles. 

“Have you started to consider the stress on our electric grid that has struggled to keep up with all of this electrification?” he asked. 

Gage said it’s likely that Congress and the state of New Hampshire will need to change energy permitting rules, since federal Inflation Reduction Act subsidies have “opened up the floodgates to generate clean energy.” He argued carbon pricing isn’t manipulation, but rather reflects the true costs of different energy options.

A resident of Bradford, Barbara Southard asked the committee to “not be shortsighted on this.”

“We are in a fantastically huge transition right now,” she said. “Not just in New Hampshire, but the whole United States and all of the countries. The whole globe.”

Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative

All six New England states, including New Hampshire, are currently part of what was the first mandatory market-based program in the U.S. to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Similar to carbon pricing but with a different mechanism, the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative is a cap-and-trade program among 10 Eastern states to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from power plants. Within the RGGI states, fossil fuel electric power generators with a capacity of 25 megawatts or more are required to hold allowances equal to their carbon dioxide emissions over a three-year control period. The number of allowances shrinks every year, incentivizing power generators to emit less carbon – or pay more to do so.

Since 2009, the initiative has raised at least $3 billion in proceeds that have been invested back into states in the forms of energy efficiency, clean and renewable energy, electrification, greenhouse gas abatement, and direct bill assistance. 

According to the RGGI’s annual report in 2020, the nine states that participated in the initiative from the beginning experienced a reduction of over 90 million short tons of annual power sector carbon emissions.

In 2020, New Hampshire received approximately $18.8 million in allowance proceeds, the majority of which was used to provide direct bill assistance to electric consumers. The rest was allocated to the state’s Energy Efficiency Fund and related initiatives. From 2009-2020, the Granite State received $176 million in proceeds.

The RGGI is at a critical juncture. The state of Virginia withdrew from the RGGI in December, and this month, Democrats drafted budget language to return to it. Virginia Republicans have long opposed the state’s membership in the market, and Gov. Glenn Youngkin has called it a “hidden tax” because the state law authorizing participation allows utilities to recover the costs of the allowances from ratepayers. 

Meanwhile, a November court ruling in Pennsylvania blocked the state from joining the RGGI, saying it violates the state constitution. Pennsylvania lawmakers would have to vote to join the RGGI, the state said, rather than the state’s Department of Environmental Protection making the decision on its own.

Originally published in New Hampshire Bulletin. New Hampshire Bulletin is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity.

The report finds that achieving U.S. climate goals is possible through existing measures—transportation electrification, building decarbonization, and clean energy—and aims to chart achievable pathways for each measure. The report finds that U.S. federal agencies, state and local governments, and utilities will need to work together to increase electric vehicles (EVs) by 100 times the current number on the road, install more than a billion decarbonization measures in buildings, and increase renewable energy to 85% of total electricity generation to meet national climate goals.

The report also modeled the impact of two signature U.S. climate laws, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL) and the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), finding that the laws could reduce enough planet-warming greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions to get the U.S. halfway to its climate goals.

To slow the impacts of climate change and address its causes, the U.S. government set ambitious climate goals in 2021: to reduce GHG emissions by 50–52% by 2030 relative to 2005, and to achieve a net-zero economy by 2050. To help accelerate GHG reductions and build resilience to the impacts of climate change, President Biden signed the BIL into law in 2021 and the IRA in 2022.

Electric vehicles

EV road presence will need to increase by 100 times to meet the 2050 goals, the report said, even with 2 million EVs on the road at the end of 2022. This increase would include both light-duty passenger vehicles and trucks and heavy-duty buses and trucks.

44 million EVS would need to be on the road by 2030, and 240 million by 2050 to put the US on path for net-zero by 2050, the report says. The BIL and IRA helped nudge these numbers, the report said: Before their passage, the US was on track for 29 million EVs on the road by 2030. Now, it could be on track for 35 million in the same timeframe.

However, even with the assistance of the BIL and IRA, the US is only on track for 93 million EVS by 2050, nearly 150 million less than the report estimates will be required. To fill this gap, the ICF says aggressive federal mandates for EVs, scaling up of battery manufacturing, continued consumer excitement, scaling up of charging stations, and the electrification of public transportation will all be required.

Building decarbonization

The ICF’s second solution is to install more than a billion decarbonization measures in buildings nationwide.

