Press Room: Press Releases

 

Mr. President, today I introduce the Future Fuels Act of 2008. Put simply, I think coal – especially clean coal - is a critical part of the solution to America’s energy independence and to our national security. The bill I will describe this morning presents several technological options that will help put us on a path toward achieving greater energy independence, while also tackling the grave threat to human health, property, and the world’s economy that is global climate change.

 

I know that there are some, in this chamber and around the country, who would demonize coal. But the reality is that coal is what we have – in abundance. We just can’t ignore this resource or the incredible potential that it has not just to generate electricity, but as a potential transportation fuel source. The challenges that we face today - and they are a challenges which I firmly believe can be overcome with the right combination of resources and American know-how - is how to use coal to produce energy in cleaner ways than we do now, and to accelerate development of carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) technologies to see to it that we don’t make our current climate problems worse.

 

In addition to the bill I am introducing today, in West Virginia we have been working with major companies and our coal industry to promote some exciting next generation projects that will produce a range of value-added products out of coal – electricity, chemical feedstocks, fertilizer, diesel and aviation fuels.  If we can pull off what we’re trying to do, it will be, in a word, transformational. 

 

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My colleagues know that from Maine to California, West Virginia to Washington State, our constituents are paying more at the gasoline pump, in the supermarket aisles, and for virtually everything else. American families are being crushed by the weight of the rising cost of living – especially our seniors, veterans, and low-income families, who often live on fixed incomes. They’re looking for solutions, not lengthy and circular debates on how this energy crisis came about and who’s to blame for not fixing it. They’re looking for the people they sent to Washington to examine all the options, work together for the common good, and to stop playing partisan or parochial games.

 

As a Senator from West Virginia, I can tell you that the people of my state know a thing or two about coal. They know that from small towns to major cities, from the Capitol building to the Vegas strip, coal generates nearly 50 percent of the nation’s electricity. It lights our homes, schools, and workplaces, and while the summer sun beats down, coal-burning power plants keep us cool. West Virginians, like so many others in this country who have considered our energy options, understand that coal also has the potential to run our cars and trucks and keep our planes flying. West Virginians - like the relatively few of us who are proud to call ourselves Coal State Senators - understand that the only thing keeping us from turning this promise into a reality is a laser-focused commitment from our government and the nation’s industries to unleash good old American ingenuity.

 

The Future Fuels Act can be the foundation for our efforts. In a way not seen since the Manhattan Project helped us win World War II, and at least not since we fulfilled President Kennedy’s promise to put a man on the moon and bring him safely back to Earth, the Future Fuels Act would bring together the best minds in government and the private sector to figure out commercially viable solutions to carbon capture and sequestration. In achieving what is undoubtedly the greatest environmental challenge of this century, the best minds throughout the world, working together, will renew the promise of a better standard of living that coal showed the world at the dawn of the industrial age. For Americans blessed with abundant reserves of this resource, the Future Fuels Act can allow coal to be the source of most of the clean energy we must have in the coming decades.

           

I understand there are those who believe that coal can never be part of the solution, because its detractors have made it such a poster child of the problem. Let’s be honest. No energy policy choice can be made that does not have an environmental consequence. Oil drilling obviously does - and mining coal does, as well. 

 

But it’s not just the use of fossil fuels that has consequences. Wind power probably has more than its fair share of detractors, due to perceived threats to migratory birds and bats, and what some consider an unacceptable disruption of scenic vistas. Ethanol has been blamed for rising food prices and for the minimal value of the energy it produces relative to its production costs. Nuclear energy is touted by its proponents as a carbon-free option that should have its share of the nation’s electricity generation expanded. Yet we have never figured out what to do about the permanent storage of, and human health and safety concerns regarding, highly radioactive waste with a half-life measured in tens of thousands of years.  It’s clear to me, at least, that the fundamentally flawed Yucca Mountain plan is not the answer. Natural gas-powered plants emit somewhat less than coal-fired plants, but are still not clean. In any event, installing new gas pipelines or trying to open a liquefied natural gas terminal inevitably runs utilities into the classic problem of “not in my backyard,” or NIMBY. The point is we need to find energy alternatives that are accessible, can be used wisely, preserve our standard of living, and make positive strides to heal our broken world.   

 

Anyone who’s watched the nightly news lately or who has read a newsmagazine in the last several years knows that global climate change is no longer cloaked in uncertainty or shrouded in doubt. The sheer repetition of major meteorological calamities renders discussion of “storms of the century” mute. Meanwhile, all too frequently floods, hurricanes, and typhoons are characterized as “500 year events.” We’ve watched the flood waters rise in the heartland of America, forest fires rage out West, and both our Atlantic and Pacific coastlines battered by more common storms. The permafrost in the Arctic Tundra is thawing and releasing methane, and the polar ice caps are melting. Growing seasons are changing, and temperate zones are shifting. The damaging effects of global climate change are not suffered only by humanity; an increasing number of plant and animal species are facing extinction.

 

Whether you believe that climate change is happening or not; whether you accept the science of it all, or not, is beside the point. One thing is clear – we can’t afford to be wrong, and doing nothing is not an option any longer. Our national policy can’t be to merely clean up after more and more terrible weather affects more and more parts of the country – we’ll go steadily more bankrupt if we do. We need to start addressing the root cause of it all – and that means fundamental changes in the ways we harness the immense power of fossil fuels, like coal, and permanent solutions for the carbon produced.

