Preview Newsletter
ACC PM 6/10/17
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(ACC Mentioned) EU Rules out Tax on Plastic Products to Reduce Waste
Oct 6, 2017 | The Guardian
By Fiona Harvey
The EU has ruled out penalties on single-use plastic products, in favour of raising public awareness of the damage consumer plastics are doing to the world’s oceans. -
NAM Defends Meeting With Pruitt
Oct 6, 2017 | Inside EPA
The National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) is defending its March meeting with EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, amid rising criticism that the administrator meets mostly with industry. -
(ACC Mentioned) Report: U.S. Imported 705 Metric Tons of Raw Asbestos in 2016
Oct 6, 2017 | Asbestos.com
By Matt Mauney
New data from the Department of Commerce and the U.S. International Trade Commission show the amount of raw asbestos imported to the U.S. nearly doubled from 2015 to 2016. -
Harvey Closures Barely Touched Exporters' Bottom Line
Oct 6, 2017 | E&E Energywire
By Nathanial Gronewold
Hurricane Harvey barely made a dent in U.S. energy export revenues, according to new data from the U.S. Census Bureau and the Bureau of Economic Analysis. -
Eagle Ford Shales Fuels $50 Billion in Corpus Christi Port Projects
Oct 6, 2017 | San Antonio Express-News
By Jennifer Hiller
This year, the U.S. Energy Information Administration expects the U.S. to become a net exporter of natural gas. It already surpassed Russia in 2009 to become the world’s largest natural gas producer. -
Quakes Linked to Actual Fracking 'Rare,' State Says
Oct 6, 2017 | E&E Energywire
By Mike Soraghan
State officials in Oklahoma say a rough analysis of earthquakes near "frack jobs" shows how rarely the specific practice of hydraulic fracturing is linked to seismic shaking. -
U.S. Shale Growth Could Be Waning
Oct 6, 2017 | E&E Energywire
American shale drillers are showing signs of slowing output, as drilling expenses rise in the hottest oil fields and innovation eases. -
Studies Attack Conventional Wisdom on Natural Gas
Oct 6, 2017 | E&E Greenwire
By Christa Marshall
One paper from a Massachusetts Institute of Technology team found technology advances with fracking and drilling are not playing nearly as large a role as thought in boosting oil and gas production from shale. -
TRI Data Shows Few Facilities Violating Major Programs, IG Finds
Oct 6, 2017 | Inside EPA
EPA's Inspector General (IG) in a new report reviewing data submitted to the agency's Toxics Release Inventory (TRI) finds that few facilities are violating major regulatory programs, such as the Clean Air Act Risk Management Program (RMP) and Clean Water Act (CWA) discharge permitting mandates. -
Gov't Fears Achilles Heel Is Energy Industry Supply Chain
Oct 6, 2017 | E&E Energywire
By Blake Sobczak
Three years ago, hackers hijacked the websites of three different energy industry suppliers to sneak past oil, gas and power companies' digital defenses. -
EPA to Argue Obama Climate Rule Violates Law: Report
Oct 6, 2017 | The Hill - E2 Wire
By Devin Henry
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is reportedly set to repeal the Obama administration’s landmark climate rule for power plants, arguing that it violates federal law. -
EPA Moves to Repeal Obama Climate Rule 'in Its Entirety'
Oct 6, 2017 | The Hill - E2 Wire
By Timothy Cama and Devin Henry
The Trump administration will soon propose repealing the Obama administration’s climate change rule for power plants, but won’t commit to replacing it with another regulation. -
Industrial Emissions Drop 2%, Led by Power Sector — EPA
Oct 6, 2017 | E&E Greenwire
Greenhouse gas emissions fell 2 percent last year at the biggest U.S. industrial facilities, led by major cuts in the power sector, according to data released yesterday by U.S. EPA. -
Deputy Pick Waged Behind-Scenes War Against Climate Bills
Oct 6, 2017 | E&E Climatewire
By Robin Bravender and Niina Heikkinen
President Trump's nominee to be second in command at U.S. EPA helped kill bipartisan climate legislation during his time as a top Senate aide.
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(ACC Mentioned) EU Rules out Tax on Plastic Products to Reduce Waste
Oct 6, 2017 | The Guardian
By Fiona Harvey
The EU has ruled out penalties on single-use plastic products, in favour of raising public awareness of the damage consumer plastics are doing to the world’s oceans.
Frans Timmermans, vice president of the European commission, said a tax would “not be sustainable”, but that changing the way plastic was produced and used could work. “The only sustainable method is to create recyclable plastic and take out microplastics. You can’t take out microplastics with a tax. You need to make sure things are reused, and not put in the ocean.”
He said the commission was working with manufacturers to help change their products and packaging. Karmenu Vella, environment commissioner, also pledged that the EU’s long-awaited plastics strategy would be published by the end of the year.
The European commission cannot raise taxes directly, but can encourage member states to do so, and can impose other penalties, as with the emissions trading scheme to reduce carbon from heavy industry.
Timmermans rejected outright charges and taxes on single-use plastic, and was reluctant to consider legislative measures, but called instead for public information campaigns on the problems plastics cause. “It is not that we, through legislation, should force [producers of plastic to change], though if we have to we might, but through public awareness, to urge countries to raise awareness,” he said.
“Nothing disciplines companies more than consumer practices. We are on the verge of changing consumer habits. I sense a turning point, like that we saw 10 to 15 years ago on climate change,” he told journalists at the Our Ocean conferencein Malta.
“That was what happened with recycling. Who made us recycle? Our kids. I don’t think there is one producer of consumer goods that would go against the grain of public awareness.”
At present, only about 6% of plastic waste is recycled within the EU. In part, this is because of the many different forms of plastic that are used in consumer goods, and the difficulty of returning them to the kind of versatility that virgin plastics enjoy. But Timmermans said consumers would accept “less flashy” and less aesthetically pleasing packaging, if they understood it would help remove pollution from the oceans.
Vella added that companies should design plastic products with reuse in mind from the outset: “The circular economy is the most effective way to deal with plastics.”
He promised that the forthcoming plastics strategy would include design, recycling, biodegradable plastics, single-use plastics and microplastics.
The commission is also to remove single-use plastics, including drinking vessels, from its own offices by the end of this year.
The commission is to devote €550m (£490m) to projects that improve the health of the oceans, from marine protection zones and satellite monitoring, to plastic waste disposal. At the conference, more than €6bn was pledged in total by governments, institutions and private sector companies towards efforts to combat overfishing, pollution, plastic waste, ocean acidification and other threats to the marine environment.
