Wyoming Considers Relaxing its Carbon Capture Standards for Electric Utilities
CO2 Coalition and NOAA DIFFER: Greg Wrightstone & Howard Diamond, climate science program manager at NOAA’s air resources, called Wrightstone’s findings “simply not in keeping with the science.”
Wyoming Considers Relaxing its Carbon Capture Standards for Electric Utilities
A bill lowering the amount of CO2 a utility must capture at its power plants has drawn opposition from two groups usually diametrically opposed to each other’s priorities.
MAR 8
As Wyoming nears the end of its 2024 legislative session, clean energy advocates and climate change skeptics find themselves in an uneasy situation: an alliance.
Both groups oppose legislation that would weaken and delay the state’s carbon capture requirements, albeit for wildly different reasons.
Wyoming has bet a portion of its future economy on the proliferation of carbon capture, “low-carbon” fossil fuels and hydrogen. As a result, the state has encouraged companies to explore use-cases for coal, oil and fracked natural gas that would keep them viable in a clean-energy power sector.
In 2020, Wyoming’s legislature enshrined this goal into law by passing House Bill 200, which requires power plants to generate electricity using carbon capture with fossil fuels by 2030.
But this week, the legislature is considering Senate File 42, which would amend House Bill 200 to decrease the amount of carbon a utility must capture at its power plants in order to be considered “low-carbon,” and postpone the date of compliance to 2033.
The Cowboy State’s push to find a home for fossil fuels in a world powered by wind and sunlight appears to have scrambled its traditional political fault lines when it comes to energy and environmental policy.
Some environmentalists in Wyoming oppose Senate File 42 on the grounds that promoting carbon capture, a nascent technology that is decades from viability, is coming at the expense of investing in renewable energy—already a cheaper source of electricity than almost all U.S. coal plants—in the effort to reduce the concentrations of atmospheric greenhouse gases that are warming the planet.
Senate File 42, they say, is merely postponing the objectives of House Bill 200 and letting utilities avoid conceding that carbon capture is too expensive and too undeveloped a technology to save Wyoming’s fossil fuels.
In an dizzying turn of political gymnastics, they find themselves siding with lawmakers skeptical of the very science of climate change, who agree that carbon capture is too costly an experiment for Wyoming ratepayers to bear, and who appear to have voted against Senate File 42, in part, because they do not believe excess carbon dioxide in the earth’s atmosphere poses a threat to humanity and consequently doesn’t need to be captured at all.
Governor Mark Gordon’s administration, oil and gas companies, mining corporations and utilities, have all credited the global shift to renewable energy—and corresponding decrease in demand for coal—as justification for carbon capture, an implicit acknowledgement of the effects of climate change on the global energy economy. To Senate File 42’s supporters, the costs ratepayers would bear for a utility to explore carbon capture are worthwhile if the technology can one day preserve the market for Wyoming coal, which it exports to 26 other states as fuel for power plants. But, in retrospect, they’ve decided, current law has put the cart before the horse, requiring utilities to deploy costly technology before it’s ready.
Environmentalists, on the other hand, are skeptical of carbon capture altogether, and don’t want to make it cheaper or easier for utilities to implement something they fear will displace Wyoming’s investments in renewable energy and could fail regardless of how much time utilities have to meet the goals.
“We’re opposed to the bill,” said Shannon Anderson, an attorney with the Powder River Basin Resource Council, a state-based conservation organization told Inside Climate News.
Anderson and Claire Deuter, an organizer with the council expressed their organization’s concerns before the House and Senate Minerals, Business and Economic Development committees earlier this month, saying the proposed legislation does not align with a cost-effective energy future for Wyoming.
“We are extremely concerned about the impact to ratepayers,” Deuter told the House committee. Utilities may recoup expenses for carbon capture construction, operation, analysis and engineering projects, but the unproven nature of the technology makes it “likely all of this will result in the lack of a viable project, and in the end, Wyomingites will have paid millions into something that is never put into use,” she said. “We just see this as a lost cause.”
With the 2030 deadline only a handful of years away, Anderson said that utilities have begun balking at their chances of complying with the law.
“Utilities have been consistently saying that the technology’s not ready,” she said. Retrofitting a half-century-old coal plant, she continued, is impractical, could require too much water and could lead to rate increases for technology that may never be fully viable.
“There’s a host of issues,” Anderson said. “It’s not technically or economically feasible to retrofit coal carbon capture at any facility out there in the state right now.”
Deuter told the House committee that further entrenching carbon capture into state law would “not encourage renewable energy and the economic development that could bring to Wyoming.”
