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“Beautiful, clean coal,” as President Donald Trump described it in his January 2018 State of the Union address, is still not making the comeback the president promised. In fact, power-plant coal consumption continues to drop in large increments and shows no sign of changing course. And the less coal power plants burn, the harder the […]
Even with more than 4 decades of experience in government and industry, William Barr, President Donald Trump’s choice to be the nation’s next attorney general (AG), does not have much of a public record on environmental law and regulation.
Over the last several months, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has taken two actions intended to ensure that coal-fired power plants continue to comprise a substantial portion of the nation’s energy portfolio. In December 2018, the DOE’s Office of Fossil Energy (FE) issued a request for proposal (RFP) seeking “conceptual designs for coal-based power […]
Public comment on the EPA’s proposed Affordable Clean Energy (ACE) rule closed October 30, 2018, and, as expected, the thousands of responses highlighted the radically diverse opinions on coal-fired energy and climate change held by Americans and industry stakeholders. The ACE proposal (August 31, 2018, Federal Register (FR)) comprised revisions of three existing regulations contained […]
In the waning days of the Obama administration, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) promulgated revisions to regulations at 43 CFR Subpart Section 3179, which are intended to reduce the waste of oil and natural gas (O&G) from venting, flaring, and leaks during O&G production on onshore federal and Indian leases. The main objective of […]
TransCanada’s plans to construct the Keystone XL Pipeline and the U.S. Department of State’s (DOS) approval of those plans ran into another wall when a U.S. District Court judge in Montana found that the DOS had not met its statutory requirements in analyzing the effects of the project on climate change and on species protected […]
With the midterm elections switching control of the House to the Democrats, there will also be changes in the leadership of House committees in January 2019. The Committee on Energy and Commerce typically takes the lead on environmental issues in the House, and it is expected that the committee’s current Ranking Member, Democrat Frank Pallone […]
Shortly after the Trump EPA proposed to replace the Obama EPA’s Clean Power Plan with its more industry-friendly Affordable Clean Energy (ACE) rule, the Massachusetts Supreme Court went in the opposite direction by denying a petition to overturn a state regulation imposing a progressive cap on greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions for the power sector.
The use of ambient air to cool and condense steam at electric power plants is a costly alternative to water cooling, but the use of air, or dry cooling, is being gradually adopted by energy companies, reports the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA). Dry cooling or hybrid cooling—a combination of air and water—occurs in 3% […]
Notwithstanding many verbal endorsements from the Trump administration and several preliminary regulatory actions (e.g., a pullback on EPA’s Clean Power Plan and the Agency’s proposed deregulatory amendments to the Obama EPA’s 2016 Coal Combustion Residuals rule), coal-fired energy is not experiencing a renaissance in the United States.