This included a pledge of $150m (£115m) from a group of NGOs and companies to prevent plastic waste reaching oceans in south-east Asia. Five countries – China, Indonesia, Philippines, Vietnam and Thailand – are responsible for half of all the plastic waste that enters the oceans globally each year. In those countries, on average less than 40% of plastic waste is recycled. The organisations include PepsiCo, Procter & Gamble, 3M, the American Chemistry Council, the World Plastics Council and Oceana.
Insurers are also taking action against illegal fishing, with several of the world’s biggest companies pledging to stop insuring vessels that have been pirate fishing. Illegal fishing costs the world an estimated $10bn to $23bn a year, amounting to about 25m tonnes of fish that are taken from waters against quotas, or in contravention of national fisheries rights and policies. The insurers include Allianz, Axa, Generali, Hanseatic Underwriters, and The Shipowners’ Club.
However, the environment lawyers ClientEarth said laws against illegal fishing in the EU were being undermined by failures among member states.
Analysing the enforcement system in six of the EU’s biggest fishing countries – France, Spain, the Netherlands, Poland, Ireland and the UK – the lawyers found none were properly implementing the anti-piracy regulations of the Common Fisheries Policy, and the level of sanctions against offenders was low.
Elisabeth Druel, lawyer at ClientEarth, said authorities were doing little to combat illegal fishing. “Strong and systematic sanctions are needed to deter illegal fishing and pay for the damage done to our marine environment. The fishing industry would have us believe they are heavily inspected and sanctioned, but our research shows that is just not the case.”
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/oct/06/eu-rules-out-tax-on-plastic-products-to-reduce-waste
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NAM Defends Meeting With Pruitt
Oct 6, 2017 | Inside EPA
The National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) is defending its March meeting with EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, amid rising criticism that the administrator meets mostly with industry.
In an Oct. 4 blog post “Yes, Manufacturers Met With Scott Pruitt. Here’s Why That’s A Good Thing,” Ross Eisenberg, NAM's vice president of energy and resources policy, argues that meetings between EPA and industry bolster agency rules.
He says that NAM regularly invites top EPA officials to meetings and used the meeting with Pruitt to press for adequate agency funding to implement new toxics rules, among other things.
“We asked him to put resources into the Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention, so it can properly implement the Lautenberg Chemical Safety Act, the overwhelmingly bipartisan chemical safety law put into place in 2016,” the blog says.
Pruitt met with NAM officials March 6 at the group's spring board of directors meeting in Scottsdale, AZ.
NAM's defense of the March meeting comes after an Oct. 3 report, from the New York Times on Pruitt's extensive meetings with top industry officials -- and the topics discussed at each. The report escalated controversy over Pruitt's schedule, which has included scores of meetings with industry groups, as well as mostly Republican elected officials
The Times also quotes William Reilly, the EPA chief under President H.W. Bush, who called the number of meetings between Pruitt and industry unusual.
EPA has rejected Reilly's suggestion and strongly defended Pruitt's schedule. “As E.P.A. has been the poster child for regulatory overreach, the agency is now meeting with those ignored by the Obama administration,” the agency told the Times in a statement.
Eisenberg echoes EPA's stance, noting that the group had invited Obama EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy to attend board meetings in September 2014, December 2014, and September 2015but she declined.
Eisenberg argues that meetings between EPA and regulated businesses strengthen agency rules, and that McCarthy's refusal to take similar meetings led to weaker Obama-era rules that have struggled in the courts.
“It certainly would have been helpful as the EPA put the finishing touches on the Ozone standard (final rule, October 2015), the Waters of the U.S. regulation (final rule, June 2015), and the Clean Power Plan (final rule, August 2015), the latter two of which were held up by federal courts and are receiving thorough reexaminations,” he says.
Eisenberg also faults the Obama EPA for declining to meet with manufacturers prior to issuing the 2012 “Boiler MACT” regulation that governs the type of boilers manufacturers operate and how they use them. “It didn’t and manufacturers are still feeling the after-effects,” he says.
“That’s what we should want: good government based on the best data. A steady flow of information between manufacturers and the agencies that regulate them,” Eisenberg says. “We’ll continue to invite EPA leadership to address our board, no matter who is in charge. Manufacturers strongly support the EPA’s mission to protect health and the environment."
Eisenberg says that during the Pruitt meeting NAM board members faulted certain EPA rules while pressing for timely implementation of others.
https://insideepa.com/daily-feed/nam-defends-meeting-pruitt
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(ACC Mentioned) Report: U.S. Imported 705 Metric Tons of Raw Asbestos in 2016
Oct 6, 2017 | Asbestos.com
By Matt Mauney
New data from the Department of Commerce and the U.S. International Trade Commission show the amount of raw asbestos imported to the U.S. nearly doubled from 2015 to 2016.
The federal organizations estimate 705 metric tons of raw asbestos was imported last year — a significant and alarming increase from the reported 343 metric tons imported in 2015.
Asbestos, a known carcinogen, is highly regulated but still used in the U.S., mainly by the chloralkali industry, which uses asbestos diaphragms in its chlorine manufacturing process. It is also found in imported clutches and brake linings, gaskets, cement corrugated sheets and other products.
Mining asbestos in the U.S. is illegal, and the last domestic production of asbestos products ceased in 2002. But despite more than 60 countries around the world having comprehensive asbestos bans, the U.S. continues to import the toxic mineral in large quantities.
“So many Americans believe asbestos is a problem of the past, but this is cold, hard, proof that it’s not only a current, but a growing issue,” Linda Reinstein, president and co-founder of the Asbestos Disease Awareness Organization, told Asbestos.com. “Coupled with this increase in imports is concerning data from the Center for Disease Control from March 2017 that shows a nearly 5 percent increase in mesothelioma death rates.”Spike in Asbestos Imports Attributed to TSCA
The surge in asbestos imports is attributed to the revamped Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA), which recently included asbestos among the top 10 dangerous chemicals the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) must review.
Under the reformed, bipartisan legislation — passed in late 2016 — the EPA can complete an in-depth review of asbestos, which could eventually lead to a comprehensive ban. However, risk evaluations could take years to complete, and the legislation allows two years to mitigate a hazard once it’s deemed an unreasonable risk.
Furthermore, anti-asbestos advocates fear the changes to TSCA could fall flat under the Trump administration and EPA head Scott Pruitt. In June, the Pruitt-led EPA released a series of limitations on TSCA rules, including how broadly the agency will review potentially hazardous substances, including asbestos.
Environmental groups and congressional Democrats particularly fear the appointment of Nancy Beck as the EPA’s deputy assistant administrator and the nomination of Michael Dourson to lead the agency’s Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention.
Before joining the EPA in April, Beck served as the senior director at the American Chemistry Council, the chemical industry’s leading lobbying group.
