Preview Newsletter
AM ACC 12/28/2016
-
Democrats Press EPA Pick Pruitt on Energy Sector Ties
Dec 27, 2016 | Politico
By Elana Schor
Senate Democrats are raising concerns about the energy industry ties of Scott Pruitt, Donald Trump’s pick to helm the Environmental Protection Agency, pointing to his leading role at a nonprofit group that took money from a central arm of the Koch brothers’ network. -
Clean Tech Rises Again, Retooling Nature for Industrial Use
Dec 28, 2016 | New York Times
By Quentin Hardy
A decade ago, a group of biologists, venture capitalists and computer whizzes gathered under the name “clean tech.” They hoped to overturn polluting industries with microorganisms cheerily excreting industrial chemicals through the miracle of reprogramming nature’s genetic code. -
Canada to Match U.S. Asbestos Limits in Federal Workplaces
Dec 28, 2016 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Peter Menyasz
Canada is proposing much more stringent limits on workplace exposure to asbestos for workers in federally regulated industries that would match current restrictions in the U.S. -
Biobased Chemical, Fuel Makers Seek Parity Under Trump
Dec 28, 2016 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Pat Rizzuto
Biobased chemical and fuel manufacturers want their products to be treated equally with their fossil fuel-based counterparts under the incoming administration's policies. -
Editorial: Align PCB Cleanup Efforts
Dec 28, 2016 | Albany Times-Union
By Editorial Board
New York is critical of the federal EPA's approach on further cleanup of PCBs from the Hudson River. -
Outlook 2017: Trump Inauguration to Bring Major US Oil Policy Changes
Dec 28, 2016 | Platts
By Brian Scheid and Meghan Gordon
An unprecedented presidential election, court battles over hydraulic fracturing and oil pipelines, Arctic drilling plans and additional Renewable Fuel Standard drama rounded out the top five US oil policy stories of 2016. -
Will Trump Try to Scrap Obama’s Prohibition on Arctic, Atlantic Drilling?
Dec 28, 2016 | Platts
By Brian Schneid
In July 2014, as the Obama administration was really beginning to work through its future plan for offshore oil and gas leasing, the industry was hopeful that the plan would include expanded drilling in nearly all US Gulf of Mexico waters, much of offshore Alaska and even off the East Coast. -
Kasich Vetoes Bill to Weaken Clean Energy Mandate
Dec 27, 2016 | The Hill - E2 Wire
By Timothy Cama
Gov. John Kasich (R) bucked Ohio's GOP state legislature Tuesday by vetoing a bill that would have weakened the state’s clean energy requirements for power companies. -
POLITICO Pro Q&A: NARUC President Robert Powelson
Dec 28, 2016 | PoliticoPro
By Darius Dixon
Robert Powelson, a Republican and Pennsylvania state regulator, was elevated in November to the presidency of the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners, which represents state regulators across the country. -
‘A Tense Few Days’ For Producers, Developers as FERC Mulls Rover Decision, Analysts Say
Dec 27, 2016 | Natural Gas Intelligence
By Jeremiah Shelor
FERC needs to approve the Rover Pipeline Project this week in order to avoid delays, project backers told the Commission in a filing earlier this month. -
Sell Your Carbon Dioxide? For Now, Market Remains Slim, But Energy, Industrial Sectors Looks to Future
Dec 27, 2016 | Houston Chronicle
By James Osborne
In the age of climate change, carbon dioxide emissions produced by burning fossil fuels present a liability that many investors fear might one day bring down oil companies. -
Gulf Methanol Plant Gets $2 Billion Loan
Dec 27, 2016 | Chemical & Engineering News
By Melody M. Bomgardner
A new firm called Lake Charles Methanol has received a $2 billion conditional loan commitment from the Department of Energy for a facility that will produce methanol by gasifying petroleum coke, a waste product from oil refining. The plant will capture and purify by-product... -
Texas Town Opposes Exxon Petrochemical JV Plant
Dec 27, 2016 | Houston Business Journal
By Jack Witthaus
A small town near Corpus Christi is pushing back against plans to build a petrochemical plant near the city. -
EPA Amends its Risk Management Program for Chemical Facilities
Dec 27, 2016 | National Law Review
Today, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) finalized a rule amending its Risk Management Program (RMP) regulations to reduce the likelihood of accidental releases at chemical facilities and improve emergency response activities when those releases occur. -
Five Regulations That Could Come in Obama's Final Days
Dec 28, 2016 | The Hill - Regulation
By Lydia Wheeler
...The Labor Department's Occupational Health and Safety Administration (OSHA) is planning to release a rule that would reduce by 10 times the amount of beryllium that workers can be exposed to on the job... -
Scientists Just Ran the Numbers on How Much Trump Could Damage the Planet
Dec 27, 2016 | Washington Post
By Chris Mooney
There has been a lot of speculation since climate change doubter Donald Trump’s election about what the consequences could be for global climate action. Some analysts cite very dire implications, and others suggest that clean energy growth will continue apace. -
Climateers Can’t Handle the Truth
Dec 27, 2016 | Wall Street Journal
By Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.
Congrats are due for the term “climate denialist,” which in 2016 migrated from Paul Krugman’s column to the news pages of the New York Times. -
How Will Trump Handle Climate Regulation? Watch The Skies
Dec 28, 2016 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By David Schultz
If you're looking for an early signal on how soon-to-be President Donald Trump will handle the issue of climate change, you might want to keep your eyes on the skies. -
Yeast Facilities Must Always Meet Air Toxics Limits, EPA Proposes
Dec 28, 2016 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Rachel Leven
Yeast manufacturers would be required to comply with existing air toxics emission limits for all fermentation batches—instead of with 98 percent of batches—under a soon-to-be-published Environmental Protection Agency proposed rule.
Industry and Association News
LCSA News - There are no clips to report at this time.
Chemical Management News
Energy News
Chemical Security News
Transportation News - There are no clips to report at this time.
Environment News
-
Democrats Press EPA Pick Pruitt on Energy Sector Ties
Dec 27, 2016 | Politico
By Elana Schor
Senate Democrats are raising concerns about the energy industry ties of Scott Pruitt, Donald Trump’s pick to helm the Environmental Protection Agency, pointing to his leading role at a nonprofit group that took money from a central arm of the Koch brothers’ network.
Six Democrats on the Senate’s Environment and Public Works Committee wrote to Pruitt on Tuesday asking for the names of donors, meeting information, internal emails and other details related to his director status at the nonprofit, called the Rule of Law Defense Fund. Formed as an offshoot of the Republican Attorneys General Association, the Defense Fund is organized under a section of the tax code that allows it to keep donors secret — but it received $175,000 in 2014 from Freedom Partners, which coordinates the Kochs’ political activities.
That contribution, combined with past reports about Pruitt’s use of industry talking points in criticism of Obama administration environmental rules, is rousing suspicion among Democrats. In the letter obtained by POLITICO, the six senators said Pruitt’s work with the Defense Fund is a “troubling” sign that the Oklahoma attorney general is too close to the fossil-fuel companies he would regulate as chief of Trump’s EPA.
The Defense Fund took in $855,000 in 2014 and $953,000 last year, according to IRS records. Five Republican state attorneys general joined Pruitt as unpaid directors: Patrick Morrisey of West Virginia, Pam Bondi of Florida, Sean Reyes of Utah, Derek Schmidt of Kansas and Alan Wilson of South Carolina. Bondi, whose political committee received a controversial $25,000 donation from Trump’s foundation in 2013, is a member of the president-elect’s transition team.
Defense Fund spokesman Jordan Russell said by email that the group “facilitates study and discussion among attorneys general of a wide range of policy issues, including health care, immigration, federalism, and many other matters affecting states and their citizens.” Trump's transition team did not respond to a request for comment.
America Rising Executive Director Brian Rogers, whose conservative group has launched a pro-Pruitt campaign targeting red-state Democrats, slammed the letter as a sign of green groups dictating to Democratic senators.
"This is a partisan fishing expedition by six liberal Democrats who combined have taken more than $1.2 million from far-left environmentalist groups dead-set against any reforms to an out of control EPA," Rogers said in a statement.
Democrats’ interest in playing up Pruitt’s involvement with the group — part of a broader push to turn moderate senators against his confirmation — stems from a New York Times investigation in 2014 that found Pruitt borrowing language almost word-for-word from oil and gas company Devon Energy in a letter that accused EPA of inflating emissions.
"The confirmation process, starting with your responses to committee questions before your hearing, is an opportunity for you to dispel the notion that the advocacy you have undertaken on environmental issues as Attorney General of Oklahoma has been directed by and for the benefit of the energy industry," the Democrats wrote to Pruitt.
The letter was signed by Sens. Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, Jeff Merkley of Oregon, Cory Booker of New Jersey, Ed Markey of Massachusetts, Ben Cardin of Maryland and Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who caucuses with Democrats. The environment panel’s incoming top Democrat, Delaware Sen. Tom Carper, did not sign on, nor did Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) or Sens.-elect Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) and Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.), who will join the committee next year.
Dan Kunsman, chief of staff to Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.), who will assume the environment panel gavel in the new Congress, said committee policy allows senators to question nominees through the chairman rather than on their own.
"Further, the authority to require a nominee to respond to questions following a hearing also rests with the Chairman. That is why members submit their questions to the Chairman to be sent under his or her signature to the nominee," Kunsman said by email. "This was the precedent for President Obama’s EPA nominees, and will be followed again."
The Defense Fund’s current president is Samantha Dravis, a former counsel at Freedom Partners and White House aide during the George W. Bush administration who also serves as general counsel at RAGA. Other senior employees as of last year were RAGA Executive Director Scott Will; RAGA Chief Financial Officer Lee Russell; and veteran Alabama operative Jessica Garrison, a former aide to Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), Trump’s attorney general in waiting, as well as Bill Pryor, a federal appeals court judge on Trump’s Supreme Court short list.
Defense Fund counsel Charlie Spies, a longtime GOP election lawyer, noted that the Democratic letter acknowledges the right of nonprofits to shield their donors' identities and said the group would "maintain its longstanding policy of maintaining donor confidentiality.”
"It is unfortunate that certain Democrat Senators appear willing to trample First Amendment rights in order to score cheap political points," Spies said in a statement.
http://www.politico.com/story/2016/12/congress-democrats-epa-pruitt-232989
-
Clean Tech Rises Again, Retooling Nature for Industrial Use
Dec 28, 2016 | New York Times
By Quentin Hardy
A decade ago, a group of biologists, venture capitalists and computer whizzes gathered under the name “clean tech.” They hoped to overturn polluting industries with microorganisms cheerily excreting industrial chemicals through the miracle of reprogramming nature’s genetic code.
