Bush energy budget bypasses Wyo coal

President Bush’s proposed 2008 budget for the U.S. Department of Energy largely passes over “clean coal” projects in Wyoming and the West.

U.S. Sen. Craig Thomas, R-Wyo., grilled Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman last week for not following certain directives set forth in the Energy Policy Act of 2005.

Provisions such as a Western coal-gasification demonstration project are being passed over in the Department of Energy’s budget in favor of biofuels programs and the zero-emissions FutureGen project — a program that already eliminated Wyoming as a potential site.

Thomas demanded answers from Bodman during a recent Senate Energy Committee oversight hearing.

“(The Department of Energy) has manufactured $257 million for themselves in this request by eliminating the Clean Coal Technology account, which has been replaced by the Clean Coal Power Initiative,” Thomas said. “One-hundred and eight million from CCT elimination has been sent to FutureGen, and DOE proposes that the (rest) go back to the treasury. When Congress appropriated those funds, they were meant to advance clean coal technologies.”

Bodman is expected to provide written responses to the oversight committee in the next few days.

Congressional delegates from coal supply regions are in a West vs. East dogfight over federal dollars to prove the commercial viability of “clean coal” technologies, including integrated gasification combined cycle, or IGCC, for electrical generation. Although Thomas was able to insert the provision for a Western IGCC demonstration project into Section 413 of the Energy Policy Act, he has yet to convince federal officials to put money toward it.

And that’s not all. Federal loan guarantees that would sway the investment community toward such clean coal efforts are not being funded either.

“The incredibly slow progress on the loan guarantee program and the lack of focus on getting Section 413 fully funded are very troubling,” Thomas told Bodman. “What provisions in the Energy Policy Act do you think are best suited to helping Wyoming’s goal of exporting value-added coal products? Where’s the money for the pipes and wires we need out West?”

Still, trade industry officials said the Republican senator from Wyoming can’t escape the fact that federal funding for domestic programs is seriously pinched due to the war in Iraq and the nation’s $8.7 trillion budget deficit. That means the United States’ ability to invest in a more “energy secure” future is seriously compromised.

“There’s a tightening of the budget, and some of the identified (cuts) are for so-called ‘clean coal’ programs and a number of other items,” said Jim Childress, executive director of Gasification Technologies Council.

The proposed budget includes $426.602 million for coal research and development, a 29 percent increase over last year’s fiscal year 2007 appropriation request. Childress said that although the most recent budget proposal would provide an increase in federal money for coal research, those programs still suffer from several years of minimal appropriations.

And that has fueled competition between Western and Eastern coal interests, Childress said.

“We think you need to be able to access both coal resources — Powder River Basin coals as well as Eastern coals,” Childress said. “Any federal program ought to address both of those resources.”

For his own role in the nation’s financial position today, Thomas suggested that the war in Iraq is part of the overall war on terror, and those are inescapable security priorities.

“National defense and the defense of our country are the first issue,” Thomas said in a phone interview Friday. “We may not have done the best job, and we need to change what we’re doing.”

Thomas said his criticism of the Department of Energy budget proposal is a matter of balancing priorities. Western coal gasification should be considered a near-term strategy, while hydrogen and biofuels are part of a longer-term strategy toward becoming more self-reliant on domestic resources.

“It’s a matter of how much do you put into future alternative fuels as opposed to these other fuels that we already know how to use,” Thomas said.

Source: www.casperstartribune.net