This story has been updated.
Even though the Trump administration remains noncommittal or even dubious on the subject of climate change, Energy secretary Rick Perry was slated to travel to his home state of Texas Thursday to celebrate a technology aimed at fighting it.
Perry, his department announced, would attend a celebration of the U.S.’s first coal-fired electricity unit equipped to capture carbon dioxide, the principal gas that drives the planet’s warming, and then store it underground — more popularly known as a “clean coal” facility.
The Petra Nova project, a joint venture of NRG Energy and JX Nippon Oil & Gas Exploration Corp, was declared operational in January. A 240 megawatt coal unit of the larger W.A. Parish plant in Thompsons, Texas, can now capture 90 percent of the carbon dioxide emitted when the coal burns, according to the companies.
The carbon dioxide is then piped in liquid form to a nearby oil field where it is used to draw additional oil from the ground, a practice that helps strengthen the economics of the endeavor. Perry will actually be attending a valve-turning that pipes already stored carbon dioxide to the oilfield, according to NRG.
Perry’s visit comes at a time when it remains unclear how the new administration plans to further advance a new technology that — despite its potential to reduce emissions from burning coal – remains costly and has struggled to gain a foothold.
During the presidential campaign president Trump spoke often about “clean coal,” and the energy policy posted on the White House website on its very first day of the new administration stated that the administration was “committed to clean coal technology.”
Since then, however, White House budget proposals have appeared to seek cuts to the Department of Energy’s research programs designed to advance the technology.
The Trump “skinny budget” for the 2018 federal fiscal year aims an unspecified cut at the Fossil Energy Research and Development Program, which, among other things, funds carbon capture and storage research. And a budget memo sent to Congress by the White House Office of Management and Budget targets deep cuts to the same program for the remainder of the 2017 fiscal year.
Carbon capture and storage research isn’t the only type of science funded through this program, but it makes up a very significant part of it.
A press release from the Energy Department notes that while the Petra Nova project did receive federal funding — $ 190 million, including some funding received under President Obama’s first term economic stimulus package — it was initially envisioned as a smaller project.
“Originally conceived as a 60-megawatt electric (MWe) capture project, the project sponsors expanded the design to capture emissions from 240 MWe of generation at the Houston-area power plant, quadrupling the size of the capture project without additional federal investment,” said the announcement.
But some coal industry representatives are hoping for more such investment from the Trump administration.
“Petra Nova continues the pathway of demonstrating CCS at scale and bringing costs down,” said Benjamin Sporton, the CEO of the World Coal Association, in a statement regarding Perry’s visit. “As he begins to set his priorities at the Department of Energy, we encourage Secretary Perry to support CCS research and development as CCS development and deployment is critical to meeting the 2 degrees climate target.”
Obama stimulus funding also supported another carbon capture initiative that has, only now in the Trump years, come online — a project at agribusiness giant Archer Daniels Midland’s Decatur, Illinois ethanol plant, which strips carbon dioxide out of the fermentation process that makes ethanol.
Both the Petra Nova and Decatur projects are expected to sequester more than a million tons of carbon dioxide in the ground annually, which means that in the context of capturing and storing carbon they would count as large-scale industrial projects.
However, these amounts still pale in comparison to the amount of carbon dioxide that humans put in the atmosphere annually from energy use — about 32 billion tons — underscoring that carbon capture and storage has a very long way to go before it makes a major dent in the climate change problem.
Perry is just back from a G-7 energy ministers meeting where the U.S.’s unresolved position on climate change and the Paris climate agreement reportedly prevented the adoption of a joint statement on the matter by the group of nations.
In a statement on the ministerial, however, Perry hailed fossil energy technologies, remarking that the U.S. and fellow countries should support “high efficiency, low-emission coal and natural gas.”
“Innovation is also a top priority for the Trump Administration,” he said.