 

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To do this, my legislation will expand incentives for clean coal technologies, establish an incentive to capture a potent greenhouse gas currently being vented into the atmosphere, create a low-cost program to promote responsible conversion of coal to transportation fuels, help develop new pipeline networks connecting the coalfields to the gas pump, and devote substantial resources to enable government and private sector scientists to turn the corner on commercially viable CCS.

 

The United States has more than a 250-year supply of coal stored beneath the hills of Appalachia and in several places around the country. To use this abundance in a responsible and environmentally appropriate way, the Future Fuels Act will do the following:

 

It will expand tax incentive and clean coal energy bond programs in current law designed to defray costs incurred by investor-owned utilities and public power providers when they choose advanced clean coal technologies to replace and supplement our current fleet of electricity generating plants. We have provided money for this purpose over the last decade, but given the scope of the challenge, we have up until now provided pennies on the dollar. The Future Fuels Act will provide $10.3 billion - $8.3 billion in expanded clean coal tax incentives and an additional $2 billion for municipal and cooperative energy providers in clean coal energy bonds.

 

It will establish a new incentive available to companies that mine coal underground to capture and sequester methane. Methane is more than 20 times as potent a heat-trapping greenhouse gas as an equal volume of carbon dioxide. It is liberated as a natural byproduct of the excavation of coal, and is currently vented to prevent explosions and to purify the air coal miners breathe. This incentive would allow coal companies that voluntarily capture methane and prevent it from being released into the atmosphere to offset some of the costs of that capture.

 

It will create a “stand-by” loan program for development of environmentally responsible coal conversion facilities. Coal-based fuel developers would receive no federal funds to build or operate their facilities, but would be able to tap into a loan program with strict repayment terms when the world price of oil drops below a figure to be set in statute. As a frustrating summer of high gasoline prices and airlines teetering on the edge of collapse because of high jet fuel costs makes clear, we need a new set of solutions to meet our energy demand. The Future Fuels Act will move us toward a time when we can run our cars, trucks, planes, and trains with domestic coal-derived fuel.

 

It will establish a tax incentive for the construction of pipeline infrastructure to bring coal-based fuels to the marketplace. Because our current network of oil and gas pipelines serves, naturally, where oil and gas is found, it may not be adequate or geographically able to serve new sources of fuels in the coalfields of Appalachia and other regions of the country where coal conversion facilities might be built. This incentive would encourage pipeline companies to build out to new locations with untapped potential in coal reserves.

 

But the Future Fuels Act is not just about using coal. It is about meeting the challenge of using coal in the carbon-constrained future we know is coming. The Future Fuels Act does this by harnessing the wisdom, scientific knowledge, and creativity of both government scientists and their private sector counterparts.

 

First, it would put into motion the kind of massive research, development, demonstration, and technology deployment program we should have seen from the current Administration, which had promised to be a friend to coal, only to walk away from ongoing coal initiatives in our federal laboratories. Instead of doing the work that would establish a sustainable future for coal, the Administration first denied climate change was a problem, and then cut the fossil fuel R&D. Consequently, we have lost eight years’ worth of serious efforts to develop commercial-scale carbon capture and sequestration, or CCS, options. This is utterly inexcusable, but by increasing the size and investment in government CCS R&D, my legislation attempts to make up for that lost time. Our national labs have done groundbreaking work, especially West Virginia, but they have not been given the resources they need to truly accelerate their research and make it commercially available. In contrast, this legislation would authorize $650 million over the next five fiscal years to develop commercial-scale carbon sequestration demonstrations in multiple geological and terrestrial formations, with the goal of storing one million tons of carbon dioxide annually.

 

Finally, my bill would create the Future Fuels Corporation (FFC), a publicly funded but privately operated institution with two primary goals. First, the FFC will accelerate research – and more importantly, commercial deployment – of CCS technologies. Without the combination of brainpower and private sector dedication to deadlines and results we may never get CCS technologies off the drawing board and on to power plants and other industrial emitting facilities. 

 

Second, the FFC will work to create new technologies and new production processes to enable the production of coal-based transportation fuels that are not only cleaner than petroleum-based fuels in use today, but which are made in plants that are cleaner, and which cause less environmental disruption than drilling for oil.

 

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Like so many of the other legislative responses to the current energy and economic crisis, my legislation is not a “silver bullet.” It is, however, a sincere attempt to offer American solutions to what is both an American and a global problem. 

 

We can never be truly energy “independent,” but we must resolve to be more energy “resilient.” We can do that when we tap into coal’s still unbound potential. Likewise, we cannot expect the serious problem of global climate change to fix itself. The combination of our abundant coal and the innovative potential of the greatest scientists, technicians, and researchers in American business, academia, and government can make the energy resources of Saudi Arabia seem like a drop in the bucket. We need to foster policies to unleash these brilliant men and women to find and prove a range of carbon storage solutions, and then watch a waiting world beat a path to our doorstep. 

 

Known American coal reserves can produce electricity at current rates – and be converted to transportation fuels in sufficient amounts to supplant more than the petroleum we import from the Persian Gulf and elsewhere – for two centuries or more. No American president will have to call up the Guard and Reserve to secure the coalfields, and no American parent will have trouble falling asleep because they’re concerned about the safety of their son or daughter in uniform because the people who own the energy don’t much like the American presence near the energy.

 

That is why the Future Fuels Act is so important, and why I commend it to my colleagues.

 

I thank the presiding officer, and I yield the floor.