The idea lost billions of dollars. Genes may indeed be programmable code, akin to computer software, but it turned out nature was more complex than first believed.
Now, with less fanfare, a few clean tech companies are aiming for a comeback. And the big idea has not changed much: Create cheap, safe and natural materials for fuel, cosmetics and other goods, much the way yeast ferments sugars into alcohol.
This time around, they believe they have better tools for editing genetic codes, measuring results and automating how chemicals are produced at a large scale. They have also set their sights lower, for now targeting just a few chemicals, not remaking how the world powers cars.
Most strikingly, the way they propose to create their bio-based “software” parallels recent changes in the way computer software is written. Instead of grand, complex projects, they are targeting little changes at a fast rate, and adjusting as clever analysis yields more information — a concept high-tech firms call agile programming.
“This is like agile programming, but for biology,” said Eric Steen, a co-founder of Lygos, a start-up here creating yeasts that make malonic acid, an ingredient in fragrances commonly derived from cyanide. “Evolution is the most powerful algorithm ever, but you have to figure out how to stack it in your favor.”
In computer-based agile programming, small teams reinforce positive signals about the way their code is working online. The Lygos version of this is to rapidly measure the performance of a novel yeast strain, and quickly build on those results with gene-editing tools that are 100 times faster than when Dr. Steen was in graduate school 15 years ago.
“It’s a big data problem,” he said, echoing one of the trendiest terms in computing. “There’s 2,000 genes in this yeast, and each gene may use 300 amino acids. There’s well over a million variants. Our first successful strain had just a tiny poop of malonic acid as a byproduct, but we seized on that, and kept building on it.”
The company, which Dr. Steen and others spun out of the University of California, Berkeley, in 2011 with a $150,000 grant from the federal Energy Department, recently secured $13 million, on top of $8 million it got from the government and a few private investors over the years.
Lygos plans to use the money to make its acid at an industrial scale, sometimes in partnerships with larger producers working in this new system. It is enough, Dr. Steen said, to make “tons” of the chemical next year, and “rail-car sizes” within two years.
It is natural to look at genetic engineering and think of H. G. Wells’s Dr. Moreau, creating an island of miserable and dangerous freaks. At the same time, altering genes is what mankind has done for millenniums, breeding wolves into Chihuahuas and cobs of loose-podded maize into big, uniform ears of corn.
What is different, and troubling to some, are the tools and the time scale. By directly altering the genetic makeup of plants and animals, the creations happen a thousand or more times as fast.
Lygos and other contemporary bio-based manufacturers benefit in particular from a tool called Crispr, which can snip into a sequence of DNA and insert desired features, like a propensity to create malonic acid. The process underlying Crispr was first observed in bacterial behavior and then experimentally demonstrated in 2007, too late for the first bio-based chemical companies.
This capability, commonly spoken of as the genetic version of cutting and pasting in a word-processing program, bypasses the slow adjustments to a complex ecosystem that happen when nature brings forth a new species.
Nature’s complexity is one reason clean tech fell short. Amyris, a clean-tech pioneer in Emeryville, Calif., first worked on anti-malarial drugs with backing from Bill Gates, then set out to make biofuels. It found that organisms created in a California lab behaved differently in a Brazilian factory. The company spent $250 million trying to figure out the problem, while regular oil prices fell.
“It turned out we had to track every part of the process, and automate as many things as possible,” Peter Denardo, a company spokesman, said. “We’ve hired a lot more software and analytics people.”
It has also moved from competing with big oil companies to making things like patchouli, used as a base chemical in fragrances. Even so, its stock, now worth pennies, trades 98 percent below its 2011 high.
Early on, Amyris had scientists transfer yeast with toothpicks from one dish to another, creating all sorts of unseen variations and errors. Now, the company has enzymes that act as sensors where material is produced, and takes measurements of every part of the lab and production building, so it can trace any problems.
ygos and others appear to have learned something from the clean tech crash. Dr. Steen’s modest lab, a few blocks from a brewery and a mile or so from the university where he studied, has lots of sensors and programs measuring and predicting which yeast strains will be productive and robust.
Elsewhere, scientists toil with petri dishes and automated pipettes to test new strains. Small piles of malonic acid, a white crystal in refined form, mark the way to a wall of deep freezers, where the champion strains await industrial vats.
Though Dr. Steen never worked for Amyris, his college adviser, Jay D. Keasling, helped found the company.
“I was involved with them as a grad student,” Dr. Steen said. “Trying to tackle gasoline was too much; it doesn’t make sense to compete at first with someone’s core product for over 100 years.” He figures that his product, malonic acid, has a market worth $250 million — small enough that there has not been too many thoughts about efficiency.
At least some big producers agree that these new tools and styles of genetic coding are reviving the clean tech field.
“We have better tools, better computational biology,” said Markus Pompejus, who runs a biotechnology program for BASF, the German chemical giant. “The whole thing is very real. It’s already getting big.”
His company uses fungi to make vitamin B2, and has a license agreement with Genomatica, a company that spent $300 million on biofuels in the first wave, and now fashions E. coli bacteria to spit out the basics of biodegradable shopping bags.
Still, Dr. Pompejus said, “petrochemicals won’t go away.”
“We make 3,000 metric tons of B2 a year; that’s a specialty amount of production,” he added. “When you talk about things like citric acid, or lysine for animal feeds, you’re talking about 200,000 metric tons a year.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/27/technology/clean-tech-rises-again-retooling-nature-for-industrial-use.html?_r=0
-
Canada to Match U.S. Asbestos Limits in Federal Workplaces
Dec 28, 2016 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Peter Menyasz
Canada is proposing much more stringent limits on workplace exposure to asbestos for workers in federally regulated industries that would match current restrictions in the U.S.
The tougher limits would require private sector employers in the aviation, marine and rail transport, oil and gas, banking, telecommunication, broadcasting and shipping industries to achieve virtual elimination of asbestos in the workplace.
Draft amendments to regulations under the Canada Labour Code would set an occupational exposure limit for all forms of asbestos “as close to zero as reasonably practicable” and no greater than that set by the American Conference of Governmental Industrial Hygienists, currently 0.1 fiber per cubic centimeter, the government said Dec. 24.
The proposal follows the federal government's Dec. 15 announcement that it will ban the manufacture, use, import and export of asbestos and asbestos-containing products by 2018. It proposed a ban under the Canadian Environmental Protection Act, as well as work with provinces and territories to amend building codes to prohibit the use of asbestos in new construction and renovation projects.
Asbestos Exposure Management Programs
The amendments also would require federally regulated employers to implement asbestos exposure management programs in workplaces where asbestos-containing material is disturbed or exposed and where there is potential for employee exposure to airborne asbestos fibers.
The programs would include asbestos exposure control plans with procedures and control measures for moderate- and high-risk activities, as well as employee education and training. Employers would be required to have a qualified person investigate workplaces and classify all work activity as low-, moderate- or high-risk for asbestos exposure.
Employers would have to make readily available to employees a record of the location, risk and state of disturbed asbestos-containing material and would have to implement other preventive measures, including asbestos dust, waste and debris removal, decontamination and air sampling.
Limit Meets International Obligations
A more stringent exposure limit would allow Canada to meet its international commitments, as its current limit for airborne chrysotile asbestos of one fiber per cubic centimeter doesn't meet the International Labour Organization's Asbestos Convention of 1986, the government said. Other forms of asbestos are already subject to a 0.1 fiber per cubic centimeter limit.
Thirty-five countries have ratified the convention, including Canada, Australia, Germany, Switzerland and Japan, it said. Most of Canada's provincial and territorial governments already prohibit exposure above 0.1 fiber per cubic centimeter, including in British Columbia, Alberta, Manitoba, Ontario, Quebec, Nova Scotia, Newfoundland and Labrador, Nunavut and the Northwest Territories, it said.
The U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration's current occupational exposure limit for asbestos, established in 1986 and covering all forms including chrysotile, is 0.1 fiber per cubic centimeter of air, as a time-weighted average over an eight-hour shift of a 40-hour work week. The European Union adopted a similar limit in 2009.
About one-third of the federal government's inventory of more than 2,000 buildings contain asbestos, and, extending that to all federally regulated workplaces, it is likely about 10,000 sites expose workers to asbestos, the government said.
The government previously banned, effective April 1, 2016, the use of asbestos-containing materials in all new construction and renovation projects overseen by the Public Services and Procurement Canada. Some federal employees may also be exposed to asbestos while working with materials that contain it, including brake linings or insulation, or during building maintenance or demolition, it said.
Canada Had Major Asbestos Industry
Asbestos has been mined in Canada since the 1870s, mostly in Quebec, and the country was among the world's largest producers. At the industry's peak, about a dozen mines were located in Quebec, the last of which closed in 2012. Canada is still a significant importer.
Canada joins more than 50 countries to have banned the known carcinogen, led by Iceland, which was the first in 1983. The U.K. banned it in 1999, Australia in 2003 and a European Unionwide ban was adopted in 2005.
At the height of its use, asbestos was found in more than 3,000 applications, including roofing shingles, thermal and electrical insulation, cement pipe and sheets, flooring, gaskets and brake pads and shoes. Production and use have declined since the 1970s, particularly after the World Health Organization declared asbestos a human carcinogen in 1987.
In 2011 alone, 2,331 new Canadian cases of mesothelioma and lung cancer were attributed to occupational and para-occupational exposure to asbestos, and from 2007 to 2011, there was an average of 13 asbestos-related occupational fatalities per year, eight of them in the federal jurisdiction.
Several Regulations Affected
The amendments would affect the Canada Occupational Health and Safety Regulations, the Maritime Occupational Health and Safety Regulations, the On Board Trains Occupational Health and Safety Regulations, the Oil and Gas Occupational Safety and Health Regulations and the Aviation Occupational Health and Safety Regulations.
The draft amendments are open to public comment through Jan. 18, 2017.
http://news.bna.com/deln/DELNWB/split_display.adp?fedfid=102630972&vname=dennotallissues&fn=102630972&jd=102630972
-
Biobased Chemical, Fuel Makers Seek Parity Under Trump
Dec 28, 2016 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Pat Rizzuto
Biobased chemical and fuel manufacturers want their products to be treated equally with their fossil fuel-based counterparts under the incoming administration's policies.
“Our priority is to get a level playing field,” Paul Winters, communications director for the Biotechnology Industry Organization, told Bloomberg BNA.
