U.S. EPA Unveils Carbon Dioxide Regulations That Could End Coal and Natural Gas Power Generation

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced new regulations on April 25 that would force coal-fired power plants to reduce or capture 90 percent of their carbon dioxide emissions by 2039, one year earlier than in the rule originally proposed in May 2023.

Other newly announced coal regulations include a final rule “strengthening and updating the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards (MATS) for coal-fired power plants, tightening the emissions standard for toxic metals by 67 percent, finalizing a 70 percent reduction in the emissions standard for mercury from existing lignite-fired sources,” and another rule to “reduce pollutants discharged through wastewater from coal-fired power plants by more than 660 million pounds per year.” The EPA also issued an additional rule to require the safe management of coal ash in locations not previously covered by federal regulations.

“Today, EPA is proud to make good on the Biden-Harris administration’s vision to tackle climate change and to protect all communities from pollution in our air, water, and in our neighborhoods,” said EPA Administrator Michael S. Regan. “By developing these standards in a clear, transparent, inclusive manner, EPA is cutting pollution while ensuring that power companies can make smart investments and continue to deliver reliable electricity for all Americans.”

EPA estimates its new regulations will reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 1.38 billion metric tons by 2047 and create $370 billion in “climate and public health net benefits” over the next twenty years.

Coal in a Regulatory Decline

Partially due to increasingly stringent regulations, electricity generation from coal has fallen from 52 percent of the nation’s total output in the 1990s to just 16.2 percent in 2023. Critics of the new regulations, including Jason Isaac, CEO of the American Energy Institute, argue that EPA’s new rules would make it impossible to open new coal plants and will effectively force those already online to shut down operations.

“These rules are a direct attack on an important and necessary source of American energy—one of our most affordable, reliable resources, and one that is essential here and growing in use around the world,” said Isaac. “The ignorance of this administration is negligent at best, criminal at worst, relegating the least among us to more expensive energy, or even none at all, as millions of Americans are finding out by having their electricity disconnected.

“On one hand they push to electrify everything and then with the other leave us with unreliable electricity,” Isaac said. “The Biden administration is hell bent on destroying coal and reaching new levels of recklessness.”

‘De Facto Ban’ on Coal

The new regulations almost assuredly will face legal challenges from the coal industry and others, says Steve Milloy, founder of JunkScience.com.

“Another unconstitutional EPA rule from the Biden regime that will be DOA at [the Supreme Court] but not until much harm has been caused,” said Milloy. “Congress has not authorized EPA to issue regulations that operate as a de facto ban on coal plants, yet that’s what this regulation amounts to because it mandates emissions control technology (i.e., carbon capture and sequestration) which does not, and will never, exist for coal plants.”

EPA, by contrast, says carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) is the “best system of emission reduction for the longest-running existing coal units” and a “cost-reasonable emission control technology that can be applied directly to power plants and can reduce 90 percent of carbon dioxide emissions from the plants.”

“The requirement for imaginary technology violates Clean Air Act notions of only requiring the best available and adequately tested technology,” Milloy said. “The de facto ban violates the 2022 [Supreme Court] decision in West Virginia v. EPA, which established the major questions doctrine, under which agencies cannot undertake significant new actions, like banning coal plants, without authorization from Congress.”

Natural Gas Targeted, Too

Coal plants were not the only target of new EPA regulations, as natural gas power plants are also now required to eliminate or capture 90 percent of their carbon dioxide emissions by 2032, three years earlier than called for when the draft rule was originally proposed in 2023.

The EPA is acting as if it has absolute power unconstrained by the law and prior court rulings, Darren Bakst, director of the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Center on Energy & Environment, says in a press release.

“The [EPA] absurdly thinks its authority to regulate means it has the authority to shut down businesses,” said Bakst. “Establishing new regulations for power plants does not mean the agency can effectively force them out of business.

“This is Clean Power Plan Part II, but like with many sequels, it is worse,” Bakst said.

Tim Benson ([email protected]) is a senior policy analyst with Heartland Impact.

For more on the Biden administrations power regulations, click here.

Related Topics:#EPA #HeartlandDailyNews #MercuryAndAirToxicsStandards #Tim Benson #USCO2Regulations #USCoalPower #USNaturalGas

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Energy

Tech giants’ self-made AI energy crisis

Published on May 18, 2024

Todayville

For years tech giants have been helping climate catastrophists shut down reliable fossil fuel electricity. Now the grid they’ve helped gut cannot possibly supply their growing AI needs.