Funding from the BIL and IRA will help reach this goal, the report said, with an estimated 238 million decarbonization methods to be added to buildings by 2030, and an additional 962 million measures added by 2050. However, the ICF estimates that an additional 281 million measures would be needed by 2030, and another 1.1 billion by 2050. Nearly all of the roughly 110 million buildings in the US would need to receive some sort of energy efficiency and/or electrification measure by 2050, the report says.

In addition to the pure number of measures installed, the types of measures would need to evolve as well, the report says. This would include building envelope and shell improvements, electrification, and more holistic retrofits of buildings.

Since decarbonization measures have different market cycles, supply chains, and installation contractors, it will be difficult to standardize and integrate solutions across regional and local markets, the report says. This means that decarbonization may occur in a more “piecemeal” fashion compared to EVS, but utilities and government agencies could help by encouraging the bundling of energy efficiency and electrification upgrades during one interaction with a business owner.

Clean energy

The ICF’s solution for clean energy is to increase renewables to 85% of total electricity generation. This would require an increase of solar and wind’s current 13% of total generation to more than 80%. Batteries would also need to be installed in the hundreds of GW by 2050 to meet this goal.

Natural gas, coal, and other fossil fuels would need to be reduced from 60% of generation in 2022 to nearly zero in 2050. Low-carbon fuels will have to grow 1,800 tBTU by 2030 and more than more than 5,100 tBTU by 2050 to surpass natural gas. The remaining generation not covered by renewables would come from low- or zero-carbon dispatchable resources, the report says.

A few possible roadmaps to achieve these clean energy goals include: reform of permitting, land rights, and regulatory approval for transmission projects; identifying optimal locations for clean energy projects (both geographical and economical); investment in distributed energy resource systems; and building out the supply chain for raw materials like copper, cobalt, manganese, and molybdenum.

The Republicans told EPA Administrator Michael Regan that the agency overstepped its legal authority under the Clean Air Act to curb emissions from the plants.

The EPA proposal would require coal plants to capture 90% of their emissions by 2030. Gas plants, new and existing, would need to capture 90% of their emissions by 2035 or run mostly on hydrogen energy by 2038.

In its proposal the EPA cited multiple examples of existing and planned power generating projects that use carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) and hydrogen co-firing technologies, which are bedrock strategies for achieving its newly proposed carbon emission reductions.

Senate Republicans said these were “sweeping claims” about the future availability of CCS and hydrogen co-firing. They said these technologies “are still nascent and have not yet been adequately demonstrated.”

The new rules replace the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan, which was proposed in 2015 but ran into multiple legal challenges and never took effect. Even so, in the 2022 ruling of West Virginia v. EPA, the U.S. Supreme Court found that the Obama administration’s approach exceeded the EPA’s authority to regulate power plant emissions under the Clean Air Act. Specifically, the court said EPA couldn’t direct plants to shift from dirty sources of energy to cleaner ones like wind and solar.

The GOP senators claimed in their latter that the latest EPA proposal was in “direct conflict” with West Virginia v. EPA.

“While the Agency falsely claims this does not run afoul of the Supreme Court’s decision, it is undeniable the proposal would require generation shifting that the Court has definitively found Congress has never granted EPA the authority to require under the Clean Air Act,” the letter reads.

EPA is allowing public comment on the proposed rules until August 8.

One GHG reduction technologies is carbon capture and sequestration (CCS), a technology that can capture and permanently store CO2 from power plants. 

In practice, exhaust gases from most combustion processes are at atmospheric pressure with relatively low concentrations of CO2. Most post-combustion capture systems use liquid solvents (most commonly amine-based) in a scrubber column to absorb the CO2 from the flue gas. This CO2-rich solvent is then regenerated by heating the solvent to release the captured CO2. The high purity CO2 is then compressed and transported, generally through pipelines, to a site for geologic sequestration.

In its proposed rulemaking, EPA said that process improvements, the availability of better solvents, and other advances have resulted in a decrease in the cost of CCS in recent years. It said the cost of CO2 capture, excluding any tax credits, from coal-fired power generation is projected to fall by 50% by 2025 compared to 2010. 

In addition, policies such as the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) support the deployment of CCS technology and are expected to further reduce the cost of implementing CCS by extending and increasing the tax credit for CCS under Internal Revenue Code section 45Q.