Biobased chemicals and fuels are of great interest to investors, according to Lux Research, Inc., a market analysis firm focused on emerging technologies.
“Venture capitalists have pumped in $5.8 billion into biobased materials and chemicals startups since 2010, reflecting the drive for sustainability, performance, and alternatives to petroleum feedstocks” Lux said in a Dec. 20 e-mailed announcement.
Companies that make or use biobased chemicals include the Coca-Cola Co., which uses sugarcane-based plastic bottles; DuPont, which uses corn stalks, leaves and cobs to make ingredients in detergents, textiles, biofuels and other products; and Novozymes, which designs enzymes and microorganisms for customers that produce detergents, renewable fuels and other products, according to a recent BIO report, “Advancing the Biobased Economy.”
Diverse Policies
A variety of tax breaks for fossil fuels are built into the U.S. tax code, which indirectly give a cost advantage to fossil fuels and the chemicals they produce, Winters said.
The incoming Congress already has said reforming the U.S. tax code is a priority, and Winters said that discussion could open the door towards a level playing field for fuels and chemicals irrespective of the feedstocks used to make them.
Encouraging President-elect Donald Trump's administration to implement the amended Toxic Substances Control Act is another Biotechnology Industry Organization (BIO) priority, he said.
Urging Congress to allow government agencies to offer loan guarantees for biobased chemicals, and not just biofuels, is a third BIO priority, Winters said.
Finally, although BIO has not yet met with Trump's transition team, the organization is relying on the President-elect to keep promises he made supporting biofuels and rural America during speeches in Iowa, Winters said.
For example, during a Jan. 19, speech at the Iowa Renewable Fuels Summit, Trump described EPA's Renewable Fuel Standard as “an important tool in the mission to achieve energy independence for the United States.”
“I will do all that is in my power a president to achieve that goal,” Trump said.
Cost of Carbon Not Accounted For
David Levine, chief executive officer of the American Sustainable Business Council, said achieving parity for biobased chemicals will be a challenge in light of the support for the fossil fuel industry and opposition to policies to limit greenhouse gas emissions voiced by Trump and Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt, the President-elect's pick to run the Environmental Protection Agency.
Until there is a price on carbon in fossil fuel, biobased chemicals cannot compete on a truly cost-competitive basis, Levine said.
Lynn Bergeson, managing partner of the Washington D.C.-based Bergeson & Campbell, P.C., which manages the Biobased and Renewable Products Advocacy Group (BRAG), said Pruitt's alignment with the fossil fuel industry does not necessarily telegraph a lack of support for biobased chemicals.
Yet, “certain inferences flow from that alignment, none of which are especially good news for the biobased community,” Bergeson said.
Regulatory Certainty
Martha Marrapese, an attorney in the Washington D.C. office of Keller and Heckman LLP, and Preston Fulmer, a scientist working with that law firm, said regulatory certainty would help manufacturers of a particular subset of biobased chemicals—companies that use algae to make commercial chemicals.
The law firm was among the organizations submitting comments on draft guidance the EPA has issued describing the types of information it wants to receive when companies ask to make new types of algae. Comments were due Nov. 30.
The draft guidance is a step in clarifying uncertainty, but needs to be expanded, Marrapese and Fulmer wrote.
Among the improvements they suggested, Marrapese and Fulmer urged the EPA to provide more guidance on generic names companies could use for their algae so the names provide the public information it needs while protecting confidential business information the company has already provided to the EPA.
http://news.bna.com/deln/DELNWB/split_display.adp?fedfid=102630961&vname=dennotallissues&fn=102630961&jd=102630961
-
Editorial: Align PCB Cleanup Efforts
Dec 28, 2016 | Albany Times-Union
By Editorial Board
New York is critical of the federal EPA's approach on further cleanup of PCBs from the Hudson River.
THE STAKES:
The two entities should be aligning their efforts and hold GE accountable.In the escalating debate between New York state and the federal Environmental Protection Agency over the extent of PCB contamination remaining in the Hudson River, the essential next step — dredging of the Champlain Canal — must not become its casualty.
Last week, the state Department of Environmental Conservation strikingly declared the six-year, $1.5 billion cleanup of polychlorinated biphenyls brokered in 2002 between the EPA and the General Electric Co. a failure. In that extensive dredging operation completed in 2015, GE removed and disposed of more than 150 tons of river sediment from various PCB hot spots between Fort Edward and Troy. For decades through the 1970s, GE had legally discharged the toxins, which have proven to be harmful to human health and the environment, into the Hudson from its capacitor plants in Hudson Falls and Fort Edward.
The cleanup, however, excluded the Champlain Canal, a channel and succession of locks in the same stretch where the cleanup occurred. Dredging such channels is the responsibility of the state Canal Corp., but because of the added complications and expense of dealing with the PCBs, the process has lingered. Portions of the canal can no longer be safely navigated by larger commercial vessels, a real constriction to the region's economic development. GE insists it has fulfilled the requirements of its agreement with the EPA and stands firmly against sharing the cost for the additional dredging of the Champlain Canal.
The DEC's new aggressive stance is a welcome departure from its silence last year when communities along the river and many environmental groups were urging it to help make GE keep the dredging operation intact so the canal could also be cleared. At the time, the state was attempting to lure GE to relocate its corporate headquarters in Manhattan. The company eventually chose Boston.
The new tension between DEC and the EPA stems from the assessment under way to measure PCB contamination down river, the 150-mile stretch from Troy to New York City. The state wants five times as many samples taken than the EPA intends.
This makes sense. The more data collected, the stronger the case for GE to continue its cleanup. Some environmental groups worry that if the EPA finds current levels down river acceptable, it could certify the cleanup as complete, reliving GE of any future liability.
This must not delay the unresolved issue of the Champlain Canal. The state must be equally aggressive now, using every bit of leverage it can muster, including legal action, to compel GE to finish the cleanup between Fort Edward and Troy, helping cover costs for dredging the Champlain Canal for the first time since the 1980s.
Instead of a battle of words, the state and federal governments should now be working in unison to get the cleanup of PCBs from all of the Hudson River finished.
http://www.timesunion.com/tuplus-opinion/article/Editorial-Align-PCB-cleanup-efforts-10821190.php
-
Outlook 2017: Trump Inauguration to Bring Major US Oil Policy Changes
Dec 28, 2016 | Platts
By Brian Scheid and Meghan Gordon
An unprecedented presidential election, court battles over hydraulic fracturing and oil pipelines, Arctic drilling plans and additional Renewable Fuel Standard drama rounded out the top five US oil policy stories of 2016.
But rather than just serving to fill out a year-end list, the biggest policy events of this year are likely to shape the policy path of the next, perhaps more than ever before.
Here's a look at the top five stories of 2016 and how they will affect 2017:
TRUMP ELECTIONOn November 8, businessman and reality television star Donald Trump was elected president, an unexpected result that may prove to be the start of the most significant shift in the direction of oil policy in decades.
Trump, who made promises on the campaign trail to boost US oil and gas output and roll back regulations unfriendly to industry, is expected to be a stark policy departure from President Barack Obama, who spent much of his political capital over the past four years pushing efforts to combat climate change.
Whether Trump is successful in repealing those efforts, such as new rules on methane emissions, remains unclear at the moment, as does whether the White House can even play a role in how much oil producers actually drill.
But Trump's picks so far to fill out his cabinet, including ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson to serve as secretary of state, show that the Trump White House will likely take a much more industry-friendly path.PIPELINE PERMITTINGTrump has promised to quickly approve Energy Transfer Partners' Dakota Access Pipeline for Bakken crude and TransCanada's Keystone XL pipeline for Canadian diluted bitumen.
To move Dakota Access, he can appoint a new head of the Army Corps of Engineers to replace Jo-Ellen Darcy, who called December 4 for a new environmental review of the project, withholding the final federal approval the pipeline needed.
The application remains open because Darcy's order did not officially deny the needed easement to build on Army Corps of Engineers land in North Dakota.
Reviving the dormant Keystone XL project would depend on TransCanada's interest in refiling its application based on the current demand outlook for Alberta's oil sands.
New environmental reviews could take some time, but it would likely easily receive a permit to cross the US-Canada border with former ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson leading the State Department.
Trump could accelerate other energy infrastructure projects like LNG export terminals and natural gas pipelines by pushing agencies to make quicker comments and decisions.
He will be able to appoint two or three commissioners to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, including its next chairman.
OFFSHORE PLANOn November 18, the Obama administration finalized the legal schedule for all offshore oil and gas lease sales between 2017 and 2022.
The plan offers 11 potential lease sales in four planning areas, including 10 in the Gulf of Mexico and one off the coast of Alaska in the Cook Inlet.
But the plan also excluded sales planned for the Beaufort and Chukchi seas and an earlier version of the plan removed a lease sale planned for the Atlantic Ocean.
On December 20, Obama went even further, designating the majority of federal waters offshore Alaska and portions of the Atlantic permanently off limits to oil and gas drilling.
The move, paired with an announcement that Canada would block oil and gas development from their Arctic waters for at least five years, was hailed by environmentalists and criticized by industry, setting up a likely court battle that could play out for years.
President-elect Trump has said he wants to expand the amount of drilling on federal lands and waters, likely including lease sales for both the Arctic and Atlantic. But redoing the offshore lease plan could take as long as three years and the expected legal fight to undo Obama's prohibitions on drilling in US Arctic and Atlantic waters could take even longer.
This means that the Trump administration would not likely be able to hold a sale outside the Gulf of Mexico or Cook Inlet much before 2020.
COURT BATTLESOn June 21, US District Court of Wyoming Judge Scott Skavdahl overturned Obama administration rules over fracking on federal and Indian lands, ruling they exceeded the Interior Department's statutory authority.
The 10th US Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver will hear the Obama administration's appeal of that decision January 17, with Trump expected to be inaugurated three days later.
The timing complicates federal regulation of oil production and sets up a 2017 that likely will be filled with an incoming administration abandoning appeals or defenses of rules being challenged by industry groups and states, such as lawsuits against the Department of the Interior's and Environmental Protection Agency's methane rules. But environmental groups will likely pick up these cases, meaning the legal challenges will probably not go away, but the sides could switch.
BIOFUEL MANDATEOn November 23, EPA said it will require refiners and blenders to mix 19.28 billion gallons of renewable fuel into the US transportation fuel supply in 2017, 480 million gallons more than it proposed in May.
But the next administration's support for biofuels remains to be seen, after Trump sent mixed messages during the campaign and appointed Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt to lead the agency. Pruitt has sued EPA over various regulations and called the Renewable Fuel Standard "unworkable."