Dourson is a toxicologist who specializes in environmental risk assessment, but much of his research has been funded by varying chemical interest groups: American Petroleum Institute, Beck’s American Chemistry Council and the American Cleaning Institute. If appointed, Dourson would regulate the same industries that financed his research.
Critics fear under this leadership, safety standards for chemicals and pesticides would weaken, putting the American public at risk.
Reinstein noted the chloralkali industry is lobbying hard for a “safe and controlled use” exemption from any forthcoming TSCA regulations.
“If they succeed, they’ll be free to import as much asbestos as they want for this use,” she said. “Given that the chloralkali industry is the singular user of raw asbestos, any ban that allows them to continue importing and using asbestos is no ban at all and will signal the failure of 2016 TSCA reforms.”Russia, China Still Lead Asbestos Production
According to a recent report from the U.S. Geological Survey, global production of asbestos is likely to remain steady at an estimated 2 million metric tons each year.
In 2016, roughly 95 percent of asbestos imported to the U.S. came from Brazil. The remaining 5 percent came from Russia, which leads the world in mine production with 1.1 million metric tons each of the last two years.
China is second with 400,000 metric tons while Brazil is a close third with 300,000 metric tons in 2016. Of the top five producers of asbestos, only Brazil and Kazakhstan saw a reduction in mine production from 2015-16.
Around the world, asbestos-cement products remained the leading market for the toxic mineral, especially in developing countries.
In the U.S., the chloralkali industry remains the top user of asbestos imports.
“It is incredulous that, in the face of such harrowing facts, the chloralkali industry continues to peddle their ‘safe use’ propaganda to the EPA, the public, and their shareholders,” Dr. Richard Lemen, former assistant U.S. surgeon general and current co-chair of the ADAO’s science advisory board said in a press release. “If the EPA does not put a stop to this environmental and public health disaster now with a complete asbestos ban, more innocent Americans will die preventable deaths due to bureaucratic inaction.”
https://www.asbestos.com/news/2017/10/06/asbestos-imports-double-united-states/
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Harvey Closures Barely Touched Exporters' Bottom Line
Oct 6, 2017 | E&E Energywire
By Nathanial Gronewold
Hurricane Harvey barely made a dent in U.S. energy export revenues, according to new data from the U.S. Census Bureau and the Bureau of Economic Analysis.
Harvey's landfall in southeast Texas forced the nation's most vital energy export hubs to close for days. Nothing came into and out of the Houston Ship Channel for almost a week. Terminals at Corpus Christi that export oil and refined products were also shuttered for days.
But trade data published yesterday show that Harvey did not hit exporters' bottom line much after all. Even if export volumes fell some, higher oil and natural gas prices may have offset any decline.
Census says the U.S. exported some $1.15 billion worth of crude oil in August. The drop is relatively insignificant compared with earlier months. Oil exports were valued at about $1.3 billion in July and just under $1.2 billion in June.
Data on sales of liquefied natural gas (LNG) also show only a slight decline in August figures. The U.S. sold the world $228.5 million worth of LNG the month Harvey hit. That's only slightly down from LNG sales of $243 million in July and $252 million in June.
Government trade statisticians say they can't rule out data that show some impact from Harvey and other hurricanes as revisions are later made, but thus far none can be detected as exports are reported to them now.
"The effects of the recent hurricanes will be embedded in source data that the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) and the U.S. Census Bureau use to produce trade in goods and services statistics," they said in BEA's report yesterday. "However, these effects generally cannot be isolated, and, thus, BEA and the Census Bureau cannot separately quantify the impacts of the hurricanes."
The trade data also show no significant changes in the value of exports for U.S. refined fuel products during August compared with previous months.
https://www.eenews.net/energywire/2017/10/06/stories/1060062839
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Eagle Ford Shales Fuels $50 Billion in Corpus Christi Port Projects
Oct 6, 2017 | San Antonio Express-News
By Jennifer Hiller
Where the coastal prairie meets Corpus Christi Bay, stubborn sunflowers bloom in the hard-packed earth and 90 construction cranes draw slashes across the blue sky.
From this spot, Houston-based Cheniere Energy in 2019 expects to launch global shipments of natural gas produced in Texas shale fields.
The idea would have sounded absurd a decade ago, when everyone thought the U.S. was running out of oil and natural gas.
Instead, the burgeoning export plant, on the remnants of a ranch that once spanned 1 million Coastal Bend acres, is one of the latest examples of the turnaround in the domestic energy industry.
After a decades-long slide, U.S. oil and gas production have surged with shale drilling, the process of using water, chemicals and sand pumped at high pressure to shatter tight rock. The mud of ancient sea beds buried deep in the earth holds vast stores of oil, but resembles a hard, black countertop, and no one could produce oil and gas from it before fracking.
National oil production next year is expected to reach around 9.9 million barrels per day and surpass the previous high of 9.6 million barrels per day from 1970. This year, the U.S. Energy Information Administration expects the U.S. to become a net exporter of natural gas. It already surpassed Russia in 2009 to become the world’s largest natural gas producer.
The rush of new hydrocarbons into the U.S. market has spurred billions in port construction and new pipelines, helped create a glut of oil on the world market, and is changing the mix of electric power generation in both the U.S. and Mexico.
The Port of Corpus Christi now exports more crude oil than any other U.S. port, around 316,000 barrels per day, more than double its daily exports last year.
Mexico, which has vast natural gas reserves but can’t keep pace with the demands of its growing population, has turned to Texas natural gas. In May, U.S. pipeline exports of natural gas to Mexico reached 129 billion cubic feet, more than double the level of May 2014, and most of it came from Texas.
The Cheniere liquefied natural gas plant, in Portland across the bay from Corpus Christi, is like a city under construction all at once, and everything is Texas-sized — from the $10 billion price tag for the first phase of construction, to the more than 5,000 workers on site every day. Hurricane Harvey made landfall on Aug. 25 in Rockport about 15 miles north as the crow flies. The Ctegory 4 storm caused workers to move equipment to high ground and evacaute, but put the Port of Corpus Christi on the weaker side of the hurricane. Harvey left only cosmetic damage at the Cheniere site.
Construction is about 70 percent complete, and wasn’t slowed much by Harvey. Already, a 48-inch, 23-mile pipeline is in the ground to deliver natural gas from Sinton to the plant, where it will move through the long, rectangular units called “trains” that super cool methane gas. At -260 Fahrenheit, methane becomes liquid and condenses to 1/600th the volume of its gaseous state, making it possible to export by ship.
Two concrete storage tanks, which employees refer to as the Yeti coolers of the plant, will hold the LNG until it’s loaded onto special tankers.