EPA pointed to several examples CCS being used at power plants. These include SaskPower’s Boundary Dam Unit 3, a 110 MW lignite-fired unit in Saskatchewan, Canada, which EPA said has achieved CO2 capture rates of 90% using an amine-based post-combustion capture system retrofitted to the existing steam generating unit.

Amine-based carbon capture has also been demonstrated at AES’s Warrior Run (Cumberland, Maryland) and Shady Point (Panama, Oklahoma) coal-fired power plants.

CCS was applied to an existing combined cycle combustion turbine at the Bellingham Energy Center in south central Massachusetts. The 40 MW slipstream capture facility at Bellingham operated from 1991 to 2005 and captured 85% to 95% of the CO2 in the slipstream.

In Scotland, the proposed 900 MW Peterhead Power Station combined cycle power plant with CCS is in the planning stages and could capture 90% of its CO2 emissions.  

An 1,800 MW combined cycle unit in West Virginia is planned to use CCS and could enter service later this decade. EPA said its economic feasibility was partially credited to the expanded IRC section 45Q tax credit for sequestered CO2 provided through the IRA.

Hydrogen co-firing

EPA said that industrial combustion turbines have been burning byproduct fuels containing large percentages of hydrogen for decades. More recently, power sector combustion turbines in the have begun to co-fire hydrogen to generate electricity. 

EPA said that new utility combustion turbine models have demonstrated the ability to co-fire up to 30% hydrogen. It said developers are working toward models that will be ready to combust 100% hydrogen by 2030. It noted that several utilities already are co-firing hydrogen in test burns and some have announced plans to move to combusting 100% hydrogen in the 2035–2045 timeframe.

EPA pointed to the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power’s (LADWP) Scattergood Modernization project that includes plans to have a hydrogen-ready combustion turbine in place when the 346 MW combined cycle plant (potential for up to 830 MW) begins initial operations in 2029. LADWP foresees the plant running on 100% electrolytic hydrogen by 2035. 

In addition, LADWP also has an agreement in place to buy electricity from the Intermountain Power Agency project (IPA) in Utah. IPA is replacing an existing 1.8 GW coal- fired plant with an 840 MW combined cycle turbine that developers expect to initially co-fire 30% electrolytic hydrogen in 2025 and 100% hydrogen by 2045.

In Florida, NextEra Energy announced plans to operate 16 GW of existing natural gas-fired combustion turbines with electrolytic hydrogen as part of the utility’s Zero Carbon Blueprint to be carbon-free by 2045.

Duke Energy Corp., which operates 33 gas-fired plants across the Midwest, the Carolinas, and Florida, has outlined plans for full hydrogen capabilities throughout its future turbine fleet. EPA quoted a utility statement that said, “All natural gas units built after 2030 are assumed to be convertible to full hydrogen capability. After 2040, only peaking units that are fully hydrogen capable are assumed to be built.”

In addition to those utility announcements, several merchant generators operating in wholesale markets are also signaling their intent to ramp up hydrogen co-firing levels after initial 30% percent co-firing phases. 

The Cricket Valley Energy Center (CVEC) in New York is retrofitting its combined cycle power plant starting in 2022 as a first step toward the conversion to a 100% hydrogen fuel capable plant. 

The Long Ridge Energy Terminal in Ohio, which has co-fired a 5% hydrogen blend at its 485 MW combined cycle plant, said that its technology has the capability to transition to 100% hydrogen over time as its low-GHG fuel supply becomes available.

EPA also said that Constellation Energy also is exploring electrolytic hydrogen co-firing across its fleet. It estimated costs for blend levels in the range of 60-100% at around $100/kW for retrofits and noted that equipment manufacturers are planning 100% hydrogen combustion-ready turbines before 2030.

What’s more, the Biden administration and congressional allies have earmarked billions of dollars to stand up the sort of carbon capture industry the EPA rules are likely to rely on.

Published reports said the rules are likely to make use of recent Supreme Court decisions. Last June, the U.S. Supreme Court limited the EPA’s authority to set standards on GHGs for existing power plants.

In its 6-3 ruling, the court said that only Congress has the power to create a system of cap-and-trade rules to limit emissions from existing power plants.

The case stemmed from the EPA’s 2015 directive to coal power plant operators either to cut production or subsidize alternate forms of energy. That order was never implemented because it was immediately challenged.

Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the majority opinion in West Virginia v. the Environmental Protection Agency and was joined by the court’s other five conservative members.