Iowa Governor Terry Branstad said Trump assured him personally he would support ethanol, and farm-state lawmakers in Congress are sure to stand in the way of any attempts to weaken the program.
But Pruitt could decide to reverse EPA's proposal in November to deny requests to shift the RFS' point of obligation from refiners and importers to the wholesale rack. In November, he will be able to set blending levels for 2018.
In Congress, it remains uncertain if the $1/gal biodiesel tax credit will be retroactively extended after it expires December 31.
Biodiesel producers are lobbying lawmakers to shift the incentive to domestic producers from blenders in response to rising biodiesel imports from Argentina and other countries.http://www.platts.com/latest-news/oil/washington/outlook-2017-trump-inauguration-to-bring-major-27738922
-
Will Trump Try to Scrap Obama’s Prohibition on Arctic, Atlantic Drilling?
Dec 28, 2016 | Platts
By Brian Schneid
In July 2014, as the Obama administration was really beginning to work through its future plan for offshore oil and gas leasing, the industry was hopeful that the plan would include expanded drilling in nearly all US Gulf of Mexico waters, much of offshore Alaska and even off the East Coast.
Some in the industry were quietly optimistic that President Barack Obama’s Interior Department would give serious consideration to opening some of the Pacific Ocean to drilling in the 2017 to 2022 offshore leasing plan, although this was viewed as a serious longshot.
“From our long-term energy planning standpoint, both from the government and the industry, it’s important to keep options on the table and not take them off the table,” Erik Milito, the American Petroleum Institute’s upstream director, said at the time.
Those hopes were dashed and a years-long push by the offshore industry appears to be for naught as the Obama administration last week not only scrapped planned lease sales in the Atlantic and Arctic, but also moved last week to permanently bar drilling in the majority of US Arctic waters and a large chunk of the Atlantic.
The move may ultimately be at the heart of a, likely, multi-year legal battle between the offshore industry and environmentalists. It has complicated President-elect Donald Trump’s ability to increase production in federal waters, one of his few, clear energy policy goals of his presidential campaign. It may also launch a new legislative effort by Alaska’s congressional delegation.
But, looking forward, it also raises the question: Will Trump want to burn political capital, federal resources and time to lift an offshore drilling prohibition at a time when the industry is not looking to immediately expand its offshore drilling activities?
Withdrawn from disposition
On December 20, the White House announced that Obama would permanently block new oil and gas development in the Chukchi and Beaufort seas, covering about 115 million acres in the Arctic, and about 3.8 million acres off the US East Coast, from Massachusetts to Maryland. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau also announced that all oil and gas leasing would be off limits in all of Canada’s Arctic waters, but those prohibitions would be reviewed every five years.
Obama is blocking Arctic and Atlantic drilling through authority under Section 12(a) of the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act, a 63-year-old law which allows the president to “withdraw from disposition” any unleased lands in federal waters.
The decision followed the Obama administration’s announcement in November that it was removing two planned lease sales in the Chukchi and Beaufort seas from its 2017-22 federal offshore leasing plan. A proposed Atlantic lease sale had been scrapped from that plan back in March.
President-elect Trump was expected to undo that plan, although it was expected to take years to do so. But Obama’s move to permanently block oil and gas development in the Arctic and Atlantic complicates Trump’s expected path when it comes to opening more US waters to drilling.
The legal battle
Just minutes after the White House announced the decision to permanently bar drilling, industry interests claimed there was no legal standing to permanently block development in those waters and environmental pledged to defend the action in court.
“If Donald Trump tries to reverse President Obama’s withdrawals, he will find himself in court,” said Marissa Knodel, a Friends of the Earth spokeswoman.
But Christopher Guith, a senior vice president for policy at the US Chamber of Commerce’s Institute for 21st Century Energy, said the decision could be easily reversed by Trump once he is sworn into office and pointed to a 2008 action by President George W. Bush to reverse previous leasing prohibitions made under 12(a) authority.
“There’s no such thing as a permanent withdrawal,” Guith said. “It can be repealed with the stroke of a pen.”
The Trump question
As with seemingly almost everything on energy policy these days, it is unclear what Trump may do on offshore drilling when he moves into the White House next month.
In a conference call with reporters the day after the White House announced the withdrawals, Jason Miller, a Trump spokesman, said the president-elect had no “immediate reaction” to the move.
While he has pushed for more drilling on federal lands and waters, it is uncertain if Trump views undoing Obama’s Arctic and Atlantic withdrawals as a priority, particularly since much of the industry appears uninterested in drilling in new offshore areas in light of current oil and gas prices.
Prices weighed at least partially on Obama’s decision last week, claiming in a statement that a “significant production in the Arctic will not occur” at current prices.
“That’s why looking forward, we must continue to focus on economic empowerment for Arctic communities beyond this one sector,” Obama said.
http://blogs.platts.com/2016/12/28/trump-obama-prohibition-arctic-atlantic-drilling/
-
Kasich Vetoes Bill to Weaken Clean Energy Mandate
Dec 27, 2016 | The Hill - E2 Wire
By Timothy Cama
Gov. John Kasich (R) bucked Ohio's GOP state legislature Tuesday by vetoing a bill that would have weakened the state’s clean energy requirements for power companies.
Kasich, who ran for the Republican presidential nomination this year, rejected the bill that sought to make clean-energy purchase mandates that have been in place since 2008 optional for two years.
The rules are nearing the end of a two-year freeze that was instituted in 2014.
In his veto message, the governor credited Ohio’s clean energy law with increasing the public’s access to diverse sources of energy, but he offered to work with legislators to find ways to make energy more affordable.
“Ohio workers cannot afford to take a step backward from the economic gains that we have made in recent years, however, and arbitrarily limiting Ohio’s energy generation options amounts to self-inflicted damage to both our state’s near- and long-term economic competitiveness,” he wrote.
Kasich had threatened to veto the bill, which is supported by many business groups, including Ohio’s Chamber of Commerce, the Columbus Dispatch reported.
Supporters argued that the bill would lead to lower energy costs and that the clean-energy requirements increase electricity rates.
Support among legislators is not high enough to override the veto, the Dispatch reported.
The decision was cheered by environmental and clean-energy advocates.
“Today Gov. Kasich put economic growth over politics, and stood up for a cleaner, healthier energy future for Ohio,” said Dick Munson, Midwest clean energy director at the Environmental Defense Fund.
“With the state’s renewable and efficiency standards back in place, Ohio can reclaim its spot as a clean energy leader, clearing the way for well-paying jobs, millions in investment, and healthier air for all,” he said.
Katich also used his line-item veto authority to block a $264 million tax break for the oil and gas industry in Ohio.
http://www.thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/311924-kasich-rejects-bill-to-weaken-clean-energy-mandate
-
POLITICO Pro Q&A: NARUC President Robert Powelson
Dec 28, 2016 | PoliticoPro
By Darius Dixon
Robert Powelson, a Republican and Pennsylvania state regulator, was elevated in November to the presidency of the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners, which represents state regulators across the country.
Powelson’s been a member of the state's PUC since 2008, including five years as its chairman, where he dealt with disasters like Hurricane Sandy in 2012.
Powelson’s one-year NARUC presidency begins amid the transition at the White House and across the executive branch, and his group plans to hammer on its issues like energy infrastructure, nuclear waste and pipeline safety. He's also frustrated with grid operators who he feels are “putting their heads down in the sand” when it comes to state initiatives aimed at rescuing nuclear plants and the need for PHMSA to have a leader that isn’t “stuck inside the Beltway.”
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
NARUC presidents tend to have a particular issue of focus for their leadership.
What are NARUC’s priorities for 2017?
This is one of those rarified opportunities when you’re elected to be president of NARUC and you’re on a parallel path with a presidential transition. In Pennsylvania, we have great leaders in [GOP] Reps. Bill Shuster and Lou Barletta and what I’ve tried to stress is that we’re all about infrastructure — roads, bridges, airports, mass transit, all that — but let's not forget what we do as public utility regulators with energy infrastructure.
It’s the pipeline replacement and siting, transmission buildout, water infrastructure in a post-Flint, Mich., world where we’re having a national discussion about lead contaminants. We’re going to be stressing our points around the need to invest in energy infrastructure. We recognize the ports and the airports and the mass transit and intermodal transportation needs and infrastructure, but NARUC’s going to be sitting there articulating a message around energy infrastructure as well.
How high a priority is nuclear waste and potentially moving forward with the Yucca Mountain repository?
From a NARUC perspective, we’re becoming a little impatient with how these markers on Yucca keep getting moved. ... I’ve been to Yucca Mountain. I’ve been inside the mountain. I know it’s there. I know it’s been paid for.
In the past, NARUC approved a resolution saying the nuclear waste fee imposed on utilities shouldn’t be restarted until the Energy Department moves ahead with Yucca or some other program authorized by Congress. If Yucca is back on the table, where is NARUC on the fee?
As the spent fuel stays onsite, I think policymakers in states like Pennsylvania and Illinois — [leading] nuclear production states, at the state legislature level and state homeland security level — there’s a little bit of heartburn in terms when we’re going to have this national solution.
Honestly, we have not had that kind of discussion recently at NARUC. I think a lot of people think about it at the macro level. State PUC commissioners believe it’s been paid for and we’re being asked to do it again.
New York approved a clean energy standard that includes subsidies for nuclear plants, and Illinois recently did the same. Do you see other states embracing that?
The Pennsylvania market — a net exporter of power, 46,000-plus megawatts, No. 2 natural gas production in the country next to Texas — we’ve seen close to a 56 percent drop in wholesale power prices since 2008, we’ve seen a market-based decarbonization since 2008.
Today, because of the benefits of the Marcelleus here in the Northeast, we’re bringing gas out of the wellhead at a $1.96 MMBtu. In fact, Pennsylvania gas is almost a dollar cheaper than Henry Hub quoted gas. These are all the real-time, ‘what’s going on in the marketplace’ [elements]. And then we have, at the federal level, a discussion about the Clean Power Plan and a meeting that took place on Capitol Hill about three months ago with DOE officials, representatives from the Nuclear Energy Institute, the Edison Electric Institute, and now all of a sudden everybody’s like, "Oh my God. We’ve missed the mark on nuclear price formation issues."
Pennsylvania has a renewable portfolio standard. That RPS does not recognize the value of nuclear. It does not recognize the potential investment that a nuclear operator can make with a steam generator retrofit. And Pennsylvania is a devout supporter of competitive markets. [There are the] issues of Diablo Canyon in California and the issue of price distortion because of wind and the federal production tax credit, and the New York example of saving western nuclear units, jobs. Pennsylvania is a very different market than Illinois, New York and California.
