One more thing we (USA) can be second at or second to last at....whatever

American Electric Power has decided to table plans to build a full-scale carbon-capture plant at Mountaineer, a 31-year-old coal-fired plant in West Virginia, where the company has successfully captured and buried carbon dioxide in a small pilot program for two years.


The technology had been heralded as the quickest solution to help the coal industry weather tougher federal limits on greenhouse gas emissions. But Congressional inaction on climate change diminished the incentives that had spurred A.E.P. to take the leap.

Company officials, who plan an announcement on Thursday, said they were dropping the larger, $668 million project because they did not believe state regulators would let the company recover its costs by charging customers, thus leaving it no compelling regulatory or business reason to continue the program.

“We are placing the project on hold until economic and policy conditions create a viable path forward,” said Michael G. Morris, chairman of American Electric Power, based in Columbus, Ohio, one of the largest operators of coal-fired generating plants in the United States. He said his company and other coal-burning utilities were caught in a quandary: they need to develop carbon-capture technology to meet any future greenhouse-gas emissions rules, but they cannot afford the projects without federal standards that will require them to act and will persuade the states to allow reimbursement.

The decision could set back for years efforts to learn how best to capture carbon emissions that result from burning fossil fuels and then inject them deep under-ground to keep them from accumulating in the atmosphere and heating the planet. The procedure, formally known as carbon capture and sequestration or C.C.S., offers the best current technology for taming greenhouse-gas emissions from traditional fuels burned at existing plants.

The abandonment of the A.E.P. plant comes in response to a string of reversals for federal climate change policy. President Obama spent his first year in office pushing a goal of an 80 percent reduction in climate-altering emissions by 2050, a target that could be met only with widespread adoption of carbon-capture and storage at coal plants around the country. The administration’s stimulus package provided billions of dollars to speed development of the technology; the climate change bill passed by the House in 2009 would have provided tens of billions of dollars in additional incentives for what industry calls “clean coal.”

But all such efforts collapsed last year with the Republican takeover of the House and the continuing softness in the economy, which killed any appetite for far-reaching environmental measures.

The West Virginia project was one of the most advanced and successful in the world. “While the coal industry’s commitment and ability to develop this technology on a large scale was always uncertain, the continued pollution from old-style, coal-fired power plants will certainly be damaging to the environment without the installation of carbon capture and other pollution control updates,” said Representative Edward J. Markey, Democrat of Massachusetts, co-author of the House climate bill. “A.E.P., the American coal industry and the Republicans who blocked help for this technology have done our economy and energy workers a disservice by likely ceding the development of carbon-capture technology to countries like China.”

Public service commissions of both West Virginia and Virginia turned down the company’s request for full reimbursement for the pilot plant. West Virginia said earlier this year that the cost should have been shared among all the states where A.E.P. does business; Virginia hinted last July that it should have been paid for by all utilities around the United States, since a successful project would benefit all of them.

Robert H. Socolow, an engineering professor at Princeton and the co-director of the Carbon Mitigation Initiative there, said he was encouraged that some chemical factories and other industries were working on carbon capture without government incentives.

Mr. Socolow, the co-author of an influential 2004 paper that identified carbon capture as one of the critical technologies needed to slow global warming, said that there was a trap ahead. “Lull yourself into believing that there is no climate problem, or that there is lots of time to fix it, and the policy driver dissolves,” he said in an e-mail.

--------- So since I mention China …what do they have going on?

Some views from Changhua Wu, the Greater China Director of The Climate Group.

Amongst other demonstration efforts globally, would you rate China as fairly active and advanced on CCS?

China is undertaking intense RD&D projects specifically designed to test the technology and financial viability of CCS. There are four facilities with annual capture capacity of a million tonnes in plan, and one geological storage project in operation. The CCS demonstration projects are all newly built and the number exceeds those of other developing countries. Leading state-owned companies such as Huaneng Group, Shenhua Group and national oil and gas companies are all actively involved in CCS demonstration.

There have been reports that China plans to launch pilot emissions trading schemes in six provinces before 2013 and set up a nationwide trading platform by 2015. What are your views on this and how do you think those goals fit with broader CCS policy?

Regional emissions trading schemes already exist in China. Among 19 professional environment exchanges, four (Beijing, Shanghai, Tianjin and Shenzhen) provide a carbon emissions exchange service. Some local governments are also building regional carbon emissions exchange platforms. Considerable work still needs to be done on the methodology, standards and regulations to build a nationwide trading platform.

There is still uncertainty about how a national scheme might develop as the National Development and Reform Commission, who will regulate the carbon market, and the State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission, who administrates major state-owned companies, may have different attitudes towards how a scheme may operate.

In near term emissions trading will be demonstrated in specific regions and/or in specific sectors. It is difficult to estimate the timetable of implementing a nationwide emissions trading scheme.

Emissions trading in and/or across sectors may benefit CCS more than regional emissions trading by its influence on the major emitters. The emissions trading scheme provides emitters with one more option to reduce emissions. It could help to decrease the cost of CCS provided that CO2 avoided through CCS is valid for trading in the scheme.