Senate panel approves carbon capture bills
Washington, 26 May (Argus) — The US Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee today approved two bills to promote the development of carbon capture technologies.
One bill, S 669, would create a program at the Energy Department (DOE) to support 10 large-scale utility carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) demonstration projects. The second, S 757, would authorize a DOE prize program to encourage new CO2 capture technologies. Both bills passed on voice votes.
To qualify under S 669, projects must inject at least 1mn short tons of CO2 into a geological formation, and would require the project's operators to monitor the injection and storage area for 10 years to ensure the site is sealed and the CO2 does not migrate. The operators would be indemnified from liability connected to the project. The proposal is intended to complement CCS projects being developed by DOE's regional carbon sequestration partnerships.
The committee included a previous version of the proposal in energy legislation it approved in 2009 that was to be merged with a cap-and-trade bill. But Senate Democrats eventually scrapped plans to bring the climate legislation to a vote.
S 757 would authorize a prize system of $10mn to encourage technology to remove CO2 directly from the atmosphere. DOE would give prizes for the technology at every level of development: design, bench scale, demonstration scale and commercial scale. Such technology could be sited directly over a geological storage area, eliminating the need to transport CO2 in pipelines.
Committee chairman Jeff Bingaman (D-New Mexico) said he did not know when the full Senate might vote on the bills. That decision is up to majority leader Harry Reid (D-Nevada).
The committee also approved legislation by Alaskan senator Lisa Murkowski, the committee's ranking Republican, to fund DOE research for hydrokinetic energy, such as wave or tidal generation. But it failed to complete work on legislation to create a Clean Energy Deployment Administration (CEDA), which would fund early-stage high-risk energy technology research and help technologies reach full commercial deployment. Bingaman and Murkowski said there were still some issues to be resolved, most importantly how to pay for the program. Republicans are insisting the $10bn for CEDA be paid for with offsetting changes in other parts of the federal budget.
But the committee approved three amendments to the CEDA legislation, including one by senator John Barrasso (R-Wyoming) to ensure that synthetic natural gas projects are eligible for funding and one from senator Al Franken (D-Minnesota) to allow funding for community-owned projects.
The committee had also been scheduled to take up legislation to address offshore oil and gas development, but two bills sponsored by Bingaman were dropped from the agenda late yesterday. One would require the government to conduct a comprehensive inventory of oil and gas resources below the outer continental shelf, the other would establish new safety requirements for offshore production.
Bingaman said there were several issues to resolved, but said he hoped to bring them and CEDA back before the committee at a markup session next month.
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