We’re following it in other states, but the construct would have to be looked at in the policy lens of the renewable portfolio standard in Pennsylvania being amended to recognize the value of nuclear. Granted, we don’t regulate generation in Pennsylvania, but we recognize that value when we had the polar vortex in 2013 when we had a 24 percent forced-outage rate across PJM. The darling child that kept the lights on at 5 o’clock at night as people were coming home from work was nuclear power.
This issue needs to be looked at by PJM — the issue of nuclear price formation. The RTOs need to deal with the issue. Pushing it back to state regulators by these one-off mechanisms — if you’re in a restructured market — basically puts us back in the business of doing integrated resource planning.
So, you’re hoping for market-wide approaches?
Yeah, that, or if Congress wants to solve the problem, then put a value on carbon. But that’s not gonna happen either.
I was in the room when [Sen.] Lamar Alexander in 2008 articulated a vision of a nuclear renaissance. Well, we haven’t seen a nuclear renaissance. It’s Watts Bar, Vogtle and SCANA and that’s it. ... I’d love a nuclear renaissance. The problem is we’ve also got the gas renaissance taking place.
What are the central problems you have with the state-by-state approach to rescuing power plants?
It creates too many, what I call, energy policy moral hazards, and you’re [looking to] state regulators that are not in the business of doing integrated resource planning, and you’re asking us to do that. I think it creates a bastardized market construct and at the end of the day, this issue is best resolved with the RTO — in our case PJM — putting that value on carbon and dealing with it. Sheepishly, RTOs are putting their heads down in the sand and not saying a word.
Do you think they’re expecting FERC to deal with this?
I think what they’re looking to do is, as these things germinate in states, the RTO is now put in the very awkward position of how does this work in the capacity auction construct, and how does it pass the screen test at the FERC level of not bastardizing the Federal Power Act.
Do you get the sense that RTOs are waiting for the courts and FERC to address the New York clean energy standard before they take their next step?
That’s seems to be the posture that we’re seeing in PJM because if you take the Illinois example and assuming there’s a discussion in New Jersey, and a discussion here [in Pennsylvania], the RTO is best equipped to addressed that. If there’s going to be a value in the wholesale power market construct in our organized market, the grid operator needs to determine that, not the state regulator.
What other big issues are on NARUC’s priorities?
Obviously, the Clean Power Plan is something the new administration will seek our input on. Then there are issues around net-neutrality and some FCC decisions and then you come back to energy. One of the big things after the passage of the SAFE PIPES Act this year, is that there is a disconnect between the states and PHMSA. One of our priorities with the new administration will be how critically important it is to identify a PHMSA administrator that understands the plight of gas safety operations back in the states.
These are largely domiciled in the state public utility commissions, but let’s use my state as an example. We’ve got a lot more responsibility in the last five years. There was a state statute signed into law giving us new jurisdictional oversight. That comes with hiring new personnel, new engineers. Well, guess what — there’s one training location in the U.S.
This has become a common-thread issue, brought up in a resolution that passed that expressed a concern that [PHMSA] can’t expect states to ramp up their safety operations when there’s only one training location in the country. When I was on the hill, and I talk to people like [Reps.] Lou Barletta and Bill Shuster and Sens. Bob Casey and Pat Toomey, they were alarmed to hear that.
Help us solve it. If you don’t want to do brick-and-mortar training facilities, that’s fine. But let’s come up with a reasonable approach. It could be at a community college, it could be a university setting, whatever. But we gotta get beyond this backlog in training because it’s really gonna come back and bite us.
PHMSA, at the administrative level, needs an individual in there that understands how state-based gas safety operations work — know the modus operandi. They can’t be stuck inside the Beltway. You need someone who understands those state issues. It’s been a very combative relationship. In fact, with PHMSA directors from [Cynthia] Quarterman to [Marie] Dominguez, we’ve pulled our hair out trying to get them as speakers. The joke at NARUC is that we know we’ve hit a homerun when the PHMSA administrator accepts an invitation to speak.
We’re equal access. We want to have high-level, key administration folk come through. I give [EPA Administrator] Gina McCarthy a lot of credit. She worked NARUC and met with people who were diametrically opposed to the Clean Power Plan but she took the time to at least talk to us.
https://www.politicopro.com/energy/story/2016/12/politico-pro-q-a-naruc-president-robert-powelson-141525
-
‘A Tense Few Days’ For Producers, Developers as FERC Mulls Rover Decision, Analysts Say
Dec 27, 2016 | Natural Gas Intelligence
By Jeremiah Shelor
FERC needs to approve the Rover Pipeline Project this week in order to avoid delays, project backers told the Commission in a filing earlier this month.
And with 3.25 Bcf/d of east-to-west takeaway capacity hanging in the balance, the risk of Rover's in-service date being pushed from 2017 to 2018 could mean "a tense few days for a lot of folks" eagerly awaiting start-up of the project, RBN Energy LLC said in a note published Monday.
As Rover developer Energy Transfer Partners LP told the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, the issue centers around the developer's commitment to work within an approved seasonal window for tree-clearing to avoid harming two protected species of bats along the project route. That window closes at the end of March and won't restart until the fall. According to Rover, this means FERC needs to issue a certificate by the end of 2016 or else the project "very likely will be delayed up to a full year."
The 710-mile, 3.25 Bcf/d Rover would connect Marcellus and Utica shale gas to the Midwest Hub in Defiance, OH, and to an interconnection with the Vector Pipeline in Michigan, giving Appalachian producers access to points such as the Dawn Hub in Ontario.
As RBN said, "If Rover gets final FERC approval within the next few days, the developers’ expectation is that they can clear the trees along Rover’s route by the end of March, finish the portion of the line from the production areas to Defiance, OH (in the northwestern part of the state) by June 2017, and complete the rest of the pipeline into southeastern Michigan by November 2017. A delay of even a few weeks in getting that FERC certificate, though, some tree clearing would likely need to wait until the fall and winter of 2017-18...
"We can’t handicap the chances that Rover’s developers will get what they need from FERC as quickly as they say they need it -- predicting the timing of federal action on pretty much anything is a fool’s errand. But if Rover’s timetable is delayed to 2018, there could be a number of significant effects."
RBN said production growth in the Marcellus and Utica shales could be harmed, given the 1.55 Bcf/d producers are hoping to begin flowing on the pipe by June 2017 and the 1.6 Bcf/d scheduled to begin flowing in November. A delay could also lead producer-shippers to push for "changes in their committed capacity volumes or in how much they pay for that capacity."
Meanwhile, Western Canadian producers could stand to benefit from another winter heating season to sell into the Upper Midwest and Ontario without additional competition out of the Appalachian Basin, RBN said.
BTU Analytics LLC energy analyst Marissa Anderson told NGI’s Shale Daily Tuesday that the window for Rover to get the needed certificate is "certainly getting tight. They put out pretty blatantly in that letter their timeline. The fact that it if they don't get it by the end of the year it puts them at risk for a delay, it doesn't bode well for them to stay on schedule."
Anderson noted risk factors that point to a certificate decision coming after Rover's stated deadline, including FERC's scrutiny of Rover's demolition of a historic home in Ohio without consulting the Commission beforehand. Holiday downtime could further impede FERC's progress on a final order, she said.
"If they're looking to get it by the end of the year, from the nature of the process...any additional steps that need to be taken, that slows things down," Anderson said.
NGI Director of Strategy and Research Patrick Rau said that "if Rover is delayed by a significant amount of time, then it will delay the pace of new drilling and DUC [drilled but uncompleted wells] completion." Rau noted Antero's 800 MMcf/d commitment to Rover as an example. The Denver-based operator has indicated they plan to ramp-up Utica activity "once Rover starts construction, since it will take 6-9 months for new wells to reach sales," Rau said.
According to RBN, Ascent Resources has committed the most to Rover at 1.1 Bcf/d, with Range Resources, Southwestern Energy, Gulfport Energy, Eclipse Resources and Rice Energy also committing volumes to the project.
Rau said a delay for Rover could also help Nexus Gas Transmission LLC, a similarly-routed westbound Appalachian Basin takeaway project also targeting the Upper Midwest/Ontario region.
"Another possible outcome from a lengthy delay is it could help fill the remainder of Nexus. That line is 60% contracted" compared to about 95% for Rover. Nexus backer "Spectra Energy Corp. expressed confidence on its 3Q16 call that there is enough producer interest to help fill the remainder. If Rover is significantly delayed and Nexus still has its 4Q17 in-service date, some producers may take some of that capacity," Rau said.
Nexus received its final EIS from FERC in late November.
A delay for Rover would mean prolonging some of the constraints and depressed prices that have affected the Appalachian Basin in recent years, Anderson said. But no matter the project’s timing, she said, BTU's outlook still shows a need for Marcellus/Utica drillers to continue increasing activity in order to maintain production.
"I think that we have seen activity start to come back to the region. Our outlook has always been that these projects are likely to get delayed, but even with that, we've anticipated that with this excess backlog that's coming off, we still need producers to continue to ramp," Anderson said. "If they were anticipating a June start-up, the beginning of January is when we would need to see additional activity above and beyond, really, to continue to fill those pipelines.
"Even without that, we're still estimating that there does need to be a material ramp in activity, because you're running out of excess backlog. Just even maintaining flat production you still need drilling activity to increase in the region."
http://www.naturalgasintel.com/articles/108864-a-tense-few-days-for-producers-developers-as-ferc-mulls-rover-decision-analysts-say
-
Dec 27, 2016 | Houston Chronicle
By James Osborne
In the age of climate change, carbon dioxide emissions produced by burning fossil fuels present a liability that many investors fear might one day bring down oil companies.
But scientists and policy makers are asking what would happen if carbon dioxide had a value the same way oil, gold and coffee do. What if it could be used to produce goods and even fuels - the way plants and trees use carbon dioxide to keep themselves alive?
It's not an entirely new concept. For decades, industries from oil to soft drinks have bought small amounts of carbon dioxide, piped in from underground caverns where it was trapped eons ago. But now the outgoing Obama administration, along with partners from both environmental groups and the oil and gas industry, are hoping to create a much larger market that will not only keep carbon out of the atmosphere but create a new engine for the U.S. economy.
"They need scientific breakthroughs, but this is a very important research direction," Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz said in an interview. "It could be building materials, road materials. A holy grail, in a certain sense, would be to use CO2 plus other ingredients like water and sunlight to convert to a hydrocarbon liquid fuel."