“These tanks are big enough to store a 747 inside,” said construction manager Keith Hendricks. “Basically it’s 42 million gallons of LNG.”
Across Corpus Christi Bay from the Cheniere mini-city, at the Port of Corpus Christi offices, chief commercial officer Jarl Pederson talked about how the port became the first in 2015 to export crude oil when Congress lifted a decades-old export ban. Last year the port exported products to 26 countries.
“All the story is about the energy renaissance in the United States,” Pederson said. “It’s a large global shift.”
The Cheniere project is part of $50 billion in construction and investment happening in and around the port — all projects announced in the years after shale oil was first discovered in the field just north of Corpus Christi, the Eagle Ford Shale.
Though the Eagle Ford is known for oil, it started as a gas field in 2008 and 2009. Prices dropped though — thanks to shale gas discoveries across the U.S. and the classic economic theory of supply and demand — and producers started chasing the more profitable crude oil.
In oil wells that happened to be drilled far from existing natural gas pipelines, many companies burned off the natural gas as an unwanted byproduct that was too expensive to get to market. Natural gas flaring is common still in the Eagle Ford, but most of that natural gas makes it to market, and it has been there all along. Although gas has been overshadowed by oil, Webb County, the southernmost reach of the Eagle Ford before the formation continues across the Rio Grande into Mexico, is the state’s biggest producer of natural gas.
Much of the Eagle Ford’s hydrocarbons flow to Corpus Christi for refining and manufacturing. The port can receive around 2 million barrels per day of crude oil now, but there are six new pipeline projects in the works to connect the booming Permian Basin oil field in West Texas to the port — even more product that will ultimately get exported.
“We think at least a couple of those will be built,” Pederson said. “It will have to go to export. The U.S. is not consuming it. We’re not building new refineries to process it.”
So far, Cheniere is the only company to have shipped LNG from U.S. shale fields abroad, all from its LNG plant and terminal in Sabine Pass, Louisiana. The first tanker sailed last year. In August, the company announced it had become the country’s largest physical purchaser of natural gas, buying nearly 3 billion cubic feet per day.
Despite rhetoric this year about trade wars and the renegotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement, the export of oil and natural gas appear — on the surface at least — to have political support.
The Trump administration has described the LNG industry as a critical part of expanding the domestic energy industry.
Cheniere has even gotten the presidential shout-out. In June, President Trump highlighted a deal between Cheniere and South Korea. During a joint appearance with South Korean President Moon Jae-in, Trump talked about the 20-year agreement to make 3.5 million tons of LNG available to Korea Gas Corp. each year.
“This month Cheniere is sending its first shipment of American liquefied natural gas to South Korea in a deal worth more than $25 billion,” Trump said during a speech at the White House.
Vice President Mike Pence in July touted a Lithuanian firm’s decision to purchase U.S. LNG, saying, “it will benefit not only our prosperity, but it will contribute to regional security and stability.”
In August when it was delivered, the U.S. State Department highlighted the shipment again as it arrived in Lithuania, noting that it was more than a dozen sent to Europe by Cheniere out of Sabine Pass this year.
Not everyone sees LNG exports as good for business, though.
U.S. manufacturers argue that LNG exports could deplete domestic supplies and cause natural gas price spikes.
Some point to Australia, one of the world’s largest LNG exporters, where the government said earlier this year said it would tamp down on exports because they were causing domestic prices to rise. Customers in eastern Australia were paying more for gas than Japanese customers receiving the country’s LNG, and it was not popular.
In a letter sent to Energy Secretary Rick Perry in August, the Industrial Energy Consumers Alliance asked him to stop issuing permits for new LNG export terminals that would send natural gas produced in U.S. fields to countries without a free-trade agreement, such as the one Canada and Mexico have with the U.S.
U.S. oil and gas producers counter that the country has abundant natural gas. The government estimates there’s 86 years of supply in the ground still.
It’s not just LNG that’s controversial in some quarters. The utilities industry has questioned the increasing use of natural gas for electricity generation, too. About a third of electricity generation was from natural gas last year.
The Department of Energy in August released a much-anticipated study on grid reliability and security, which noted that coal-and nuclear-fired power plants have been shutting down because of cheap natural gas, not because of environmental regulations. (Utility-scale wind and solar are also beating nuclear and coal on price).
Last week, Perry followed up that report and directed the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to consider setting rates that would require utilities to pay coal and nuclear plants for all of the full costs and all of the power they produce, compensating them for the full value of their “reliability” — the idea that they are important to stabilize the grid because wind and solar are intermittent sources.
That move created strange bedfellows. The oil and gas industry, the solar industry and the wind industry have teamed up to oppose Perry’s idea.
The American Petroleum Institute this year also issued a report defending the use of natural gas-fired power plants.
The report argues that natural gas has a “unique ability to support grid operations across the board” because it’s cheap and reliable — natural gas plants can be fired up at will when needed, the same as coal or nuclear plants. The oil and gas industry has tried strategically position natural gas as an ideal compliment to solar and wind.
Marty Durbin, API chief strategy officer and executive vice president, said the study was in the works for two years after API noticed that natural gas electric generation was drawing criticism within the utilities industry.
“It’s a disrupting force in the market,” Durbin said. “What we started to see was some individual utilities say we can’t be too reliant on natural gas. You don’t know what’s going to happen to the cost.”
Durbin said the supply of U.S. natural gas keeps getting “bigger and bigger,” though.
Cris Eugster, chief operating officer at San Antonio’s municipally-owned CPS Energy, said that proximity to the Eagle Ford Shale is one of the reasons the utility bought the Rio Nogales natural gas combined cycle power plant in 2012 to replace an aging coal-fired plant.
“This is right on the edge of the Eagle For Shale, so this gas is Texas gas,” said Eugster. “The problem and challenge with natural gas before shale happened it was a highly volatile fuel… you could have price spikes and there was a lot of volatility in the price of gas. With shale, I think that whole picture’s changed. Now gas is a lot more plentiful.”
Eugster noted the lack of volatility in natural gas prices since 2008 and 2009. “So I think that also bodes well from a cost standpoint that you have that kind of stability in your fuel source with this type of asset,” he said.
The natural gas industry has been in a rut of low oil prices for a long time — a good thing for customers like CPS, or for residential customers who use natural gas for cooking and heating, or for a company like Cheniere that wants to buy low at home and sell high abroad. A decade ago, prices soared above $13 per million British thermal units, but are hovering around $3 now.
Texas Railroad Commissioner Ryan Sitton said in a recent interview that he’s more bullish on natural gas than on crude oil for the long term, though.
“Which one has the greater upward mobility in the next five years? I think it’s actually gas,” Sitton said. “There’s almost no way for it to go down and a lot of potential for it to go up.”
