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No Detectable Toxins in Water Near Memphis Plant, Says TVA

July 23, 2017

A Tennessee utility company on July 20 said tests on drinking water in the vicinity of a coal-fired power plant in Memphis showed no detectable evidence of arsenic, lead, and other toxins. The Sierra Club asked state officials to perform the tests after high levels of arsenic were found in monitoring wells at the Allen Fossil Plant.

Memphis Light, Gas and Water (MLGW) said in a statement that the tests were conducted by an independent lab on 10 wells at the Allen site. The wells, which monitor pollution from coal ash ponds at the plant, supply water to a pumping station near the plant, which is operated by the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA).

The Tennessee Department of Environment & Conservation (TDEC) asked MLGW to test the wells after recent water samples showed one well had high levels of arsenic, reported as more than 300 times the federal drinking-water standard, and traces of lead were found in two wells. The monitoring wells at the plant are about 50 feet deep and are located about a half-mile from much-deeper wells the TVA has drilled into the Memphis Sand aquifer, which supplies drinking water to Memphis.…

DOE Won’t Increase Regulation on Gas to Boost Coal, Perry Says

July 19, 2017

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The Trump administration wants to revitalize the coal industry, but they will not do so by imposing regulation on the natural gas industry, Secretary of Energy Rick Perry told reporters July 18 at a joint press conference with International Energy Agency Executive Director Fatih Birol.

“Would the Department of Energy (DOE) be a participant in putting regulations into place to protect a particular energy sector?,” Perry said. “The answer is no.”

Though he firmly stated that DOE will not increase regulation on energy sources that compete with coal, he was unclear about how the administration intends to make coal competitive again.

He seemed to suggest that exports, either of coal or technology, would play a large role in a revitalized coal industry. Noting that coal still accounts for roughly 40% of worldwide energy generation, Perry stated: “It’s not like coal has been pushed out of the marketplace, I mean you are going to see coal used in the world. Our goal is for us to use the cleanest technology that we can and generally speaking, that technology is going to come from the U.S.”…

Odds Are Against a Coal Comeback, Duke CEO Says

March 6, 2017

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Regardless of recent federal support for a revitalization of coal in the U.S., “the economics are challenged,” Lynn Good, CEO of Duke Energy, said March 1 during a presentation at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) Energy Innovation Summit.

“I think coal continues to be an important part of a diverse set of resources … about a third of our generation comes from coal, but that will be declining over time,” she said.

The story of the decline of coal is not as cut and dried as many on Capitol Hill have suggested. The regulations passed in the last administration did play a part, but so did the decrease in natural gas pricing, Good said.

Regarding regulation, Good pointed to the Obama administration’s Mercury and Air Toxics Standards (MATS), which forced many energy generators to make some tough decisions. “The mercury rule is the one I would point to most specifically that put a lot of challenge into the coal fleet, whether the investment to address that regulation made sense given the life of each of those plants.”…

2017 Will be the Year for North American CCS, Expert Says

February 13, 2017

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Carbon capture and storage (CCS) in North America is about to have its year, Julio Friedmann, senior adviser for energy innovation at the Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, said during the February 8 Global CCS Institute’s annual Americas Forum.

“We are just now like fully deployed and hopefully that will finally quash the idea, the persistent pernicious meme that CCS is some kooky technology that isn’t ready for prime time,” Friedmann said.

Coming into 2017, two commercial-scale CCS projects were operational in North America: SaskPower’s Boundary Dam Unit 3 coal-fired CCS retrofit in near Estevan, Saskatchewan (POWER’s Plant of the Year in 2015), and Shell Canada’s Quest CCS project on an oil sands upgrader in Alberta.

Just more than a month into the new year, an additional CCS project came online in Texas and another in Mississippi is reportedly days from reaching full operation.

Completion of the Petra Nova project, a massive CCS project near Houston, Texas, was announced in the first half of January.…