Such breakthroughs are likely a long way off, but it they materialize, it could prove vital to Houston, Texas and the oil and gas industry that drives their economies. Solving the challenges and economics of carbon capture could keep oil, gas and other fossil fuels viable over the long term as international efforts to slow climate change lead to ever tighter restrictions on carbon dioxide emissions that accelerate global warming.
Burning fossil fuels in power plants, factories and other industries is a major source of the carbon dioxide that traps heat in the earth's atmosphere. For now, even the initial step toward putting carbon dioxide to use - separating it out of the emissions streams rising out of the country's smokestacks - remains prohibitively expensive.
But as engineers work out of the kinks, costs are coming down to the point that by 2025 it should be competitive with naturally occurring stockpiles, said Douglas Hollett, principal deputy assistant secretary for fossil energy at the Energy Department. He said carbon capture is on a similar trajectory as earlier energy technologies.
"Think about where solar PV, onshore wind (turbines), LED (light bulbs), and shale wells were not too long ago," he said.
Colorless, odorless and non-combustible, carbon dioxide has a long list of theoretical applications. It can be used to make cement, feed algae, produce the bubbles in a can of soda and even make fuels like methanol and ethanol. A report by the Energy Department's scientific advisory board last month identified more than two dozen possible applications for carbon dioxide.
Turning those possibilities into reality is becoming increasingly important. As countries like Canada and Norway, and states like California, increasingly move to put a price on carbon emissions, polluters are left with two options: Pay to have the carbon pumped underground or find someone to buy it.
"Storage is not the first resort for sure. You'd much rather be able to monetize CO2," said Jeff Erikson, general manager at the Global Carbon Capture and Storage Institute, a trade group whose membership runs from the oil giant Exxon Mobil to the Japanese government to a coalition of southern governors in the United States.
By far the biggest use to date - and the one to which industry and policy makers are pinning their hopes for the foreseeable future - is within the oil and gas industry. Known as Enhanced Oil Recovery, drillers for decades have pumped carbon dioxide into older oil fields to push the last barrels to the surface.
Since the Paris climate change pact, in which close to 200 world leaders last year agreed to control carbon emissions, most of the attention has focused on renewable sources like wind turbines and solar power. But in an Energy Department report this summer, scientists estimated that if the world was to meet the 2050 goal set in Paris, one-sixth of emissions reductions would need to come from carbon capture systems.
So far, political support has been hard to come by. Legislation introduced in Congress this past session would not only have increased incentives for carbon capture but fixed them permanently in the tax code. Despite bipartisan support - drawing together everyone from the environmentally minded Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-Rhode Island, to pro-oil Rep. Joe Barton, R-Ennis - the legislation never even got assigned to a committee in the House or Senate.
Recent cost overruns have not helped in Washington. The Kemper County coal plant in Mississippi, which was designed to sequester carbon dioxide for use in nearby oil fields, won close to $400 million in federal grants and tax credits. But the project has gone three times over its original budget and is now expected to cost $6.7 billion.
"On the Republican side, the biggest problem is the huge amount of federal money we've put on to this," said Rep. Gene Green, D-Houston, who co-sponsored the House bill. "On the Democratic side, there's lukewarm support. They generally support carbon capture, but using it for enhanced oil recovery, there's this huge group of 'keep it in the ground' folks, who are not appreciating what we're trying to do."
With President-elect Donald Trump preparing to take over the White House, carbon capture's star might fade further in the United States. Trump has questioned scientific research confirming the impact of human activities on climate change and vacillated on whether the country will remain in the Paris agreement.
But other countries are moving ahead. In Norway's offshore natural gas fields in the North Sea, Statoil has begun pumping carbon dioxide back beneath the ocean's floor to avoid the government's pricey carbon tax. China is building carbon capture facilities on its coal-fired power plants at a fast clip to drive up production in its burgeoning oil and gas industry.
The United States has long led the world in carbon capture, with 13 of the world's 18 large-scale facilities, according the carbon capture institute. But with only two plants on the drawing board in the United States - compared to eight in China - that could be changing.
Carbon capture "has the potential to become a very robust industry that the U.S. could lead on, but we do run the risk of losing our technology edge," Erikson said. "The Chinese government has made it a priority, and I'm curious to see if they do with CCS what they did with the solar industry. They flooded the market, and now they're producing all the world's solar panels."
http://www.houstonchronicle.com/business/article/Sell-your-carbon-dioxide-For-now-market-remains-10819763.php?t=7933861f01438d9cbb&cmpid=twitter-premium
-
Gulf Methanol Plant Gets $2 Billion Loan
Dec 27, 2016 | Chemical & Engineering News
By Melody M. Bomgardner
A new firm called Lake Charles Methanol has received a $2 billion conditional loan commitment from the Department of Energy for a facility that will produce methanol by gasifying petroleum coke, a waste product from oil refining. The plant will capture and purify by-product carbon dioxide for use in enhanced oil recovery.
Pending completion of financing, the $3.8 billion plant will be built in Lake Charles, La. and supplied with coke from nearby refiners. In addition to methanol and CO2 it will produce hydrogen, sulfuric acid, argon, krypton, and xenon.
Although the plant will use existing technologies for its gasification and gas separation and purification units, it will be the world’s first to make methanol from petroleum coke. In the U.S., methanol is most commonly made from natural gas; plants in China rely on coal gasification.
The chemical industry has long known that petroleum coke could be used as a methanol feedstock. In 2007, Eastman Chemical announced plans for two Gulf Coast projects to do so, but they were canceled after the advent of hydraulic fracturing made natural gas routes more cost-competitive.
The Lake Charles plant is also the first facility to obtain a DOE loan guarantee under a program designed for large-scale fossil energy projects. “It would be the world’s first methanol facility utilizing carbon capture technology and would become the world’s largest industrial manufacturing carbon capture facility,” says Mark A. McCall, executive director of the DOE’s loan programs office.
Compared to other methanol plants, Lake Charles Methanol will emit 36% fewer greenhouse gases, DOE says. Overall, it will capture 77% of its carbon emissions, sequestering more than 4 million metric tons of carbon each year. The plant will use “advanced ultra-clean” gasification technology from General Electric.
Although Lake Charles Methanol hasn’t stated what technology it will use to capture CO2, a similar project evaluated by DOE in 2012 included a solvent process to remove and purify CO2and other gases.
http://cen.acs.org/articles/94/web/2016/12/Gulf-methanol-plant-2-billion.html
-
Texas Town Opposes Exxon Petrochemical JV Plant
Dec 27, 2016 | Houston Business Journal
By Jack Witthaus
A small town near Corpus Christi is pushing back against plans to build a petrochemical plant near the city.
Portland city officials have opposed the construction of an ethylene plant by Irving-based Exxon Mobil Corp. (NYSE: XOM) and Saudi Basic Industries Corp. due to safety issues, according to the San Antonio Express-News. Both companies have ties to the Houston area — SABIC recently relocated its its regional headquarters for the Americas to the Bayou City and Exxon Mobil has a massive campus in north Houston.
But Portland's opposition may not affect the project, which falls outside the city limits but is located near the city's high school. Exxon is buying around 1,400 acres of mostly open fields north of Portland, the Express-News reports. The project could generate about $70 billion in economic gains and 4,000 permanent jobs to the area in its first decade. The groundbreaking is expected this spring.
About 11,000 workers would be hired in the next five years to complete the project, per the Express-News. The plant is expected to generate up to 1.8 million metric tons of ethylene each year. It's hailed as the world’s largest ethane steam cracker plant.
Exxon and SABIC considered several sites this summer to develop the ethylene plant on the U.S. Gulf Coast. Some of the sites included Victoria, Texas, as well as sites in Louisiana near Baton Rouge. However, Exxon has not officially announced its chosen site for the plant.
An similar ethane cracker is wrapping up construction in Baytown as part of Woodlands-based Chevron Phillips Chemical Company LP's massive $6 billion petrochemical projects on the Gulf Coast.
http://www.bizjournals.com/houston/news/2016/12/27/texas-town-opposes-exxon-petrochemical-jv-plant.html
-
EPA Amends its Risk Management Program for Chemical Facilities
Dec 27, 2016 | National Law Review
Today, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) finalized a rule amending its Risk Management Program (RMP) regulations to reduce the likelihood of accidental releases at chemical facilities and improve emergency response activities when those releases occur. This rule is the latest in a series of actions the federal government has taken in consultation with industry, local and state governments, and other stakeholders to improve chemical process safety, assist local emergency authorities in planning for, and responding to, accidents, and improve public awareness of chemical hazards at regulated sources.
“This rule is based on extensive engagement with nearly 1,800 people over the last two and a half years,” said Mathy Stanislaus, EPA's Assistant Administrator for the Office of Land and Emergency Management. “These changes are intended to protect the lives of emergency responders and the public, while preserving information security.”
This rule will help prevent chemical accidents, such as the explosion in West Texas in 2013, and their devastating effects. While numerous chemical plans are operated safely, in the last 10 years more than 1,500 accidents were reported by RMP facilities. These accidents are responsible for causing nearly 60 deaths; some 17,000 people being injured or seeking medical treatment; almost 500,000 people being evacuated or sheltered-in-place; and more than $2 billion in property damages.
The Accidental Release Prevention regulations under Section 112(r) of the Clean Air Act (CAA) – also known as the EPA RMP regulations – require covered facilities to develop and implement a risk management program. EPA shares RMP information with state and local officials to help them plan for and prevent chemical accidents and releases.
The amendments to EPA's RMP regulations are a key action item under President Obama's Executive Order (EO) 13650, Improving Chemical Facility Safety and Security. While developing and finalizing the rule, EPA met with stakeholder groups, solicited public comments, held listening sessions and webinars, and considered extensive comments on the proposed rule.
The amendments are intended to:
• Prevent catastrophic accidents by improving accident prevention program requirements
• Enhance emergency preparedness to ensure coordination between facilities and local communities
• Improve information access to help the public understand the risks at RMP facilities
• Improve third-party audits at RMP facilities
More information about the final amendments to the RMP rule.
http://www.natlawreview.com/article/epa-amends-its-risk-management-program-chemical-facilities
-
Five Regulations That Could Come in Obama's Final Days
Dec 28, 2016 | The Hill - Regulation
By Lydia Wheeler
The Obama administration appears committed to finishing as much of its regulatory agenda as possible before leaving office.
Republican lawmakers have warned the administration against issuing any “midnight” regulations in the waning days, saying they would be overturned.
