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Carbon-Storage Rules for U.S. Coal-Fired Plants Issued by EPA
2010-11-22 19:46:17.956 GMT
By Simon Lomax
Nov. 22 (Bloomberg) -- The U.S. Environmental Protection
Agency issued rules to protect drinking-water supplies from
future efforts to bury pollution from coal-fired power plants.
The regulation is a major step in the federal government's
effort to promote a "promising technology" capturing carbon
dioxide that otherwise would be emitted from smokestacks and
injecting it into geologic formations such as deep-saline
aquifers and depleted oil reservoirs, EPA administrator Lisa
Jackson said today in an e-mailed statement.
The drinking-water regulation governs the way carbon-
dioxide injection wells are located, built, tested, monitored
and closed. A task force of 14 U.S. agencies said in August that
carbon-capture technology is currently too expensive to be used
without financial and regulatory support from the federal
government.
Rules governing the "environmental soundness of injecting
and storing carbon dioxide underground" must be part of a
federal plan to "facilitate widespread cost-effective
deployment" of the pollution-control technology after 2020,
according to the task force.
A separate EPA rule also released today deals with
measuring the amount of carbon dioxide that's captured and
stored.
U.S. legislation requiring power plants to pay a price for
carbon dioxide they release into the air must also be passed to
create a "stable framework for investment" in carbon-capture
technology, the task force said. Legislation to put a price on
carbon narrowly passed the House last year and stalled in the
Senate.
Carbon dioxide is among greenhouse gases that scientists
have linked to climate change. President Barack Obama has said
the U.S. should aim to cut greenhouse-gas emissions about 17
percent from their 2005 level by 2020.
For Related News and Information:
Top environment stories: GREEN <GO>
Stories about U.S. and climate: TNI US CLIMATE <GO>
Global emissions data: EMIS <GO>
Northeast U.S. trading: RGGI <GO>
--Editors: Larry Liebert, Terry Atlas
To contact the reporter on this story:
Simon Lomax in Washington at +1-202-654-4305 or
slomax@bloomberg.net.
To contact the editor responsible for this story:
Larry Liebert at +1-202-624-1936 or
LLiebert@bloomberg.net.