The decision marked the first time a majority opinion explicitly cited the so-called “major questions doctrine” to justify a ruling. That doctrine holds that with issues of major national significance, a regulatory agency must have clear statutory authorization from Congress to take certain actions and not rely on its general agency authority.

Roberts wrote, “There is little reason to think Congress assigned such decisions” about the EPA regulations, despite the agency’s belief that “Congress implicitly tasked it, and it alone, with balancing the many vital considerations of national policy implicated in deciding how Americans will get their energy.”

The Court rules that capping carbon dioxide emissions to force a nationwide transition away from the use of coal to generate electricity may be a sensible “solution to the crisis of the day,” but that it was “not plausible that Congress gave EPA the authority to adopt on its own such a regulatory scheme.”

No CPP 2.0

The legal fight over the EPA’s authority can be traced back to a move by the Obama administration to set strict carbon limits for each state. It also urged states to meet limits by shifting to cleaner energy alternatives such as wind and solar.

The so-called Clean Power Plan was temporarily blocked in 2016 by the Supreme Court and then repealed in 2019 by the Trump administration, which argued that the plan exceeded EPA’s authority under the Clean Air Act. It argued that the act allowed the agency to set standards only within the physical premises of a power plant.

The Trump administration proposed to regulate emissions only from existing coal-fired steam plants, a policy called the Affordable Clean Energy Rule. The revision was challenged by states and environmental groups and ultimately was struck down by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.

Since then, there hasn’t been an EPA standard with respect to carbon pollution from existing power plants.

Under the Biden administration, the EPA has indicated that it will not attempt to resurrect the Clean Power Plan but rather create its own rules based on Supreme Court decisions in 2007 and 2022 to regulate power plant emissions.

Laying the groundwork

The White House and congressional allies already are working to lay the groundwork needed to stand up the carbon-capture industry that the expected EPA rules may rely on. 

In December, the Department of Energy launched four programs seeded with $3.7 billion in infrastructure funding aimed at helping to build a commercially viable carbon dioxide removal industry. 

The programs are intended to help accelerate private-sector investment, spur advancements in monitoring and reporting practices for carbon management technologies, and provide grants to state and local governments to procure and use products developed from captured carbon emissions. 

In addition, the Inflation Reduction Act aimed to improve the federal Section 45Q tax credit for the capture and geologic storage of CO2, which are intended to provide complementary incentives.

The new efforts include a $115 million Direct Air Capture Prize to promote diverse approaches to direct air capture; $3.5 billion to develop four domestic regional direct air capture hubs, each of which will demonstrate a direct air capture technology or suite of technologies at commercial scale with the potential for capturing at least 1 million metric tons of CO2 annually from the atmosphere and storing that CO2 permanently in a geologic formation or through its conversion into products; the Carbon Utilization Procurement Grants Program, which will provide up to $100 million in grants to states, local governments, and public utilities to support the commercialization of technologies that reduce carbon emissions while also procuring and using commercial or industrial products developed from captured carbon emissions; and $15 million to projects led by DOE National Laboratories, plants, and sites, and supported by diverse industry partnerships spanning the emerging carbon dioxide removal sector. 

In September, DOE announced a nearly $4.9 billion set of funding opportunities aimed at bolstering investments in the carbon management industry and to reduce carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. 

The funding from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law is intended to support three programs to demonstrate and deploy carbon capture systems, along with carbon transport and storage infrastructure.

The funding announcements include up to $2.25 billion to support the development of new and expanded large-scale, commercial carbon storage projects with capacities to store 50 or more million metric tons of CO2, along with associated CO2 transport infrastructure; up to $2.54 billion to develop six integrated carbon capture, transport, and storage demonstration projects that can be replicated and deployed at fossil energy power plants and major industrial sources of CO2; up to $100 million to design regional CO2 pipeline networks to safely transport captured CO2 from sources to centralized locations. 

More aggressive

The Biden administration’s more aggressive actions are in contrast to the Trump administration. In the summer of 2018, the Environmental Protection Agency unveiled its proposed replacement for the Obama-era Clean Power Plan, saying its approach would give states more regulatory power on curbing greenhouse gas emissions.

The Affordable Clean Energy (ACE) rule challenged the Clean Power Plan, which set carbon reduction targets for every state. Trump and many states argued that the Clean Power Plan overstepped boundaries for federal regulatory power and put burdensome rules on many coal-power states.