It will take a combination of things to raise natural gas prices, though — everything from more exports to Mexico by pipe, LNG exports to Asia or Europe, increasing use of natural gas for utility generation, and having more fleet trucks switch to using compressed natural gas as a fuel instead of diesel, Sitton said.
If prices rise to $4 or $5 per British thermal unit, “We won’t be flaring anything. They’ll be building all the pipelines they can to capture that,” Sitton said.
For now, the abundance of low-cost natural gas in the U.S. has found a willing buyer in neighboring Mexico.
Mexico has its own shale and conventional natural gas reserves, which have been the subject of speculation as the country opens its oil and gas fields to outside investment for the first time since the 1930s. Mexico’s state oil company, Petróleos Mexicanos, or Pemex, controlled nearly every aspect of the nation’s oil production and distribution since 1938, but Mexican officials decided in 2013 to end that monopoly.
It hasn’t been able to develop its own gas fields quickly enough, though. Last year, Mexico imported 53 percent of the natural gas that it used, according to its Ministry of Energy. What it can’t bring in by pipeline from Texas or produce itself, it’s bringing in by LNG tanker. LNG import terminals also help Mexico solve another energy infrastructure need — the LNG tanks also act as storage facilities.
Antonio Garza, former ambassador to Mexico and a former Railroad Commissioner, said Mexico’s energy reform aims to boost its own natural gas production in the long-term, but market forces are at work now.
“This means that as prices stay low, it makes more business sense to import cheap natural gas rather than invest more to produce it domestically,” Garza said. “But if natural gas prices rise — for example, as new U.S. LNG terminals begin exporting natural gas to other regions — then we could see more interest in developing Mexico’s natural gas reserves and infrastructure.”
Daren Gursel, analyst with the research and consulting firm Wood Mackenzie, said Mexico has seen increasing demand for natural gas for electric generation at the same time its own gas production has stagnated and plummeted. It’s not a quick thing to turn around, so Mexico is trying to complete hundreds of miles of pipeline to connect with Texas.
“Mexico relies more on the U.S. in the coming years,” Gursel said.
In the first seven months of the year, the U.S. sent 39 LNG shipments to Mexico, according to the Department of Energy. It was the top country for U.S. exports, where 23 percent of domestic LNG was delivered, and all of the cargoes originated at Cheniere’s Sabine Pass plant.
http://www.expressnews.com/business/article/Eagle-Ford-Shales-fuels-50-billion-in-Corpus-12258528.php
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Quakes Linked to Actual Fracking 'Rare,' State Says
Oct 6, 2017 | E&E Energywire
By Mike Soraghan
State officials in Oklahoma say a rough analysis of earthquakes near "frack jobs" shows how rarely the specific practice of hydraulic fracturing is linked to seismic shaking.
The Oklahoma Corporation Commission (OCC) found 282 earthquakes from 2011 to 2016 that were located within 2 kilometers of a hydraulic fracturing operation and occurred within a week afterward.
The analysis looked at quakes of any magnitude. The Oklahoma Geological Survey list of earthquakes includes more than 23,000 earthquakes from 2011 to 2016, including magnitudes as low as 0.1.
"That's why we can say frack-linked quakes are rare," OCC spokesman Matt Skinner said of the analysis that the agency presented at its recent Oil and Gas Institute.
Most of those located close to a frack job were also close to an oil and gas wastewater disposal well, Skinner said. Such deep injection wells have been blamed for the swarms of quakes that have rattled the state in recent years.
But last year, officials started linking some relatively small earthquakes west of Oklahoma City to the fracturing, or "fracking," portion of the well construction process (Energywire, June 28).
So, in December, OCC officials developed a new set of protocols for companies if quakes are detected near their frack jobs.
The guidelines are voluntary, but OCC has the power to shut down an operation to address earthquake problems. And OCC officials stressed that companies are cooperating. Often the operators detected quakes on their own seismic arrays and took action, officials said.
Many people have attributed man-made quakes in the United States to fracking, although nearly all of the ones strong enough to be felt have been linked instead to the disposal of wastewater associated with drilling.
While many people use the term "fracking" to describe nearly all of the oil and gas production process, it actually refers to a specific part of well development when large volumes of chemical-laced water and sand are injected underground at high pressure to break open deep rock formations and release oil or gas.
https://www.eenews.net/energywire/2017/10/06/stories/1060062837
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U.S. Shale Growth Could Be Waning
Oct 6, 2017 | E&E Energywire
American shale drillers are showing signs of slowing output, as drilling expenses rise in the hottest oil fields and innovation eases.
The oil rig count grew just 6 percent in the third quarter, compared with average growth of over 20 percent in the previous four. The U.S. Energy Information Administration has also revised its production forecast for the year downward, from 9.82 million barrels per day to 9.69 million — a mark that would still, however, surpass the 1970 record of 9.6 million barrels.
Many investors are pushing companies to focus less on growth than on returns. One firm, Invesco Ltd., has urged several shale company boards to link company leaders' pay to returns instead of production.
"There are no new shale plays that have come forward," said Mark Papa, CEO at oil and gas producer Centennial Resource Development Inc. "Their ability to spew forth infinite streams of oil is really just a myth" (Olson/Cook, Wall Street Journal, Oct. 5). — DI
https://www.eenews.net/energywire/2017/10/06/stories/1060062807
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Studies Attack Conventional Wisdom on Natural Gas
Oct 6, 2017 | E&E Greenwire
By Christa Marshall
Two new studies are challenging common assumptions about natural gas production with repercussions in the "billions of dollars."
One paper from a Massachusetts Institute of Technology team found technology advances with fracking and drilling are not playing nearly as large a role as thought in boosting oil and gas production from shale.
Technology's role has been overstated by as much as 50 percent, and the recent boom is more due to companies increasingly targeting the best areas of basins, it said.
That suggests future production projections that hinge on technology advances — including those from the Energy Information Administration — may be far overestimated. Extraction costs also may be higher than expected.
As prime drilling spots get used up over time, technology may not be able to counter the loss in productivity from shifting to less desirable locations, said Francis O'Sullivan, director of research at the MIT Energy Initiative and co-author of the paper published in Applied Energy and highlighted this week by the university.
"We need to be careful not to assume that we will have an abundance of low-cost oil in the future. We may not have the same acreage left to drill in the future, so U.S. resources may not be as economical as some have thought," said O'Sullivan.
The study also raises questions about whether companies are wrongly investing on new technologies, such as new well designs.
"Companies make bets based on the assumption that technology can deliver certain productivity levels. There are billions of dollars at stake," said O'Sullivan. Companies are "better off spending more on good acreage," he said.