Instead, the Powder River Basin Resource Council would prefer “House Bill 200 to play out the way it is now,” she said. Once utilities file their carbon capture prospects the legislature could “start fresh” and reconsider whether enshrining the practice into law is the best path forward for the state.
Under Senate File 42, a utility qualifies as producing “low-carbon” electricity as long as it is fitted with a carbon capture unit designed to pull in 75 percent of a plant’s baseline CO2 emissions. But for a utility to be in compliance with the amended law, that unit would need to capture only 18,750 metric tons of a plant’s annual CO2 emissions—about half a percent of the annual emissions from a coal-fired power plant, according to the Environmental Protection Agency’s carbon calculator.
Utilities would also have more time to meet the relaxed carbon capture thresholds, and would be allowed to recover the costs of securing funding, researching and implementing pilot projects and conducting various other carbon-capture studies by increasing ratepayers’ bills by as much as two percent.
Anderson, Deuter and The Powder River Basin Resource Council have ended up on the same side of the proposed amendments as “climate denialists believing that we shouldn’t pay for carbon capture,” she said. But the two sides are “coming at it from a very different perspective.”
Among the 10 state Senators who voted against Senate File 42 in its final Senate floor vote were Tim French, Bob Ide, Dan Laursen and Cheri Steinmetz, representing Park, Natrona, Big Horn and Goshen counties, respectively. Two weeks earlier, the four had hosted a presentation given by the CO2 Coalition, an organization that peddles “facts, resources and information about the vital role carbon dioxide plays in our environment.”
Steinmetz, chairman of the Senate Agriculture, State and Public Lands & Water Resources Committee, welcomed the CO2 Coalition by foregrounding her “definite difference of opinion” from Gordon, who has pledged to reduce Wyoming’s emissions, “on policy issues regarding CO2.”
Gregory Wrightstone, the coalition’s executive director and a former head of a regional branch of the American Association of Petroleum Geologists, kicked off the group’s presentation by saying “carbon dioxide should be celebrated, not captured,” and proceeded to give a presentation rife with misinformation about climate change that contradicts both the global and regional consensus regarding greenhouse gases influence on global warming.
At one point, Wrightstone said that, in Wyoming, “maximum average daily temperature has been declining for 90 years,” a claim he purported was backed up by National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) data.
Howard Diamond, climate science program manager at NOAA’s air resources laboratory, called Wrightstone’s findings “simply not in keeping with the science.” After looking at Wrightstone’s chart, Diamond said he did not know where Wrightstone got his data, and said his claims were “pretty misleading.”
“I could go over reams and reams of data and science dating back nearly 200 years, but frankly, the relationship between increasing CO2 and increasing temperatures could not be clearer,” he said.
NOAA’s temperature data from the last 90 years—the time period Wrightstone referenced in his presentation— shows the average maximum temperature in Wyoming has increased 0.2 degrees Fahrenheit per decade.
Wrightstone was joined that day by Byron Soepyan, a “research and science” associate—he has a Ph.D. in chemical engineering from the University of Tulsa—with the CO2 Coalition, who presented about carbon capture’s cost and “the dangers of CO2 capture.”
Retrofitting Wyoming’s fossil fuel power plants with carbon capture would cost billions of dollars, he said, and the practice could create and release volatile organic compounds into the atmosphere, contaminate nearby sources of groundwater if CO2 were stored underground or used to revive oil and natural gas fields and rupture pipelines—resulting in hospitalizations from exposure to high concentrations of CO2.
Soepyan wrapped up by asserting that carbon capture is “not worth pursuing for the state of Wyoming.”
“Unnecessary, costly and dangerous,” Ide said. “That’s a good finish on that presentation right there.”
Laursen proved receptive to the CO2 Coalition’s presentation, too, at one point asking Wrightstone for an explanation regarding the “false narrative” that increasing earth’s temperature by 1.5 degree Celsius would negatively impact life on earth.
What know misses to discuss in situation like this is the why. Why would plan and rule change, well it's because the cost associated the technology makes it's unachievable. Carbon capture does work in isolated areas with high cost via taxes, fees, or subsidies. See Norway NCS. But no of this matters because we already have technology and resources that sequester carbon. Using less carbon intense natural gas and Nuclear power will displace coal-hence sequestration-less expensively to. The U.S., Canada, U.K., & France have shown that by substituting high carbon intensity fuel for less carbon intense ones, you lower the carbon profile of a country there by sequestering a lot of carbon.