In official assault on fossil energy, tactics vary by fuel

May 9, 2014
An Executive Branch campaign against fossil energy applies different tactics to specific fuels.

An Executive Branch campaign against fossil energy applies different tactics to specific fuels.

Against coal, the tactic is frontal assault. Against oil, it’s block and stall, And against natural gas, it’s turnabout.

The assault against coal has two waves. The first is the Environmental Protection Agency’s regulation of emissions of carbon dioxide from new coal-fired power plants. Essentially, the plants must be able to capture the gas and inject it permanently into the subsurface.

The ability doesn’t exist at commercial scale.

In June, EPA will propose rules for CO2 emissions from existing power plants. Publication by the US Global Change Research Program of an especially gloomy climate assessment heralds a second blow to coal-fired power.

The administration wants to finish its crackdown on coal before President Barack Obama leaves office. That way, the next president will answer for rising electricity prices without being able to do anything about them.

Refiners once were next in line for EPA strangulation of stationary emitters of CO2. But frenetic regulators can only do so much.

Oil, therefore, faces piecemeal resistance to any new tranche of supply.

Federal regulation thus is in prospect for hydraulic fracturing, the completion technique essential to producing oil and gas from low-permeability reservoirs.

And the administration recently announced yet another delay in its decision about the border crossing of the Keystone XL pipeline.

Regulatory resistance lately has befallen natural gas, too. To the environmentally sensitive, gas used to be the good hydrocarbon, the one that emitted the least CO2 when combusted.

Alas, methane is a greenhouse gas more potent than CO2. So EPA is studying emissions of it from oil and gas operations to see whether regulation is in order.

The agency will, of course, determine that regulation is in order.

So tactics vary in relation to the carbon-hydrogen ratio of the fuel, but the strategy is consistent: If it contains carbon, banish it from the energy market. All the campaign needs is a scapegoat to blame for the costs.

(From the subscription area of www.ogj.com, posted May 9, 2014; author’s e-mail: [email protected])