ALEX EPSTEIN

MAY 16

For years tech giants have been helping climate catastrophists shut down reliable fossil fuel electricity, falsely claiming they can be replaced by solar/wind.

Now the grid they’ve helped gut can’t supply their growing AI needs.¹

For the last decade, tech giants such as Apple, Microsoft, Meta, and Google have, through dedicated anti-fossil-fuel propaganda and political efforts, promoted the shutdown of reliable fossil fuel power plants in favor of unreliable solar and wind.

Tech giants have propagandized against reliable fossil fuel power plants by falsely claiming to be “100% renewable” and implying everyone could do it. In fact, they have just paid utilities to credit them for others’ solar and wind use and blame others for their coal and gas use.²

In addition to their “100% renewable” propaganda, tech giants directly endorsed people and policies who shut down reliable fossil fuel power plants.E.g., The RE100 coalition, including Google, Apple, Meta, and Microsoft, advocates for policies to “accelerate change towards zero carbon grids at scale by 2040.”³

Companies’ propaganda that solar/wind could rapidly replace fossil fuels has proven false.
Statewide blackouts in California (2020) and Texas (2021) were caused by the failure of solar/wind—which can go near zero at any time—to make up for lack of reliable fossil fuel capacity.

Thanks in significant part to tech giants’ advocacy, we have now shut down enough reliable power plants to be in a nationwide electricity crisis.

For example, most of North America is at elevated/high risk of electricity shortfalls between 2024-2028.⁴

The anti-fossil-fuel, pro-unreliable solar and wind political climate that tech giants have fostered is getting much worse, as the Administration has pledged to further reduce reliable electricity supply via power plant shutdowns and add artificial demand through EV mandates.

Biden’s EV mandate: a dictatorial attack on the American driver and the US grid

ALEX EPSTEIN

APR 22

Biden's EV mandate: a dictatorial attack on the American driver and the US grid

Biden’s de facto mandate of over 50% EVs by 2032 is a dictatorial attack on the American driver and the US grid that will 1. Force Americans to drive inferior cars. 2. Place massive new demand for reliable electricity on a grid that is declining in reliable electricity supply.

Read full story

While for years tech giants didn’t seem to have any concern about the electricity supply disaster their propaganda and policies were bringing about, they are now very interested because of the accelerating power requirements of computing, above all the hyper-competitive AI space.

To function at its potential, AI requires massive amounts of power. E.g., state-of-the-art data centers can require as much electricity as a large nuclear reactor.⁵

Electricity demand from US data centers already doubled between 2014 and 2023. Now with the fast growth of energy-hungry AI, demand from data centers could triple from 2.5% to 7.5% of our electricity use by 2030, according to Boston Consulting Group.⁶

In large part due to AI, nationwide electricity demand is projected to skyrocket. Official 10-year projections for the US have summer and winter peak demand rising by over 79 gigawatt and over 90 gigawatt. 90 gigawatt is equivalent to adding the entire power generating capacity of California (!)⁷

Given the woeful underpowered grid that AI giants have helped bring about, dramatically rising demand from AI will not only contribute to massive electricity shortages, but it will also destroy a lot of potential for AI to occur in the United States.
Limited and expensive electricity will force data centers to operate with higher cost or lower capacity within the US—or take a performance hit in the form of increased latency (which can drastically reduce the value of the product) by moving offshore.
Not only is offshoring data centers destructive from an economic standpoint, it also poses a substantial security risk. E.g., Building a data center in China—which we already depend on dangerously for critical minerals—gives the CCP physical power over more parts of our economy.

Economically, data centers are a gold mine of opportunities.Globally, data centers employed 2M people full-time in 2019, many in high-skill/high-pay jobs—and this number is forecast to increase nearly 300K by 2025.

Our gutted grid will cost many Americans these opportunities.⁸

In the face of woefully inadequate electricity supply for their AI goals, tech giant CEOs are finally speaking up about the lack of power.
E.g., Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in an interview that energy will be the #1 bottleneck to AI progress.

It is not enough for tech giants to warn us about the lack of reliable power. They need to take responsibility for their anti-fossil-fuel advocacy that helped caused it. And they need to support energy freedom policies that allow all fuels to compete to provide reliable power.

