Senators want $20B to burn coal cleanly

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By Jack Torry, Washington Bureau Updated 9:28 AM Thursday, July 15, 2010

WASHINGTON — Declaring that a major global warming bill cannot pass the Senate, Republican George V. Voinovich of Ohio and Democrat Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia want to spend $20 billion during the next decade to develop a commercially viable way to burn coal cleanly.

If the bill wins congressional approval, the government would funnel billions of dollars to utility companies seeking ways to burn coal mined in Ohio and West Virginia without emitting carbon dioxide believed to cause global warming.

The measure, introduced Wednesday, July 14, would be financed through a fee on utility rates that consumers and companies would pay. Because the fee would amount to a tax, it likely would be opposed by most Republicans.

Utility companies have dabbled with a technology known as carbon capture and sequestration, where the carbon dioxide emitted from a utility plant would be captured and stored in the ground. The technology is promising but too expensive to be viable commercially.

Rockefeller and Voinovich said it was unlikely their bill would be folded into a larger global warming measure championed by Sens. John Kerry, D-Mass., and Joe Lieberman, I-Conn.

The Kerry-Lieberman approach relies on a regulatory system known as cap-and-trade. Under cap-and-trade, a utility plant would need permits for its emissions of carbon dioxide. Utility plants that dramatically reduced emissions could sell their permits to other utilities that have not achieved reductions.

Frank O’Donnell, president of the Washington-based Clean Air Watch, was skeptical of the Rockefeller-Voinovich approach.

“At this point, the only proven method of putting carbon in the ground is keeping the coal in the ground in the first place,’’ he said.

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