Carbon capture tech needs more support: group

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WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. government should provide more support for the development of carbon capturing technology, but also consider technological barriers before passing climate change legislation, a coal industry representative said on Tuesday.

U.S. President Barack Obama is pushing Congress to establish a system capping and trading carbon emissions that cause global warming. Obama’s plan would require companies to purchase permits to release emissions above the government’s limits.

This proposal would greatly impact coal fired power plants, which provide about half of the nation’s electricity and accounts for about 80 percent of carbon dioxide emissions from domestic power generation.

Hal Quinn, president of the National Mining Association, said the United States must do more to develop technology that would allow power plants fueled by coal to trap and store carbon gases instead of releasing them into the atmosphere.

“Climate change policies must harmonize the timing when controls are placed on emissions with the availability of the critical (carbon capture and storage) technologies needed to reduce them,” Quinn said in testimony before the House Energy and Commerce Committee.

Quinn warned that the nation might not be able to meet its electricity demand needs if the power sector does not have “the necessary tools to meet future emissions requirements.”

Representative Henry Waxman, chairman of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, said he believes technologies reducing carbon emissions “hold great promise.”

“The challenge ahead of us is putting all the pieces together in a way to enable the cost-effective production of low-carbon electricity from coal,” Waxman said.

The recently passed economic stimulus package included $3.4 billion for the Energy Department’s office of fossil energy, much of which is slated for carbon capture and storage development.

Separately, Quinn cautioned that carbon regulation should be handled by Congress and not the Environmental Protection Agency.

The EPA is currently considering whether to regulate carbon dioxide as a pollutant under the Clean Air Act. The agency on Tuesday proposed a comprehensive U.S. system for reporting carbon emissions from heavy industry, automakers and companies with at least 25,000 metric tons in greenhouse gas emissions annually.