(Washington, DC) – Today, the House Committee on Science and Technology Chairman Bart Gordon (D-TN) sent a letter to President Bush urging him to voice his support at next week’s G-8 Summit for carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) demonstrations. Last month, the G-8 Energy Ministers endorsed a recommendation by the Carbon Sequestration Leadership Forum and the International Energy Agency to undertake 20 large-scale CCS demonstration projects worldwide.
“Next week at the G-8 Summit, I urge you to assure our international partners that you will aggressively and creatively pursue the necessary cost-sharing mechanism and incentives for facilitating the revolution in energy technology deployment required to achieve common objectives for a more secure, reliable, affordable, and sustainable energy-use outlook,” said Gordon in the letter.
“International cooperation, both intellectual and financial, is key to meeting the world’s energy needs and solving our environmental problems,” said Gordon.
Currently, coal provides about half of the electricity used in the United States, according to the Energy Information Administration. Capturing and storing carbon could allow use of fossil fuels, such as coal and oil, without the negative environmental impacts like climate change and ocean acidification. Because the United States is rich in coal, technologies to use coal without the associated greenhouse gas emissions could mean a more independent energy portfolio and a potential solution to a major cause of climate change. These technologies would also be useful in helping other nations, like China, use their own rich coal stores to meet growing energy needs without a major impact on the environment.
“If we do not make a substantial investment to demonstrate integrated CCS technologies now, our ability to implement a comprehensive and meaningful climate change program could be seriously undermined,” said Gordon in the letter.
Carbon capture and sequestration has long been a focus of the Committee’s work. The Committee passed HR 1933, which directs the Secretary of Energy to carry out fundamental science and engineering research to develop and document the performance of new approaches to capture and store carbon dioxide. The bill was included in Title VII of the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007, which was signed into law (PL 110-140) on December 19, 2007.
Currently, the Committee is reviewing documents related to the Administration’s major restructuring of the FutureGen project. FutureGen was intended to be a model of clean coal technologies until the Secretary of Energy abruptly withdrew funding from the project, without any consultation with the Committee, which is the Committee of jurisdiction in the House of Representatives.
For more information, please visit the Committee’s website
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