For more than three years, the researchers assessed North Dakota's Williston tight oil basin, where crude production grew from 98,000 barrels a day in 2005 to 1,174,000 barrels a day in 2015.
Even so, the findings are likely broadly applicable to other unconventional oil and gas plays, said Justin Montgomery , co-author and doctoral student in MIT's Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering.
Margaret Coleman, team lead in exploration and production analysis at EIA, said the study "makes some valid points." The EIA is always looking for ways to improve modeling, and "we appreciate the work of these authors," she said.
Coleman noted the agency is responsible for projections 25 years into the future that account for gas areas not currently active, in addition to areas like the Williston Basin.Similar footprint
The second study, released this week in Nature Energy, provides an unprecedented cradle-to-grave analysis of the land footprint of natural gas electricity, according to researchers from Johns Hopkins University, the University of Calgary and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory.
In a surprising discovery, they found the land-use needs of natural gas to be similar to wind and solar production, at least in some locations.
That diverts from a common argument that renewables require large land tracts and more space than fossil fuels, said Sarah Jordaan, assistant professor of energy, resources and environment at Johns Hopkins and co-author of the study.
Natural gas "can be comparable, and in some cases if best practices are not employed it can be greater than specific renewable energies" in terms of the land footprint, said Jordaan. More research is needed to make definitive comparisons between fuels, she said.
Previously, it was unclear how much land natural gas required from wellhead to power plant, since evaluations typically considered only one aspect of the supply chain or were based on estimates rather than actual physical measurements.
Garvin Heath, a senior scientist at NREL, said land use has not been thoroughly studied with nonrenewable resources partly because there are more steps in the chain.
More accurate data could lead to better assessments of everything from gas impacts on wildlife to property values, said Joseph Fargione, North American lead scientist at the Nature Conservancy in an accompanying article in Nature Energy. He noted that surface use agreements for oil and gas can require that land-use impacts be minimized, for example.
Although natural gas is associated with drilling, power plants required the greatest amount of land, along with processing facilities and gathering lines. Those are the low-pressure lines to transport gas from production site to collection point.
Research suggests reducing right of ways for gathering lines from 50 to 25 feet would lower the land footprint by almost half, Fargione said. Increasing the number of wells on a pad could cut land needs by more than 60 percent.
Researchers determined the land footprint using satellite images of a seven-county area of the Barnett Shale, combined with state data on production, processing and transport. The studied area produces 98 percent of the Barnett's gas.
In total, natural gas required about 0.62 square meters (6.67 feet) of space per megawatt-hour of power. While that applies to the Barnett, the team developed a formula that could be replicated and used to estimate the land footprint of other fuels like coal and nuclear.
Extrapolated out to midcentury, the data indicate that some 80,000 square kilometers (31,000 square miles) of space eventually may be needed to meet U.S. natural gas demand, said Fargione.
The Electric Power Research Institute and the Department of Energy provided funding for the land-use study.
https://www.eenews.net/greenwire/2017/10/06/stories/1060062933
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TRI Data Shows Few Facilities Violating Major Programs, IG Finds
Oct 6, 2017 | Inside EPA
EPA's Inspector General (IG) in a new report reviewing data submitted to the agency's Toxics Release Inventory (TRI) finds that few facilities are violating major regulatory programs, such as the Clean Air Act Risk Management Program (RMP) and Clean Water Act (CWA) discharge permitting mandates.
The IG conducted its review, released Oct. 5, to assess how EPA uses TRI data to identify potentially non-compliant facilities in its major regulatory programs. TRI a program that annually publishes information about releases of certain environmental pollutants into the air, water and soil. The agency provides the information in a searchable database on its website and also releases an annual report analyzing the data.
Analyzing TRI data can help EPA identify facilities that are potentially violating the RMP facility safety rule, the NPDES permitting program, and other mandates, the IG says.
But the report found that there were few non-compliant facilities identifiable from the data the IG reviewed. For example, there were “very few” facilities that were violating RMP filing requirements, and only four percent were “actual non-filers” under the overall TRI mandate.
For CWA National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (NPDES) permits, the IG was unable to complete a full review due to a lack of specific discharge address information.
As a result, the IG recommended that EPA clarify the limitations to the public NPDES data in its Discharge Monitoring Report (DMR) pollutant loading tool, and review the usefulness of the DMR data.
EPA agreed to take steps to address the IG's call that the agency clarify limits in the DMR data. The IG says the recommendations “are resolved with agreed-to actions pending.”
https://insideepa.com/daily-feed/tri-data-shows-few-facilities-violating-major-programs-ig-finds
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Gov't Fears Achilles Heel Is Energy Industry Supply Chain
Oct 6, 2017 | E&E Energywire
By Blake Sobczak
Three years ago, hackers hijacked the websites of three different energy industry suppliers to sneak past oil, gas and power companies' digital defenses.
The attackers used the websites to spread malicious software updates to sensitive electricity and manufacturing control systems in the U.S. and Europe.
Once brought to light, the "Dragonfly" group's Trojan horse-style tactics set off changes to securing the U.S. power grid's "soft underbelly" — its supply chain.
Now, a U.S. regulatory push to lock down the global market for grid equipment is on the agenda at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, as the Dragonfly hackers have reportedly staged a comeback (Energywire, Sept. 7).
Supply chain issues "keep me up at night," said Devon Streit, the Energy Department's deputy assistant secretary for infrastructure security and energy restoration, at a cybersecurity event Wednesday.
She recommended utilities assume "that either you are going to be compromised, or if you really are going to be honest about this, that you already have been compromised, and take it from there."
Streit said DOE's Advanced Manufacturing Office is working with defense officials to address potential security flaws in critical manufacturers, an effort distinct from the petition sent to FERC last week.
Streit also pointed to research and development underway at U.S. national labs. "There's a lot of nascent work there, and a lot more to be done," she said at an event hosted by the Intelligence and National Security Alliance at the MITRE Corp.'s headquarters in Virginia.
Supply chain problems have vexed U.S. utilities for years. Energy companies have to worry not only about Trojan horses sent by the likes of Dragonfly but also more prosaic counterfeit products that can pose competitive, safety and quality assurance problems.
Reverse-engineering software or hardware components to look for potential backdoors is a painstaking, costly process out of reach to all but the biggest power utilities. Grid operators can request certain cyber protections in contract language with their suppliers, but experts say there's little appetite to go further than that.
"I wish I could offer you a simple solution or a box to check for you to secure your software supply chain," said Tonya Ugoretz, director of the cyberthreat intelligence integration center at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, during another cybersecurity event Wednesday at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
Supply chain security "is an area where U.S. businesses are essential; here, private industry is truly the first line of defense for us all," she said.A 'tight spot'
The proposed supply chain security standards that arrived at FERC last week were crafted by the North American Electric Reliability Corp., the nonprofit U.S. grid overseer.