Yet the Environmental Protection Agency on Dec. 19 defied those warnings, issuing a controversial coal mining regulation that sets new requirements for companies when testing and maintaining streams damaged by mining.
President-elect Donald Trump has already pledged to repeal the rule.
Here are five other regulations that could be issued before Trump takes office on Jan. 20.
Occupational safety
The Labor Department's Occupational Health and Safety Administration (OSHA) is planning to release a rule that would reduce by 10 times the amount of beryllium that workers can be exposed to on the job.
Under the new rule, workers in general industry operations — foundry and smelting operations, machining, beryllium oxide ceramics, composites manufacturing and dental lab work — could only be exposed to 0.2 micrograms of beryllium per cubic meter of air over an 8-hour period.
The rule does not cover general industry workers in coal-burning and aluminum production or workers in the construction and shipyard industries who may also be exposed to the substance.
The lightweight metal is used in a number of industries, including nuclear weapons. Severe health risks, including cancer, are linked to exposure from its dust particles.
While the new rules would sharply reduce the exposure limit, groups advocating for workers were pushing OSHA to go a step further and reduce the limit to 0.1 micrograms per cubic meter of air.
OSHA expects the rule to cost companies $37.6 to $39.1 million a year to comply with, but save 96 lives a year and generate anywhere from $225.3 to $538.2 million in benefits annually.
Industry and labor groups have been pushing the rule for years. In 2012, the United Steelworkers (USW) and Materion Corp. — one of the biggest berylliun metal producers — submitted model standards to OSHA that they had created together to better protect workers.
When the rule was finally proposed in 2015, the groups issued a joint release praising the administration.
“We sincerely desire that the final standard be promulgated in the shortest possible time and we stand ready to assist OSHA in this regard,” Richard Hipple, Materion’s chair and CEO, said in a statement at the time.
The White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) finished its review of the regulation on Dec. 16. The final rule is expected in January.
Forced arbitration
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) is expected to finalize a rule it proposed in May that would prevent credit card companies from mandating that consumers go to arbitration over disputes.
Often slipped into the fine print, the arbitration clauses prevent consumers from bringing a suit against a company over fees or practices, or from joining a class action lawsuit.
Instead, people are required to resolve the fights through a third-party arbitrator that’s often chosen by the credit card company.
The CFPB said the public comment period closed on the rule in August, and the agency is in the process of reviewing the feedback it received.
The final rule is scheduled to be released in February. That would be after Trump takes office, so it’s possible that action could come sooner.
Incentive-based compensation
Financial regulators are poised to finalize rules that would delay compensation to Wall Street executives that are based on profits made from short-term, risky bets.
The joint rule coming from six federal agencies is one of the biggest enforceable actions left to implement under the Dodd-Frank Wall Street reform law.
The National Credit Union Administration said the proposed rule sets up a three-tiered system, based on asset size, that requires increasing levels of internal review of incentive-based compensation policies to ensure that compensation is aligned with the long-term goals of a company.
Financial regulators said there is evidence that flawed incentive-based compensation practices contributed to the financial crisis that began in 2007.
"Some compensation arrangements rewarded employees for increasing an institution’s revenue or short-term profit without sufficient recognition of the risks the employees’ activities posed to the institutions, and therefore potentially to the broader financial system," the agencies said in the proposed rulemaking.
Stoves
The Department of Energy is expected to finalize new energy efficiency standards for residential gas and electric stove tops and ovens that are designed to reduce energy costs and help with climate change.
Sen. John Hoeven (R-N.D.) introduced legislation in April 2015 to stop the Department of Energy from issuing the rules, but the bill never made it out of committee.
The Energy Department said bringing the stovetops and ovens into compliance with the rule — something that would be required within three years — could cost about 11 percent of the industry’s profits.
Consumers, meanwhile, are collectively expected to save $4.7 to $11 billion over a 30-year period in reduced equipment operating costs under the new standards. The rule are also expected to cut carbon emissions by 41.1 million metric tons, according to the Energy Department.
Public comments were due Nov. 2. The final rule is scheduled to be finished sometime in December.
Organic meat
The Department of Agriculture is working on new standards for how animals should be treated before meat is sold as “certified organic.”
To qualify for the label, livestock would have to live in an environment that allows for its natural behaviors and be kept in an appropriate shelter.
Barns, pens, coops and other shelters, for example, would have to be big enough for the animals to lie down, stand up and fully stretch their limbs without touching other animals or the sides of the shelter.
The National Pork Producers Council is urging the USDA to withdraw the rule. The group says it would present serious challenges to livestock producers.
Because animal welfare is not germane under the Organic Foods Production Act, NPPC claims the USDA does not have clear authority to promulgate such rules.
OIRA is now reviewing the final rule.
http://thehill.com/regulation/administration/311907-five-regulations-that-could-come-in-obamas-final-days
-
Scientists Just Ran the Numbers on How Much Trump Could Damage the Planet
Dec 27, 2016 | Washington Post
By Chris Mooney
There has been a lot of speculation since climate change doubter Donald Trump’s election about what the consequences could be for global climate action. Some analysts cite very dire implications, and others suggest that clean energy growth will continue apace.
But number-crunching analyses that actually calculate how much of a dent the election could have on the planet’s temperature have been rare. That’s in part because it’s no simple calculation.
Some have tried, though — and one such analysis from the think tank Climate Interactive, which we’ve unpacked here before, came up with a kind of middle-road result on this question. It found that if the United States delays addressing climate change domestically for four to eight years, this alone would not be enough to push the globe into the climate “danger” zone, which is generally described as allowing temperatures to rise more than 2 degrees Celsius above their pre-industrial level. However, if U.S. backsliding lasted longer, or if it led to corresponding actions by other countries, then the result could be severe for the planet.
A new commentary article published in Nature Climate Change on Monday presents some additional calculations that tend toward a similar conclusion.
Written by Benjamin Sanderson of the National Center for Atmospheric Research and Reto Knutti of ETH Zurich, the paper uses climate models to determine what the consequences would be if an eight-year delay in U.S. climate action, led by Trump, reverberates globally. The paper also considered a doubly bad scenario in which the United States also cuts back on clean energy research and then the world follows suit, and a triply bad scenario in which it also burns more fossil fuels and the world follows.
“Any delays to mitigation or cuts to renewable energy research by the U.S. will likely render the 2 °C target unachievable if a global precedent is set,” the authors write.
Let’s take this in pieces.
First and most important, the analysis finds that if the U.S. delays for eight years taking any climate action — meaning its current emissions remain steady — then that alone wouldn’t harm the planet much. This is basically the same result as the one reached by the Climate Interactive analysis. The United States is just one country and the second largest emitter. Even if it goes rogue, it cannot totally torpedo the planet.
But if the delay by the United States spreads globally — nobody cuts emissions, everybody waits for eight years — then it becomes a bigger deal. The study found that could lead to an additional 350 billion tons of carbon dioxide emissions, corresponding to a planetary temperature increase of .25 degrees Celsius and a lessened chance of keeping the warming of the planet within the safe range embraced in the Paris climate accord.
“The fear is that the U.S. coming out, or the U.S. having reduced ambitions in the near term would, destabilize the whole agreement,” Sanderson said in an interview.
The problem with such a delay is that there is a finite “carbon budget” before we reach 2 degrees of warming, and each successive year of emissions adds to the budget. So delays make staying within the budget a great deal harder and require much sharper cuts afterward.
In the case of an eight-year global delay (followed by global emissions cuts), that reduces the chances of staying within the 2-degree C goal from 66 percent to 50 percent, Sanderson said.
But it could be worse than that: The United States and globe could not only hold steady on emissions, but could actually emit more. And the United States might delay taking steps to create clean energy technologies better than the ones that we have now, causing a global turn away from clean energy research, including on key technologies such as carbon capture and storage.
The analysis finds that adding these problems for eight years worsens the overall problem still more, putting the 2-degree goal farther and farther out of reach.
“The bottom line is that a very short delay in global action would have very large consequences for the ability to meet these very aggressive targets, even if very globally coordinated and ambitious action happens post-2025,” said Sanderson.
Granted, the authors admit that this is a thought experiment only based on a particular set of assumptions — Trump’s policies don’t exist yet, so they cannot be evaluated directly. Nor can the world’s response to them. “We caution against overinterpreting the numbers of this analysis because of the large uncertainty in how the economic and ideological shift in U.S. governance will affect greenhouse gas emissions,” they write.
Indeed, some aspects of the analysis seem less realistic than others. The idea that the United States could withdraw from the Paris process, and that could then crack things up enough that other countries also slow their own ambitions to cut emissions, is not an unreasonable fear. And as the study shows, that’s a bad enough outcome.
What’s harder to believe, though, is that a global turn away from clean energy research and development could be precipitated by U.S. actions. The clean-energy trend seems too firmly entrenched at this point. In this sector, a U.S. withdrawal seems more likely to give advantages to its competitors (China, Germany, and others) than to lead them to cut back on investments as well.
As for whether an actual increase in emissions could happen globally over the next eight years — that’s also uncertain. In the past three years, global emissions have appeared to flatten but have not yet gone down. Less coal burning in China and the United States appears to be a key driver of this trend. Once again, it’s not clear that the United States’ intransigence alone could set off more emissions growth in a world in which clean energy growth is looking pretty dynamic.
Still, despite using a very different methodology, the new analysis fits with the previous one by Climate Interactive. A Trump administration hostile to international climate agreements cannot substantially change the planet’s temperature alone over eight years — but it can cause considerably more of an impact if it leads other nations to halt their own actions, or to step back from the clean energy revolution.
It is important to reiterate that keeping global warming below 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels was already going to be extremely difficult no matter who the U.S. elected president — and that the climate impacts we have seen so far are already pretty grave.
So really, we are on a road to considerable damage no matter what, and likely some impacts that will be irreversible on any human time-scale. In this context, while we can’t know the future, we can definitely say that disengagement by the United States has the potential to make things worse — but that it will depend on how the entire world responds.
It is, after all, global warming.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2016/12/27/scientists-just-ran-the-numbers-on-how-much-trump-could-damage-the-planet/?utm_term=.900871047347#comments
-
Climateers Can’t Handle the Truth
Dec 27, 2016 | Wall Street Journal
By Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.
Congrats are due for the term “climate denialist,” which in 2016 migrated from Paul Krugman’s column to the news pages of the New York Times.
On Dec. 7, the term ascended to a place of ultimate honor when it figured in the headline, “Trump Picks Scott Pruitt, Climate Change Denialist, to Lead E.P.A.”