End preferences for unreliable electricity

ALEX EPSTEIN

DECEMBER 14, 2022

End preferences for unreliable electricity

Today’s grids are being ruined by systemic preferences for unreliable electricity: 1) no price penalty for being unreliable 2) huge subsidies for unreliables 3) mandates for unreliables Congress should end these now. The Opportunity America, given its combination of abundant domestic energy resources, technological ingenuity, and free-market competition, has …

Read full story

An example of a tech giant influencer not taking any responsibility for causing the electricity crisis is BlackRock CEO Larry Fink, who pushed companies and governments to adopt “net-zero” policies using mostly solar/wind, but now admits they can’t power AI data centers!
A better attitude toward electricity was expressed by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman: “There will always be people who wait and sit around and say ‘we shouldn’t do AI because we may burn a little more carbon’… the anti-progress streak” and this “is something that we can all fight against.”⁹
America faces a choice. We can either continue our current trajectory, descend into a Third World grid, and become totally inhospitable for AI, or we can adopt energy freedom policies and become a world leader in both AI and electricity.
Share this article with tech giant CEOs and tell them to publicly apologize for damaging our grid and to commit to energy freedom policies.Google: @sundarpichai ([email protected])
Apple: @tim_cook ([email protected])
Meta: @finkd ([email protected])
Microsoft: @satyanadella ([email protected])

Michelle Hung contributed to this piece.

Energy

New Report Reveals Just How Energy Rich America Really Is

Published on May 17, 2024

Todayville

From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By DAVID BLACKMON

A new report by the Institute for Energy Research (IER), a nonprofit dedicated to the study of the impact of government regulation on global energy resources, finds that U.S. inventories of oil and natural gas have experienced stunning growth since 2011.

The same report, the North American Energy Inventory 2024, finds the United States also leading the world in coal resources, with total proven resources that are more than 53% bigger than China’s.

Despite years of record production levels and almost a decade of curtailed investment in the finding and development of new reserves forced by government regulation and discrimination by ESG-focused investment houses, America’s technically recoverable resource in oil grew by 15% from 2011 to 2024. Now standing at 1.66 trillion barrels, the U.S. resource is 5.6 times the proved reserves held by Saudi Arabia.

The story for natural gas is even more amazing: IER finds the technically recoverable resource for gas expanded by 47% in just 13 years, to a total of 4.03 quadrillion cubic feet. At current US consumption rates, that’s enough gas to supply the country’s needs for 130 years.

“The 2024 North American Energy Inventory makes it clear that we have ample reserves of oil, natural gas, and coal that will sustain us for generations,” Tom Pyle, President at IER, said in a release. “Technological advancements in the production process, along with our unique system of private ownership, have propelled the U.S. to global leadership in oil and natural gas production, fostering economic benefits like lower energy prices, job growth, enhanced national security, and an improved environment.”

It is key to understand here that the “technically recoverable” resource measure used in financial reporting is designed solely to create a point-in-time estimate of the amount of oil and gas in place underground that can be produced with current technology. Because technology advances in the oil and gas business every day, just as it does in society at large, this measure almost always is a vast understatement of the amount of resource that will ultimately be produced.

The Permian Basin has provided a great example of this phenomenon. Just over the past decade, the deployment of steadily advancing drilling and hydraulic fracturing technologies has enabled producers in that vast resource play to more than double expected recoveries from each new well drilled. Similar advances have been experienced in the other major shale plays throughout North America. As a result, the U.S. industry has been able to consistently raise record overall production levels of both oil and gas despite an active rig count that has fallen by over 30% since January 2023.

In its report, IER notes this aspect of the industry by pointing out that, while the technically recoverable resource for U.S. natural gas sits at an impressive 4.03 quads, the total gas resource in place underground is currently estimated at an overwhelming 65 quads. If just half of that resource in place eventually becomes recoverable thanks to advancing technology over the coming decades, that would mean the United States will enjoy more than 1,000 years of gas supply at current consumption levels. That is not a typo.

Where coal is concerned, IER finds the US is home to a world-leading 470 billion short tons of the most energy-dense fossil fuel in place. That equates to 912 years of supply at current consumption rates.

No other country on Earth can come close to rivaling the U.S. for this level of wealth in energy mineral resources, and few countries’ governments would dream of squandering them in pursuit of a political agenda driven by climate fearmongering. “And yet, many politicians, government agents, and activists seek to constrain North America’s energy potential,” Pyle says, adding, “We must resist these efforts and commit ourselves to unlocking these resources so that American families can continue to enjoy the real and meaningful benefits our energy production offers.”

With President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump staking out polar opposite positions on this crucial question, America’s energy future is truly on the ballot this November.

David Blackmon is an energy writer and consultant based in Texas. He spent 40 years in the oil and gas business, where he specialized in public policy and communications.