Last year, FERC ordered NERC to review the issue and draft a new set of "critical infrastructure protection" rules, citing the Dragonfly threat, variously known as "Havex" and "Energetic Bear" (Energywire, July 22, 2016).
Under federal law, FERC and NERC set and enforce binding security standards on the bulk power grid. FERC directs NERC to draft rules, then gets the final say on whether to adopt NERC's proposals, throw them out or call for changes.
From the outset, the government's focus on supply chain defenses drew skepticism from some industry observers, who wondered how regulators could crack down on global equipment and software suppliers that don't fall under federal jurisdiction.
"This regulation is basically impacting one industry through another one," said Patrick Miller, managing partner at Archer Energy Solutions and a former control system security auditor.
In other words, utilities would act as a "proxy" regulator for FERC, Miller explained, by getting their suppliers to improve the security of products that end up in the U.S. power grid.
"That puts utilities in a tight spot and makes the vendors and the utilities act in strange ways," said Miller, who noted that he would have preferred a more "surgical" approach for the standards.
The draft rules would make utilities develop supply chain risk management plans, accounting for vendors' policies for disclosing cyber vulnerabilities and identifying any remote access to installed equipment, among other precautions.
Another part of regulations would require utilities to have at least one way to shut off vendor access to systems that could affect electric reliability. That way, the thinking goes, hackers who break into a supplier couldn't count on getting a remote pathway to the grid. (Control system providers often request access to installed equipment for troubleshooting or maintenance.)
In a nod to the Dragonfly threat, NERC's petition would also make utilities double-check the integrity of software updates and "patches" applied to major parts of the electric system.
Miller said that even if FERC agrees to adopt the rules as written, enforcing them could prove tricky. "The auditors will be challenged to actually call a ball or a strike because the language of the standard is so flexible," he said.
NERC has acknowledged many of the challenges with the rule, noting that supply chain management "is a complex global issue."
The standards "cannot directly impose obligations on suppliers, vendors, or other entities that provide products or services" to big power utilities, NERC said. "NERC Reliability Standards should not be expected to mitigate all risks inherent to the global supply chain."
Melissa Crawford, global consultant for industrial cybersecurity for Siemens Plant Security Services, said the automation giant has developed varying "protection levels" for its products based in part on supply chain checks. Such rankings, she explained, can help organizations determine which products are the best fit for highly regulated or sensitive environments. She also said that Siemens maintains only one-way access to deployed products — that is, the vendor can typically monitor data coming in from installed devices but not send back commands that could pose a cybersecurity risk.
"Supply chain security is such a large topic — you have to think about what level of security you're trying to achieve, and what kind of attackers you're trying to prevent," she said. "It comes back down to money: Do you want to have your own team that has the skills and knowledge in the products that you're using and will be testing them themselves? [Or] is that something you want the vendor to be accountable for?"
Crawford, who is based at Siemens' headquarters in Munich, often works with chemical and manufacturing customers who have facilities in multiple countries, with varying regulations, cultures and security challenges. She pointed out that Siemens has its own cybersecurity emergency response team to home in on potential vulnerabilities in products or third-party components.
"There have already been known instances of attackers mimicking firmware updates from the supplier. ... I can understand why NERC wants to address that," she said, though she added it could still be a "challenge" to regulate. "When a regulator gets involved, it might force you to pay more attention."
https://www.eenews.net/energywire/2017/10/06/stories/1060062889
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EPA to Argue Obama Climate Rule Violates Law: Report
Oct 6, 2017 | The Hill - E2 Wire
By Devin Henry
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is reportedly set to repeal the Obama administration’s landmark climate rule for power plants, arguing that it violates federal law.
The EPA is planning to target the legality of the central tenant of the Clean Power Plan, Bloomberg reported, citing agency documents: that it directs states to reduce greenhouse gas emissions however they saw fit.
Under the rule, the federal government set reduction carbon targets for states and then asked them to find ways to hit those targets on their own, rather than by regulating a single source of pollution.
That means some states are planning to replace carbon-heavy coal power plants with cleaner energy such as natural gas or renewables.
But the EPA is now set to say that a regulation affecting the broader electricity sector is outside the agency’s purview.
The EPA will argue that “the Clean Power Plan departed from this practice by instead setting carbon dioxide emission guidelines for existing power plants that can only realistically be effected by measures that cannot be employed to, for, or at a particular source," the documents say.
The argument is similar to one pursued by the Clean Power Plan’s most ardent opponents, who sued against the proposal when it was finalized in 2015. That group includes current EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, who was then attorney general of Oklahoma.
Though the Supreme Court has frozen implementation of the rule, a federal court has not ruled on the validity of the claims from the attorneys general.
Officials will announce their intention to repeal the Clean Power Plan soon and solicit comments on how to replace it, if at all, according to reports.
http://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/354210-epa-to-argue-obama-climate-rule-violates-law-report
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EPA Moves to Repeal Obama Climate Rule 'in Its Entirety'
Oct 6, 2017 | The Hill - E2 Wire
By Timothy Cama and Devin Henry
The Trump administration will soon propose repealing the Obama administration’s climate change rule for power plants, but won’t commit to replacing it with another regulation.
A draft of the proposal obtained by The Hill on Friday asserts that under former President Barack Obama, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) issued a Clean Power Plan that “is not within Congress’s grant of authority to the agency under the governing statute.”
“The EPA is proposing to repeal the CPP in its entirety,” the agency writes in the notice that would be published in the Federal Register.
“The EPA proposes to take this action because it proposes to determine that the rule exceeds its authority under the statute, that those portions of the rule which arguably do not exceed its authority are not severable and separately implementable, and that it is not appropriate for a rule that exceeds statutory authority — especially a rule of this magnitude and with this level of impact on areas of traditional state regulatory authority — to remain in existence pending a potential, successive rulemaking process.”
The administration is expected to roll out the proposed repeal as early as Friday, which would open what is certain to be a fierce regulatory battle over the limits of the EPA’s authority and its responsibility to fight climate change.
The regulation was the pillar of Obama’s aggressive second-term climate agenda, in which he sought to take unilateral actions to fight climate change after Congress refused to pass cap-and-trade legislation.
It then become central to Republicans’ and the business community’s arguments that the Obama administration went too far with regulations. EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, who was Oklahoma’s Republican attorney general before Trump became president, was a leading figure in the federal court fight to get the rule overturned.
The Trump administration's argument against the Clean Power Plan is largely similar to one the rule’s opponents used when filing lawsuits against it.