Unfortunately, never to be explained is precisely which climate propositions one must deny in order to qualify as a denialist. In zinging Mr. Pruitt, currently Oklahoma’s attorney general, the Times rests its unspoken case on a quote from an article this year in National Review, in which he and a coauthor wrote: “Scientists continue to disagree about the degree and extent of global warming and its connection to the actions of mankind.”
But this statement is plainly true. No climate scientist would dispute it. Through all five “assessment reports” of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change—sharer of Al Gore’s Nobel prize—the central puzzle has been “climate sensitivity,” aka the “degree and extent” of human impact on climate.
Greenpeace adopts the same National Review article to attack Mr. Pruitt, lying that he and a coauthor “claimed the science of climate change is ‘far from settled.’”
The science is not settled (science never is), but this is not what Mr. Pruitt was referring to. His plain, unmistakable words refer to a “major policy debate” that is “far from settled”—a statement that indisputably applies even among ardent believers in climate doom. Witness the battle between wings of the environmental movement over the role of nuclear power. Witness veteran campaigner James Hansen’s dismissal of the Paris agreement, which other climate campaigners celebrate, as “worthless words.”
These lies about what Mr. Pruitt wrote in a widely available article aren’t the lies of authors carried away by enthusiasm for their cause. They are the lies of people who know their employers and audiences are beyond caring.
Which brings us a two-part article in the New York Review of Books by representatives of the Rockefeller family charity, desperately trying to make the world care about their fantasy that Exxon is somehow a decisive player in the policy debate—Exxon, not voters who oppose higher energy taxes; Exxon, not the governments that control 80% of the world’s fossil fuel reserves and show no tendency to forgo the money available from them.
The Rockefeller family’s charitable attachment to the climate cause is understandable, though. Their money might instead be used to bring clean water to poor villages, immunize kids against disease, or improve education. But such programs can be evaluated and found wanting due to fraud or incompetence, whereas climate change is a cause to which money can safely be devoted to no effect whatsoever without fear of criticism.
Twenty years before his successor became Mr. Trump’s nominee to be secretary of state, Exxon’s then-CEO Lee Raymond gave a much vilified speech in China—a much misrepresented speech, too.
He did not say humans were not influencing climate, but the degree was highly uncertain, and future warming was not a “rock-solid certainty,” he said.
He could not have known he was speaking near the peak of an observed warming trend, and that relatively little or no warming would be recorded over the next 20 years.
He said poor countries would and should choose economic growth over suppressing fossil fuel use. They did, and some one billion fewer people today are living in extreme poverty (as defined by the World Bank).
He said fossil energy would continue to fuel economic prosperity, though consumption growth would moderate with increased efficiency, and as poor countries devoted a share of their increasing wealth to environmental improvement. He was right.
He predicted that technology would open up new reserves to fuel the global economy, though he didn’t mention and perhaps didn’t know about fracking.
All in all, it was a performance, in many fewer words, far more cogent than the Rockefeller pieces, notable mainly for their childishness about both climate science and climate politics.
Donald Trump, our new president-elect, has been tagged for indiscriminately referring to climate change as a hoax. Here’s what he actually said at a campaign rally in South Carolina one year ago about climate advocacy: “It’s a money-making industry, OK? It’s a hoax, a lot of it.”
This statement, with its clearly framed qualifications, is true and accurate in every detail. It’s a statement of basic truth that can be embraced, and increasingly should be, by exactly those people most concerned about man-made climate change.
Yet it won’t be, for reasons demonstrated by the New York Times’ adoption of the term climate denialist, whose deliberately non-discriminating function we now take care to state precisely: It enables a kind of journalism that is unable—incapacitates itself—to stumble on truths that would be inconvenient to climate religion.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/climateers-cant-handle-the-truth-1482882375
-
How Will Trump Handle Climate Regulation? Watch The Skies
Dec 28, 2016 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By David Schultz
If you're looking for an early signal on how soon-to-be President Donald Trump will handle the issue of climate change, you might want to keep your eyes on the skies.
Sometime next year, the Trump administration will need to decide whether to move forward with new carbon dioxide standards for airplanes. Its decision here could indicate whether the incoming president opposes reining in greenhouse gasses in all circumstances, or only when doing so could hurt business interests.
That's because, unlike with many other climate regulations, U.S. aviation companies have embraced the regulation of carbon dioxide from its industry's jets.
These companies fear that federal inaction here will put them at a disadvantage with their foreign counterparts once a set of landmark international greenhouse gas standards goes into effect in a few years. They also worry about the precedent that would be set by a reversal on an international agreement that the U.S. agreed to under the current administration.
“This issue is put to bed already. Why pick this fight?” Edward Smith, head of international and environmental affairs with the General Aviation Manufacturers Association, told Bloomberg BNA. “It would make the U.S. industry less competitive around the world. It would be like suicide. It would be ridiculous.”
The Trump transition team did not respond to requests for comment from Bloomberg BNA.
International Standards
The ball will be in the Trump administration's court next year, after a 2016 that saw the international community enact major carbon dioxide emissions standards for aircraft.
Though the aviation industry emits a small fraction of the world's greenhouse gasses—well under 5 percent by most estimates—its emissions are growing more rapidly than those from cars, power plants or any other industrial sector, according to Vera Pardee, an attorney with the Center for Biological Diversity, who has been leading the charge for carbon standards in the U.S.
In October, the general assembly of the UN's International Civil Aviation Organization adopted standards for new airplane designs that would begin to take effect in 2020. The measure, which was supported by the U.S. and dozens of other countries, would require a minimum level of fuel efficiency from all jet engines in new plane models.
The next step will be for federal authorities in all of the parties to ICAO to formally write these new standards into law in their respective countries.
The Obama administration, through its Environmental Protection Agency, already laid the groundwork for this earlier this year. In July, the EPA finalized its aircraft endangerment finding, a formal declaration that carbon emissions from airplanes threaten the environment via climate change and should be regulated under the Clean Air Act.
Aviation Pain
But despite this requirement, the Trump administration has several options at its disposal if it doesn't want to enact CO2 standards for airplanes. It could attempt to rescind the endangerment finding or simply delay enacting the aircraft standards, though that may spur new lawsuits from environmental advocates.
Regardless of the method used, if Trump's EPA fails to adopt the ICAO carbon dioxide standards into law, there will be real self-inflicted damage to the U.S. aviation industry, according to several industry trade groups that spoke to Bloomberg BNA.
Smith, of the aviation manufacturers group, said U.S. aircraft manufacturers like Boeing and Lockheed Martin would feel the pain most acutely; once the ICAO standards take effect, it would become uncertain whether they would still be able to sell their planes overseas in countries that adopted the international rules. These countries may not accept planes made by U.S. companies if there's no federal agency that can certify the planes meet international standards, he said.
“It's a global industry,” Smith said. “The manufacturing, supply chain and market for all planes in the world is global. Nobody is going to build a plane that you can only fly in half the world or a third of the world. That's crazy.”
Unraveling Agreements
An even bigger concern is that other countries will retaliate against U.S. aviation companies for reversing course on this international agreement, according to Leslie Riegle, director of environmental policy with the Aerospace Industries Association.
“It's really hard to predict. ... Taking away any part of that puzzle would be damaging to the industry,” Riegle said. “It's always a danger when you back away from a global agreement that there might be repercussions.”
And it's not just the aviation industry that's advocating for these emissions regulations. The National Association of Manufacturers, which fiercely opposed many of the Obama administration's environmental actions, called on Trump to commit to the ICAO standards to maintain “a level playing field for aircraft manufacturers” in the group's policy white paper for the incoming administration.
If the Trump administration does decide to implement the airplane standards, Riegle said, it doesn't have much room for delay since the agency's regulatory development process can take years and the ICAO rules take effect in 2020.
And Yet..
But while enacting these aircraft regulations would seem like a win-win for Trump, one that would simultaneously please business interests and counter the left's worst fears about him, there are plenty of indications he may choose not to.
Trump famously said on the campaign trail that climate change is a hoax, despite voluminous scientific data to the contrary. And, after winning the election, the president-elect has selected several people to serve in his cabinet who question the validity of climate science, such as Trump's pick to head the EPA, Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt (R). To adopt the ICAO aircraft standards, the Trump administration would have to at least tacitly acknowledge that climate change is real.
Additionally, Trump has not shied away from threatening to renegotiate or outright withdraw the U.S. from other international agreements, such as NAFTA, the Paris climate accord and even NATO.
And, to make matters even more complicated, Trump's relationship with airline manufacturers is already strained after his recent social media melees with Boeing and Lockheed Martin over the cost of their government contracts.
http://news.bna.com/deln/DELNWB/split_display.adp?fedfid=102630962&vname=dennotallissues&fn=102630962&jd=102630962
-
Yeast Facilities Must Always Meet Air Toxics Limits, EPA Proposes
Dec 28, 2016 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Rachel Leven
Yeast manufacturers would be required to comply with existing air toxics emission limits for all fermentation batches—instead of with 98 percent of batches—under a soon-to-be-published Environmental Protection Agency proposed rule.
The changes, which would affect any facility manufacturing baker's yeast by fermentation, are in response to the 2008 U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia court ruling in Sierra Club v. EPA that vacated parts of a rule that exempted sources from complying with otherwise applicable Clean Air Act section 112(d) emission standards “during periods of startup, shutdown, and malfunction.”
The EPA is proposing to change parts of the yeast-related rule that are “in direct conflict with the statutory requirement that emission standards apply at all times,” the agency said in the notice to be published Dec. 28 in the Federal Register.
The proposed National Emission Standards for Hazardous Air Pollutants updates (RIN:2060-AS93) for the sector also would change testing, monitoring, recordkeeping and reporting requirements and “lead to a slight decrease in the overall emissions from the facilities.” It would cost the industry $172,000 annually, the EPA said.
The testing and monitoring requirements would improve facility-specific emissions data reliability to ensure emission limits are consistently met, it said.
Yeast manufacturers also would have an option to average their volatile organic compound emissions over a 12-month period, but would be required to meet a slightly more stringent emission standard under that method, the EPA said. The proposal also would remove emission limit exemptions during periods of malfunction, it said.
The EPA will accept comments on its proposed rule for 45 days through Feb. 13 under the docket number EPA-HQ-OAR-2015-0730.
http://news.bna.com/deln/DELNWB/split_display.adp?fedfid=102630968&vname=dennotallissues&fn=102630968&jd=102630968
Industry and Association News
LCSA News - There are no clips to report at this time.
Chemical Management News
Energy News
Chemical Security News
Transportation News - There are no clips to report at this time.
Environment News
Add recipients
Suggested