This week, amidst the dislocations flowing from the global financial markets, lawmakers in the US and EU advanced legislation requiring geological sequestration of CO2 emissions from future coal-fired plants.  It remains to be seen how the unfolding economic landscape may affect the viability of any significant movement on new climate change legislation.  For the moment, however, these proposals are signs that some lawmakers realize that implementing a comprehensive climate change framework in five (or twenty-five) years means laying the legal and regulatory foundation now. 

On Wednesday, October 7, the EU Parliament’s Environment Committee added carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) provisions to the comprehensive climate package scheduled for a vote by Parliament in December 2008.  The provisions establish an “emission performance standard” of 500 grams CO₂ per kilowatt hour for large power plants constructed after 2015 and establish a comprehensive scheme for regulating the carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) sites that likely would be required to meet such a standard.  As part of that scheme, CCS project developers would contribute to a CCS fund during the active life of a sequestration site, and remain liable for a 50-year period after the CCS site is closed.  

That same day, Energy and Commerce Chairman John Dingell (D-MI) and Energy and Air Quality Subcommittee Chairman Rick Boucher (D-VA) released a discussion draft of a comprehensive climate change bill containing carbon capture standards for newly constructed coal-fired power plants.  Section 812 of the draft legislation would require that units constructed after 2025 capture and store, via geological sequestration, no less than 60 percent of the total CO₂ emissions produced by the covered unit on an annual average basis, with limited extensions where immediate compliance is technologically infeasible. 

When compared to the time frame envisioned in the Dingell-Boucher bill, the 2015 deadline established in the EU legislation is aggressive.  While the EU is ahead of the US in its development and implementation of climate-related regulatory schemes, all countries face considerable uncertainties in moving CCS from the pilot and demonstration project phase to commercialization.  Moreover, the EU still has to develop the details of its regulatory strategy for ensuring oversight of large-scale CCS projects.  On the other hand, the ambitious deadline envisioned by the EU may provide helpful precedent for US lawmakers and industry as consider the details of a US clean-coal program.  Indeed, success in the EU may be a critical element in helping the US meet a deadline of 2025 for commercializing CCS. 

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