States that sued against the Clean Power Plan in 2015 — a group that included Pruitt — argued that the regulation was overly broad and went outside the agency's authority.
Supporters of the rule have pushed back on that argument, saying the rule is permissible by law.
Environmentalists slammed the EPA’s decision on Friday, with the Natural Resources Defense Council calling it a “dirty power plan.”
They also questioned the EPA’s recalculation of the rule’s proposed benefits, including fewer deaths from pollution-related health problems and lower climate change-related costs.
“We already knew Donald Trump and Scott Pruitt reject science, but this smearing of the Clean Power Plan’s massive public benefits shows they reject basic math, too,” Liz Perera, the climate policy director at the Sierra Club said. “The Trump administration’s assault on the Clean Power Plan is about one thing and one thing only: helping corporate polluters profit.”
In its filing, the EPA said it would take comments on whether to write a new climate regulation that it says fits within the law.
The agency said it “will solicit information on systems of emission reduction that are in accord with the legal interpretation proposed in this notice,” though that process is likely to be a lengthy one.
The rule will also set up a contentious fight over how strictly to regulate climate change-causing pollutants. President Trump has expressed doubt about human-caused climate change, and Pruitt has proposed launching a public debate over the validity of climate science.
http://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/354264-draft-proposal-would-repeal-obama-climate-rule
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Industrial Emissions Drop 2%, Led by Power Sector — EPA
Oct 6, 2017 | E&E Greenwire
Greenhouse gas emissions fell 2 percent last year at the biggest U.S. industrial facilities, led by major cuts in the power sector, according to data released yesterday by U.S. EPA.
The drop to 2.99 billion metric tons in annual emissions came during President Obama's final year in office. The large industrial sector has cut greenhouse gas emissions by nearly 10 percent over the past five years.
Power plants led the way last year with a 4.6 percent decline in emissions, marking an 18 percent drop from when EPA began collecting data five years ago.
Emissions rose in the oil and natural gas sector, however, with pollution from pipelines and other facilities increasing 50 million metric tons to 283 million metric tons between 2015 and 2016.
EPA requires facilities that emit more than 25,000 metric tons per year of carbon dioxide equivalent to report emissions. The reporting program is mandated by Congress, but the Trump administration has attempted to slow emissions limits, taking down webpages and other information on climate change and greenhouse gas emissions.
The 2016 data appeared on the website with no accompanying press release, and EPA did not respond to requests for comment (Valerie Volcovici, Reuters, Oct. 5). — NS
https://www.eenews.net/greenwire/2017/10/06/stories/1060062915
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Deputy Pick Waged Behind-Scenes War Against Climate Bills
Oct 6, 2017 | E&E Climatewire
By Robin Bravender and Niina Heikkinen
President Trump's nominee to be second in command at U.S. EPA helped kill bipartisan climate legislation during his time as a top Senate aide.
Andrew Wheeler, nominated by Trump yesterday to be EPA deputy administrator under Scott Pruitt, spent years as the staff director for the Senate's leading climate skeptic and former Environment and Public Works chairman, Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.).
During the George W. Bush administration, the Senate considered a series of bipartisan cap-and-trade climate bills that each sputtered out.
As Inhofe's top aide, Wheeler worked behind the scenes to help crush those bills.
He helped to push Democratic members away from the climate bills by "exposing economic arguments and the impact in industrial states," said Matt Dempsey, who worked on the EPW Committee with Wheeler.
"He always focused on the economic argument because he understood that to be the winning argument," Dempsey added.
Unlike Inhofe, who has long been a vocal critic of mainstream climate science, Dempsey said of Wheeler, "I don't think he dove as strongly into the science."
Wheeler's denunciation on costs of federal climate policies puts him in line with Pruitt, who has criticized the burden that EPA rules have placed on industry, particularly during the Obama administration.
Inhofe praised the selection of his "close friend" and former staffer for EPA's No. 2 job.
"There is no one more qualified than Andrew to help Scott Pruitt restore EPA to its proper size and scope," he said in a statement.
Marc Morano, who also worked with Wheeler on EPW, said of his nomination: "Real institutional reform at the EPA just got a whole lot more real. Climate activists who were hoping some part of Obama's climate 'legacy' was going to survive the Trump presidency have to be very concerned today."
Indeed, green groups reacted to the nomination with dismay.
"Halloween apparently came early this October because the nomination of Andrew Wheeler as Deputy EPA Administrator is absolutely horrifying," Melinda Pierce, the Sierra Club's legislative director, said in a statement.
Pierce decried Wheeler's record of lobbying for coal companies and his time working for Inhofe, whom she described as "one of the most backward climate science deniers."
Wheeler was Inhofe's EPW staff director from 2003 until 2009. Several other former Inhofe aides have already landed at EPA, including Pruitt's chief of staff, Ryan Jackson.
Wheeler, an Ohio native, worked for then-Sen. George Voinovich (R-Ohio); he also worked at EPA in the early 1990s as a special assistant in the agency's toxics office, according to his LinkedIn profile.Coal lobbyist
In 2009, Wheeler joined Faegre Baker Daniels Consulting in Washington. He's co-leader of the group's energy and natural resources practice and has lobbied for coal giant Murray Energy Corp., led by vocal Trump supporter Robert Murray.
Murray declined to comment about Wheeler's potential nomination.
Wheeler's nomination has been expected for months, and some speculated that his lobbying activities slowed down the announcement of his appointment.
He was registered as a lobbyist for Murray Energy and several other clients in the first quarter of this year, according to lobbying disclosure reports. He also signed up as a lobbyist for Energy Fuels Resources Corp., a U.S. uranium mining company, in February, according to disclosures.
His firm reported in August that he was no longer expected to act as a lobbyist for Murray Energy, Energy Fuels Resources, Sargento Foods Inc. or Underwriters Laboratories. Those appear to have been all the clients for which he was registered to lobby.
Some members of the coal industry greeted Wheeler's nomination warmly. In a statement yesterday evening, Paul Bailey, the president and CEO of the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity, called him "extraordinarily qualified."
"His understanding of a wide range of environmental policies and the policy development process — combined with his thoughtfulness, judgment and temperament — will enable him to be an outstanding Deputy Administrator."
The Trump administration has pledged to bar appointees from working on issues that they lobbied on in the previous two years, but many top officials have been granted waivers.
White House energy official Mike Catanzaro, for example, received a waiver that allows him to work on broad energy and environmental policy issues, like the Clean Power Plan and other issues he focused on as a lobbyist. Catanzaro also worked on Inhofe's EPW staff, joining the committee after Wheeler left in 2009.
https://www.eenews.net/climatewire/2017/10/06/stories/1060062891
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