Remove the Golden Egg (CO2) from EPA’s GHG Basket

By Chip Knappenberger -- June 16, 2009

In its Proposed Endangerment and Cause or Contribute Findings for Greenhouse Gases Under Sections 202(a) of the Clean Air Act , the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) places six greenhouse gases into one basket. All are treated as equal, primary culprits in the anthropogenic enhancement of the earth’s greenhouse effect, and thus the EPA proposes to find that they “endanger the public health and welfare of current and future generations.” The six are carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, hydrofluorocarbons, perfluorocarbons, and sulfur hexafluoride.

But for many reasons, one of these gases is not like the others and should be considered separately. That gas is carbon dioxide.

The Green Greenhouse Gas

Carbon dioxide (CO2) is essential to life on earth as we know it. It is a necessary ingredient in the photosynthetic recipe that produces the oxygen that we breathe as well as the carbohydrates that we eat.…

Enron vs. Exxon Mobil: Polar Approaches to Energy and Public Policy

By Robert Bradley Jr. -- June 15, 2009

I have previously described Exxon Mobil as the anti-Enron. In an opinion-page editorial in yesterday’s Houston Chronicle, I contrasted the two companies in terms of both energy strategy and public policy.

More could be said than is in the editorial (reprinted below). Enron’s first fraud, engineered by Andrew Fastow, came with the purchase of Zond Corporation, which was renamed Enron Wind Corporation and is now part of GE Energy. (This complicated story about a “qualifying facility” under federal energy law is told in McLean and Elkind’s The Smartest Guys in the Room, pp. 166–67 and Kurt Eichenwald’s Conspiracy of Fools, pp. 142–44.)

Enron Energy Services, the energy outsourcing division of Enron that so excited environmentalists (including Joe Romm, now blogging at Climate Progress), was one of the company’s biggest frauds.…

Air Quality Compliance: Latest Costs for SO2 and NOx Removal (effective coal clean-up has a higher–but known–price tag)

By Robert Peltier -- June 13, 2009

Editor Note: Robert Peltier, Ph.D., PE, is editor-in-chief of POWER magazine. His bio is at the end of this post.

Environmental retrofits at coal plants have experienced costs greater than estimated by the Energy Information Administration. That is the bad news. The good news is:

There are no significant technical problems with flue gas desulphurization (FGD) or selective catalytic reduction (SCR) technologies. Utilities are not buying “serial number one” so the performance or compliance risk is negligible. Completion risk for any project also appears to be minimal.
The costs to construct either technology are reasonably well understood so that project capital cost estimates should be on the money.
The cost escalation (updated below) during the boom is now subsiding.

The overall result is that the “dirtiest” power plants have been and are being cleaned up to current stringent air-emission standards via the Clean Air Act and other pollution regulation.…