The ACE included four main courses of action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Those included finding best on-site power plant efficiencies, calling for lists of technologies that ciould be used in state plans, an updated New Source Review permitting program and regulations giving states flexibility in developing response plans.

Local news reports said that consultants working to develop the Renovo Energy Center first approached county officials in 2014 with a plan to develop the power plant. Two years ago, the Clean Air Council, Penn Future and the Center for Biological Diversity filed an appeal against the state’s Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) and the project’s developer over the air quality permit approved for the plant.

The Pennsylvania Environmental Hearing Board recently scheduled a hearing date on the matter that could have extended into October. The parties were asked to hold settlement talks, but those did not advance. Given the lack of progress, Bechtel scrapped the project in mid-April.

Last August, the environmental groups prevailed before the hearing board on some of their challenges to the air permit. The board granted partial summary judgment on issues related to sulfur dioxide and volatile organic compounds limits in the permits.

The environmental groups challenged DEP’s approval that they said erroneously modified an earlier one authorizing a 950 MW facility. The three environmental groups alleged that DEP improperly applied the best available control technology standard for greenhouse gases for the combustion turbines.

They also contended the plan approval contained erroneous emission limits for volatile organic compounds and carbon monoxide from auxiliary boilers.

Renovo Energy reportedly disagreed, saying the plan included appropriate limits.

A judge writing for the hearing board ruled neither the DEP nor Renovo Energy Center could point to any evidence that explained how the higher limit for sulfur dioxide emissions appeared in the approved plan. Nor did they provide a satisfactory answer as to why the plan approval set the limit it did.

The judge said that DEP provided no basis for selecting a higher emissions limit for the Renovo Energy Center facility other than to say that it rounded up the number in Renovo’s plan approval.

EPA said the rule would cut emissions that contribute to problems downwind states face in attaining and maintaining air quality standard for ground-level ozone, known as the 2015 Ozone National Ambient Air Quality Standards (NAAQS). 

The rule would use an approach during the summertime “ozone season” that is based on a NOx allowance trading program for fossil fuel-fired power plants in 22 states, and NOx emissions standards for targeted sources within nine industry categories in 20 states.

Beginning in the 2023 ozone season, power plants in 22 states are expected to take part in what EPA said is a “revised and strengthened” Cross-State Air Pollution Rule ozone season trading program.

To achieve rapid emissions reductions, EPA said it based the initial control stringency on the level of reductions achievable through immediately available measures, including consistently operating emissions controls already installed at power plants. Further reductions are expected to be phased in over several years starting in 2024. Those reductions would reflect emissions levels that could be achieved by installing new emissions controls.

Power plants in Utah would face the largest percentage decline in 2027 NOx emissions compared to 2021 levels. A 7,300-ton reduction, equal to a 74% reduction, would be required under the final rule. Mississippi emitters face a 65% reduction, while those in Louisiana and Missouri face a 61% reduction.

Texas power plants will be expected to cut NOx emissions by more than 14,000 tons by 2027, a 38% cut relative to 2021.

EPA said its final Good Neighbor Plan builds on the “demonstrated success of existing emissions trading programs” by including additional features that “promote consistent operation of emissions controls to enhance public health and environmental protection for affected downwind regions.” 

Features include backstop daily emissions rates on large coal-fired units to promote more consistent operation and optimization of emissions controls, annual recalibration of the emissions allowance bank, and annual updates to the emissions budgets to account for changes in the generating fleet.

Beginning in the 2026 ozone season, EPA plans to set enforceable NOx emissions control requirements for certain sources at existing and new industrial facilities that have “significant impacts” on downwind air quality and the ability to install “cost-effective pollution controls.”

These industry-specific requirements would apply in 20 states. EPA said the requirements reflect “proven, cost-effective” pollution reduction measures that are “consistent with standards that sources throughout the country have long implemented.”

EPA said the final rule implements the Clean Air Act’s “Good Neighbor” or “interstate transport” provision, which requires each state to submit a State Implementation Plan (SIP). The SIP documents are intended to ensure that sources within the state do not contribute significantly to nonattainment or interfere with maintenance of the NAAQS in other states. 

Where EPA finds that a state has not submitted a Good Neighbor SIP, or if the EPA disapproves the SIP, the EPA must issue a Federal Implementation Plan (FIP) within two years to assure downwind states are protected.

More information on the final rule is available here.