This business of states taking over where the feds dropped the ball on greenhouse emissions is getting more serious all the time. This week, reports the Seattle Time‘s Warren Cornwall, local regulators told a consortium of utilities they can’t build a new coal gasification power plant – near the town of Kalama in the state’s southwest – until they comply with a state greenhouse gas law.

All such plants, new rules say, must emit no more carbon into the air than would a high-efficiency natural gas plant. If they use coal, fine, but they must find a way to sequester the extra CO2. Cornwall mentions that some regard the immense beds of basalt in Washington as a natural sponge for CO2, turning it into hard minerals (journalists who attended the recent CASW New Horizons Meeting in Spokane got an earful from a Pac. NW Nat’l Lab expert on that. But nobody has proven it’s practical, yet).

This got fairly wide attention. Other stories include:

Reuters ; Oregonian Michael Milstein ; Columbian Erik Robinson ; AP David Ammons, Shannon Dininny ; Longview Daily News Erik Olson ;

Nobody’s Pickin’ on Coal Alone Dept:

Balance suggests we note, from the Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune’s Paul Walsh, that an ethanol producer has been hit with $300,000 in fines for various environmental violations.

-CP

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 29th, 2007 at 2:59 pm and is filed under Environment & Energy Stories. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.