WASHINGTON — The Environmental Protection Agency will move Friday to strictly limit the amount of carbon that future coal- and gas-fired power plants can pour into the atmosphere, the first such restrictions on greenhouse gases imposed by the agency.
The limits in the proposed rule will be difficult for any new coal plant to meet without incurring the substantial costs of additional technology to limit carbon dioxide output or developing new methods of cleansing emissions. The industry almost certainly will challenge it in court.
For the administration, the revised rule is the first major domestic initiative since President Barack Obama laid out his climate action plan in June. Ahead is the EPA’s decision on limiting emissions from existing power plants, which Administrator Gina McCarthy said Thursday will be made in June 2014.
“We’re providing at least some certainty here that (coal plants) have an opportunity to be around in a carbon-constrained world,” McCarthy said in an interview. “The president wants every fuel to be able to compete in a clean environment.”
But McCarthy made clear that the administration views greenhouse gases the way it sees other air pollutants and will regulate them accordingly, even if it forces the industry to spend more money to comply. “We are treating carbon the same way we’ve treated every other pollutant under the Clean Air Act,” she said.
Utility companies with large coal fleets already are preparing to challenge the rule, if it is finalized, on the grounds that the agency is requiring pollution controls that have not yet been “adequately demonstrated” in the marketplace.
Joseph Stanko, head of government relations for the law firm Hunton & Williams, said the EPA’s reliance on “federally funded demonstration projects” as the base for its new standard “is illegal, it doesn’t ‘adequately demonstrate’ technology for normal use.”
“NASA sent men to the moon with federal funds. That doesn’t mean municipalities and companies can do it,” Stanko said.
Dan Lashof, director of the climate and clean air program at the Natural Resources Defense Council, said the Clean Air Act requires pollution controls to be commercially available, but “there’s nothing in the statute that says it’s the cheapest way to make electricity.”
McCarthy said: “Clearly the technology is available. It’s been fully demonstrated.” The Energy Department has a $6 billion loan fund to help finance development of clean energy technologies, she said.
“We’re not trying to deny that there is a cost associated with these, but any first-generation technology is going to have that,” she said.