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Running for office is one matter. Governing divergent interests is
quite another. That's something in which the future Obama
administration is now coming to grips.
The administration has painted itself green. But it is now trying to
avoid doing so at the expense of the coal industry, which provides
about 50 percent of the fuel to run this country's electric generation.
And while the president-elect has said that he supports the advancement
of modern, cleaner coal technologies, his nomination of Steven Chu as
the secretary of the Department of Energy is controversial.
The Nobel Prize-winning physicist who is also the director of the
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and a Stanford University
professor said publicly before his appointment that "coal is my worst
nightmare." In the same speech, delivered last April, Chu goes on to
recognize coal's dominant role in the energy portfolio but cautions
that existing carbon capture and sequestration pilot projects are
unproven and far too small given the gravity of the situation.
"We won't run out of energy, but there's enough carbon in the ground to
really cook us," Chu says. "It's sort of a research and development
issue. I think we have to do this if we're going to go forward with
coal, but it's not a guarantee that we have a solution with coal." In
earlier talks, however, he is quoted as saying that such carbon capture
and storage technologies "can play a central role" in the battle
against climate change. The energy secretary nominee will be
in a position to influence the administration. But he will be part of a
team that develops energy and environmental policies and one that will
reflect the tenor and philosophy of Barack Obama. Therefore, the speech
given during Chu's research and scholarly days is largely irrelevant.
Nevertheless, the comments are bound to get increasing attention during
the confirmation process and will assuredly frame the debate on climate
change. President-elect Obama has vowed to cut U.S. greenhouse gas
emissions by 2020 to 1990 levels. And by 2050, he has said the goal is
to reduce them by 80 percent. Toward that end, he has said he
will invest hundred of millions in modern coal facilities that have the
potential to drastically pollute less. Obama has also said he will tell
the Energy Department to begin anew the development of commercial-scale
coal facilities that have the potential to capture and store carbon
dioxide -- something that Chu said earlier would be opposed by
community organizations that fear those releases could bubble up to the
surface and cause horrible repercussions. "If you're concerned
about radiation, coal might be worse than a nuclear reactor," Chu
remarked in the speech. "It's worse in every other respect." The Tightrope
Power companies contribute about a third of all carbon dioxide
emissions in the United States, according to the Congressional Research
Service. While older coal-fired facilities could be retrofitted so as
to trap those emissions, those remedies are expensive and less
efficient than building modern coal plants called integrated
gasification combined cycle plants, commonly referred to as coal
gasification. Such plants scrub the mercury, nitrogen oxide
and sulfur dioxide before they would separate the remaining byproducts:
carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide and hydrogen, which could be used to
power everything from cars to power plants. The largest demonstration
projects are in Norway, where Statoil is placing 1 million tons of
carbon dioxide per year into a saline aquifer deep in the North Sea,
and in Canada, where the carbon dioxide is going into the Weyburn Oil
field. In this country, American Electric Power says that it
will follow a dual course of retrofitting its older coal-fired plants
while also building modern facilities that have the potential to
capture carbon emissions. Meantime, ConocoPhillips, General Electric
and Shell Corp. are spending billions to develop not just coal
gasification technologies but also the tools to bury carbon dioxide.
Some environmental groups say that clean coal and specifically carbon
capture is a pipe dream fueled by the coal industry and utilities.
Others are taking a wait-and-see approach. But the one common position
that the environmentalists hold is that lawmakers must better respect
science in the effort to craft energy laws and that the regulatory
bodies must be more aggressive in their approach to enforcing those
rules.
Those groups universally object to greater coal development unless the
associated heat-trapping emissions can be sequestered. By nearly all
accounts, such technologies are at least two decades off, prompting
green organizations to say that private interests are not spending
enough of its own resources to bring this about sooner. They generally
applaud the nomination of Director Chu to energy secretary, noting that
he will champion science over politics during cabinet meetings.
Coal industry reps say that they look forward to working with the new
administration and laud the announcements that it will channel
resources into "clean coal" projects. They, in turn, are critical of
those environmental groups that say such projects are a "myth," noting
that the nation's energy demands are growing and it therefore requires
more base-load electric generation -- something coal is well-positioned
to provide.
"By working to kill investment in clean coal technologies, they will
prevent construction of new base-load power plants that experts say
America needs in order to maintain the health of our electricity grid,"
says Roy Innis, chairman of the Congress of Racial Equality. "That
increases the possibility of blackouts. And that puts families and
lives at increased risk." Pleasing all sides will be impossible.
But the president-elect will try, pledging to make this nation as green
as it can be while leveraging its existing natural resources and
pushing utilities to use modern technologies.
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