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As the state that produces the most coal in the country, Wyoming has two new laws taking effect in July that aim to tackle the coal industry’s biggest problem: the carbon dioxide emitted by coal-burning plants.
The Wyoming Legislature this year built on its development of a legal framework for the underground storage of carbon dioxide emissions, a practice known as sequestration.
Last year, the state passed the nation’s first laws to address the issue. Those specified that land surface owners also own the right to store CO2 underneath it and that companies that inject the gas underground are required to post bonds.
Two more carbon-capture laws go into effect in Wyoming on July 1. One specifies that the right to mine or drill for resources has legal precedence over the right to store carbon gas underground. The other new law specifies that whoever injects carbon gas underground remains legally responsible for it forever.
Rep. Tom Lubnau, R-Gillette, is a lawyer who has done much of the work in crafting Wyoming’s laws on the carbon-capture issue. He’s lectured at Harvard on the state’s approach and says Wyoming’s laws have been widely copied by other states hustling to address the underground storage issue.
Montana, for example, passed a carbon-storage law this year that Lubnau says is similar to Wyoming’s approach. One major difference is that the Montana law specifies that a storage company could turn over legal responsibility for a carbon-storage site to the state after 30 years if it proved to be trouble-free.
“It’s developed into a sort of a bidding war on which state has the most positive climate for carbon sequestration projects,” Lubnau said. “And to my way of thinking, that’s not prudent.
“We have to be very measured to our moves to adopt these technologies, to make sure that we do it very carefully and right and avoid any unintended consequences,” Lubnau said.
Large-scale carbon sequestration has not been tested in the United States but research on it and other elements of clean-coal technology is ongoing around the country.
The Wyoming State Geological Survey and the University of Wyoming are in the early stages of a proposed carbon sequestration project in southwest Wyoming that would inject carbon dioxide into the Rock Springs uplift and treat the brine that’s displaced to make it potable water.
Also, the state of Wyoming is working on a joint project with General Electric Co. to research turning coal into natural gas and other products while limiting air emissions. Officials say construction of a $100 million coal research plant in Cheyenne will start next year and it should be operating by late 2012.
Lubnau said technological advances in clean coal technology are helping Wyoming to refine its legal framework on underground carbon storage.
“When we first started this process, we were concerned about sequestering carbon dioxide for ever and ever and ever,” Lubnau said. “That’s not necessarily the case. These scientists are saying, ‘Look, we only need to sequester it until the end of the Carbon Age.’”
Lubnau said that if small amounts of carbon dioxide escape from storage once mankind stops burning carbon fuels for energy, in perhaps 60 or 100 years, the earth’s atmosphere should be able to deal with it.
“Instead of talking about sequestration for thousands of years, we may be talking about sequestration for hundreds of years,” Lubnau said. “And those technologies are starting to be developed now.”
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This sequestration and storage is a bad idea. The gas will eventually escape storage, and then what will we do with it? Clean coal is not clean, it is just putting the problem onto the next generation. Perhaps it should be called “postponed coal”.
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