Will Secretary Moniz pull the plug on dirty coal in Texas?
by Lukas Ross, Climate & Energy campaigner
Saving millions of tax dollars and protecting the climate don’t always go hand in hand. But Secretary of Energy Ernest Moniz has the chance to do both ahead of a key deadline in July. All he needs to do is pull the plug on federal support for a long-troubled coal plant in Texas.
The hilariously misnamed Texas Clean Energy Project is a carbon capture and sequestration facility proposed for Penwell, Texas. The technology is based on capturing climate-warming CO2 emissions from coal and keeping them out of the atmosphere through underground storage.
The truth is that CCS is just a lifeline to the fossil fuel industry and not a real solution to climate change. It remains prohibitively expensive, especially compared to real solutions like wind and solar. It does nothing to solve the environmental problems of coal extraction itself. And perhaps most of all, it can lead to even worse climate consequences than burning coal regularly.
When CO2 is captured, it needs to be stored somewhere, and although it has a variety of industrial uses, it is widely sought by the oil industry, which uses it to stimulate production as part of enhanced oil recovery projects. Most planned CCS facilities — the Texas Clean Energy Project included — plan to sell their CO2 to Big Oil, but when that happens the evidence suggests that as much as 4.7 metric tons of CO2 can be produced for every metric ton of CO2 pumped underground.
Take action: Tell Sec. Moniz to save money and protect our climate!
None of these concerns stopped the Texas Clean Energy Project from nabbing a hefty $450 million grant from the Department of Energy, funded in part through the 2009 stimulus. But since the grant was secured, the cost of the project more than doubled to $3.9 billion, while the project has failed to secure private financing.
In April, a damning report from the Department of Energy’s own Inspector General revealed how irresponsibly our tax dollars had been spent. It showed that although the DOE had originally intended to disburse the grant in four separate stages, it had broken its own rules and given the project over $100 million ahead of schedule — all while it was stalled in initial stage.
So far, $116 million has been lost and can never be recovered. Although the DOE wisely suspended further funding in February, there is still another $220 million the facility could theoretically nab. This is because the DOE extended its cooperative agreement with the plant, leaving the door open for more money later. This agreement was supposed to expire on May 13, but when the deadline came Bloomberg reported the facility got another extension — this time to July 1. In the latest evidence yet that the DOE is inventing the rules as it goes along, it was reported again this week that the new final deadline would fall on July 15.
Whatever the deadline, a politically-connected facility like this isn’t finished until it’s declared officially dead. That’s why it is more important than ever for Secretary Moniz to do the right thing and pull the plug on the Texas Clean Energy Project once and for all.
Take action: Tweet at Sec. Moniz to pull the plug on the Texas Clean Energy Project!
