Climate Daily News

Significant construction delays and massive cost overruns at Southern Company’s proposed Kemper carbon capture and storage (CCS) project in Mississippi are creating problems for EPA’s new source performance standards (NSPS) setting greenhouse gas (GHG) limits at new power plants, which relies on the project to justify a controversial GHG standard for new coal plants that requires installation of the technology…

Agency critics have cited these emails in their comments to argue that when EPA re-proposed the NSPS in early 2014, it ignored the interagency criticism that it was not adequately representing the costs of CCS, according to a May 14 supplemental comment in the NSPS rulemaking docket filed by the Energy and Environmental Law Institute (EELI) and the Free Market Environmental Law Clinic (FMELC).

“The EPA relies on figures concerning the cost of [CCS] citing to a study done by the National Energy Technology Laboratory originally produced in 2007 and updated periodically ending in 2011. However, these figures are no longer valid according to the authors of the very study EPA cites, and comments received from other federal agencies . . . which call into question EPA’s interpretation of this study. Indeed, these comments, upon review, assert that EPA misrepresents the work on which it relies,” the EELI/FMELC comment says.

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