Key House Dems drafting bill to create carbon storage technology fund
Friday, May 2, 2008(E&E Daily)
Darren Samuelsohn, E&E
Daily senior reporter
Three powerful House Democrats from coal country are working on legislation that would create a multibillion-dollar fund to boost the deployment of power plants capable of capturing and storing their heat-trapping greenhouse gas emissions.
Reps. Rick Boucher of Virginia, John Murtha of Pennsylvania and Nick Rahall of West Virginia have teamed up to write the bill after repeated requests from coal, mining and the electric utility industry. Sources tracking the issue say they expect the measure would help raise $10 billion over 10 years for new carbon sequestration projects.
Rahall, chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee, confirmed yesterday that the plan is to place a small fee on electricity users and then keep the revenue outside of the regular congressional appropriations process. "The coal industry would bear the largest brunt," he said.
One issue still unresolved deals with the question of legal liability for companies that want to launch sequestration projects, Rahall said. Several bills have floated the idea of exempting companies from future lawsuits if something goes wrong with a sequestration project, but to date none have picked up traction on Capitol Hill.
Boucher chairs the House Energy and Air Quality Subcommittee and would likely have direct jurisdiction over the sequestration bill. "The three of us are collaborating on legislation that would establish a mechanism through which the carbon capture and sequestration work, which is so vitally necessary, can move forward in a timely way," Boucher said in an interview.
The legislation will be ready for release "in the near term," he added.
Murtha gives the sequestration funding bill a leg up because of his close ties to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and also as chairman of the House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee.
Proponents of the sequestration bill -- including coal, mining and electric utility companies -- say it should not be seen as an alternative to the broader push for cap-and-trade legislation (E&E Daily, April 29). That debate may get bogged down for another year or two on Capitol Hill.
"I don't think it can go this year," Rahall said of cap-and-trade legislation. "There's all of the opposition in the Senate, the president's position, a lack of time. What else can we name?"
Boucher, who plans to author a cap-and-trade bill and has said repeatedly he wants to see it pass into law this year, declined comment on the link between the two issues. But Murtha's spokesman Matt Mazonkey said, "It's in addition to cap-and-trade. It'll be introduced as a separate bill."
Jason Grumet, executive director at the nonpartisan National Commission on Energy Policy, welcomed the interest in sequestration legislation on Capitol Hill and among different industry and labor interests.
He explained that a cap-and-trade bill promises to raise tens of billions of dollars for the deployment of carbon storage projects through an auction of emission credits. But even under the best-case scenario, those funds would not be available in the short term given the political dynamics of getting the bill signed into law and then seeing the new program implemented.
"This is a very straightforward recognition that under the most optimistic of circumstances we're not going to see those billions of technology dollars flowing until 2009 or 2010 at the very earliest," Grumet said.
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