The Australian Climate Sceptics Blog
Geoff Brown on December 21, 2017
By Bryan Leyland and Tom Harris
[excerpt]
http://theclimatescepticsparty.blogspot.com/2017/12/the-war-on-coal-is-war-on-environment.htmlFormer Vice President Al Gore should have used this month’s “24 Hours of Reality†internet broadcast to encourage the Trump administration to withdraw all carbon-dioxide emission rules on future power stations. Then the United States could replace its old, inefficient coal-fired power plants with modern, clean, efficient coal stations, just as they are doing in Europe, India and China.
One of the most damaging legacies of the Obama administration’s “war on coal†was the creation of a 2015 rule that limits carbon-dioxide emissions on new coal-fired stations to 1,400 pounds per megawatt-hour of electricity generated. When releasing the new rule, entitled “Standards of Performance for Greenhouse Gas Emissions From New, Modified, and Reconstructed Stationary Sources: Electric Generating Units,†the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) asserted that it “is the performance achievable by a [supercritical pulverized coal] unit capturing about 20 percent of its carbon pollution.â€
This makes no sense. Besides the fact that carbon dioxide is plant food and so the very opposite of pollution, the technology of carbon-dioxide capture on a full-scale power plant is still a technological fantasy. In fact, the agency was banning even the most modern, very efficient, supercritical coal-fired stations because their carbon-dioxide emissions are at least 20 percent above the EPA limit. Considering that America has 22.1 percent of the world’s proven coal reserves, the greatest of any country and enough to last for 381 years at current consumption rates, it is a tragedy that the U.S. can no longer build new, clean, coal-fired power stations to replace its aging fleet of coal plants.
