DAILY BEAST: Making good on President Obama’s promise this summer to tackle climate change, the Environmental Protection Agency on Friday will announce stringent new limits on greenhouse gas emissions from newly constructed power plants. A senior administration official says newly built coal fired power plants will have to keep carbon emissions below 1,100 pounds per megawatt hour — a level that will force the industry to develop potentially expensive new methods of capturing and storing CO2 before it is released into the atmosphere.
The EPA will also issue new emissions standards for newly constructed natural gas plants, which will be permitted to emit no more than 1,000 pounds of C02 per megawatt hour, according to the official. That’s essentially the level that cleaner burning natural gas plants perform at already. But if developers want to build new coal plants, which account for about a quarter of U.S. carbon emissions, they’ll have to develop new technology to pass the EPA’s muster.
The limits, issued as part of the Agency’s authority under the Clean Air Act, “will effectively require partial carbon capture and sequestration,” says the official, referring to the practice of sucking carbon out of coal exhaust and storing it underground, where it can’t contribute to climate change. It will be the first time the EPA has ever regulated greenhouse gases from power plants, and with a cap only slightly higher than a proposal made last year and then withdrawn, it shows that the administration isn’t shying from a fight with the coal industry… (more)
