Coal news and updates

Wyoming’s carbon capture mandate at coal-fired power plants saw several amendments last week and will head to the Wyoming Legislature’s Senate Appropriations Committee before potentially being considered on the Senate floor.

The Senate Minerals, Business and Economic Development Committee advanced Senate File 42 – Low-carbon reliable energy standards-amendments on a unanimous vote Friday. The bill would amend statutes created by Wyoming’s controversial 2020 law, House Bill 200 – Reliable and dispatchable low-carbon energy standards. The law requires utilities to study the viability of capturing carbon dioxide emissions from coal-fired power plants in the state — a multi-million dollar expense that their captive Wyoming ratepayers must cover.

Proponents of SF 42, including Gov. Mark Gordon, say the 2020 law must be updated — primarily to move a compliance deadline of 2030 back by several years to allow carbon capture technologies to advance and to garner more interest from private investors. Senate File 42 would also exempt utilities with fewer than 10,000 customers due to the financial burden of studying and potentially retrofitting coal plants with the technology. 

Actually implementing carbon capture at existing coal plants in Wyoming could come with a price tag of $500 million to $1 billion per coal unit, according to initial estimates reported by utilities Black Hills Energy and Rocky Mountain Power. There are five coal units currently under consideration for such retrofits.

“[House Bill 200] was never meant to be set in stone,” Gordon’s energy policy advisor Randall Luthi told committee members last week. “I welcome working with utilities on what amendments can actually make it more usable and get us to the end goal — and that is, let’s get some carbon capture units on coal-fired plants.”

Luthi admitted that retrofitting old coal plants — some of which range from 40 to 50 years old — might not be economically feasible. But if Wyoming can successfully demonstrate even a single carbon capture retrofit, it might convince other states to continue burning Wyoming coal and buying Wyoming coal-based electric power generation. “If we do that, there’s no reason that the technology cannot be exported — to those 26 other states that currently rely on Wyoming coal, and to other countries as well.”

But critics, including the Wyoming Office of Consumer Advocate, say Wyoming’s coal carbon capture mandate may not be worth salvaging. Aside from operational risks, the cost is simply too much, they say, because the entire financial burden will likely be borne by Wyoming ratepayers alone.