RNG NEWS
Stay up to date with the latest stories, insights, and announcements.State Legislative Panel will advise that freeze on Ohio's clean-energy rules be continued
By Dan Gearino, The Columbus Dispatch.
A two-year freeze of Ohio’s clean-energy standards would become indefinite under recommendations that legislative Republicans are set to announce today.
The proposal follows about a year of hearings by the Energy Mandates Study Committee, a joint House-Senate panel, and is likely to be greeted with loud objections from advocates for renewable energy and energy efficiency.
The committee will cite the federal Clean Power Plan as the main reason for continuing the freeze in state standards, saying that Ohio needs to maintain flexibility to deal with the federal rules, according to a draft of the report obtained from a committee member by The Dispatch.
Waste In, Electricity Out: The Power of Anaerobic Digestion
By Robert Coolman, The Daily Beast.
Starting with bio-waste, companies using anaerobic digester installations can church out fertilizer, animal bedding, and tons of other organic products.
Waste goes in, out comes…electricity? Waste-to-energy is an old idea. But less common are methods that harness the power of nature so masterfully that they can be brought anywhere, be it off the grid or in the city. If that weren’t enough, such methods cut carbon emissions, reducing the contributions of human-induced climate change.
Usually we’re used to thinking of waste coming after digestion, but to solve all these problems we’re going to have to start thinking like microbes. The secret is anaerobic digestion. Anaerobic digestion is not by virtue a blessing; it’s one of the main reasons for reducing food waste in landfills. When microbes perform anaerobic digestion it causes the carbon contained in food and other bio-wastes to decompose into methane. This is a problem because methane, as a greenhouse gas, is more than 20 times as potent as the carbon dioxide formed from aerobic digestion.
Oregon weighs Clean Power Plan target
By Tracy Loew, Statesman Journal.
Oregon should easily meet its carbon reduction target under President Obama’s Clean Power Plan, which will cut carbon pollution from power plants nationwide 32 percent by 2030. But the path to get there is not so simple.
The plan requires each state to make a handful of decisions – such as whether to go it alone or work with other states, how to measure its emissions, and how to handle emission rate credits.
“There are many issues that must be weighed and considered,” Palmer Mason, legislative coordinator for the state Department of Environmental Quality, told legislators at a three-hour joint meeting of the House and Senate environment committees Tuesday.
China's Xi Jinping Announces Cap-and-Trade Carbon Program: Will it Work?
By Mark L. Clifford, Forbes.
China’s President Xi Jinping won kudos for announcing on his state visit to Washington, D.C. in late September that China will by 2017 enact a cap-and-trade system designed to cut carbon emissions.
According to the White House joint statement on the meeting between Xi and U.S. President Barack Obama, “China… plans to start in 2017 its national emission trading system, covering key industry sectors such as iron and steel, power generation, chemicals, building materials, paper-making, and nonferrous metals.”
Cap-and-trade programs typically give a company the right to emit a certain amount of a given pollutant; if it can cut its emissions beyond what’s expected, it can sell the excess allocation. Conversely, if it needs more credits, it can buy them from another company.
Tax Extenders You Can Count On
Provisions that are likely to be passed – however late
Tax extenders -- temporary tax provisions that are reinstated on a regular basis -- have been a recurring part of the tax scene for years, but Congress’ habit of passing them extremely late in the year tends to eliminate their intended effect for tax planning (e.g., last year’s reinstatement of Section 179 increased expensing limits gave little time for purchasers of new equipment to be sure that the deduction would in fact be in place).
Much of the current group up for debate expired at the end of 2013, and were reinstated for 2014 on Dec. 19, 2014. The Senate Finance Committee in July passed a bill that would extend many of these provisions for two years, until the end of 2016, but as of yet there’s been no sign of further movement.
While the extenders run the gamut from insignificant to highly significant, a number of them are so important that it is inconceivable that they won’t get passed, sooner or later. Here are some of the ones affecting people and businesses in important ways.
Greenlane Biogas Contracted by Promus Energy to Supply Biogas Upgrading Solution for Dairy Farm
Burnaby, BC – Greenlane Biogas has signed a contract with Promus Energy, a project development company focusing on renewable and sustainable technologies, to provide an integrated biogas upgrading solution for a dairy farm located in Yakima County, Washington. Included in the solution is the supply of a Totara+ biogas upgrading unit and additional process equipment to deliver pipeline quality renewable natural gas (RNG).
With the capacity to upgrade biogas at a rate of 1,500 SCFM, the Totara+ system will convert organic waste from a herd of 10,500 dairy cows into approximately 8,300 diesel gallon equivalents per day of pipeline grade RNG. Using an environmentally friendly process that removes impurities with water only and no chemicals, the RNG produced by the high efficiency Totara+ upgrading system has a purity > 97% methane. RNG produced at the farm will be sold to nearby transportation fleets and injected into the Williams Northwest Pipeline through a new 3.7 mile pipeline equipped with shared access points that will allow other dairies in the area to easily connect to the pipeline grid if they become RNG producers in the future.
Congress and Energy This Fall
By Terrence Heubert, Will Le, & James Wiltraut, Jr., JD Supra.
Congress could consider wide-ranging energy legislation this fall if they can get past a Continuing Resolution, rumors of a government shut-down and pre-election year politics.
Earlier this week, a group of Senate Democrats released a national energy bill, the American Energy Innovation Act of 2015, which lays out the party’s “vision for a cleaner energy future.” The bill addresses the need to update energy-related infrastructure and technological innovation.
In response to the first installment of the Department of Energy’s Quadrennial Energy Review, which projected an 18 percent rise in the cost of electricity, a 72 percent increase in clean energy generation and the need to fill an additional 1.5 million new jobs in the energy industry within the next 15 years, Democrats claim that their legislation looks to get ahead of these issues with a bill that “seeks to unleash American innovation in energy, to spur new technologies and opportunities, to enhance our nation’s security and to create jobs while reducing pollution.”
Jeb Bush’s Energy Plan Includes Dropping Oil-Export Ban and RFS
By Amy Harder and Beth Reinhard, The Wall Street Journal.
In his third policy announcement this month aimed at accelerating economic growth, Jeb Bush is calling to remove the nation’s 40-year-old ban on oil exports, approve the Keystone XL pipeline and eliminate a raft of environmental regulations.
Mr. Bush is expected to outline his energy platform Tuesday afternoon at Rice Energy, a Pennsylvania oil and gas company. Mr. Bush is promising that this agenda, along with his plans unveiled earlier this month to lower tax rates and roll back regulations on business, would generate 4% annual economic growth—a target the U.S. hasn’t hit in a sustained way since the late 1990s.
Mr. Bush’s energy ideas are mainstays among Republican presidential hopefuls on the campaign trail. All of the GOP candidates for president support the Keystone pipeline and many, including retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson, businessman Donald Trump and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, support lifting the ban on crude-oil exports to foreign markets.
House GOP eyes permanent tax cuts
By Bernie Becker, The Hill.
House Republicans are plotting how to add a string of permanent tax cuts to a package that would simultaneously pour billions of dollars into the Highway Trust Fund and revamp international tax rules for business.
GOP lawmakers have been seeking for years to extend for good some of the dozens of tax breaks that routinely expire every year or two. They came close last November, before President Obama and a group of congressional Democrats scuttled an emerging deal between then-House Ways and Means Chairman Dave Camp (R-Mich.) and then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.).
Rep. Dave Reichert (R-Wash.) said this week that House Ways and Means Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) was eyeing the highway bill as a potential vehicle, given that lawmakers have to act by the end of October.
EPA set to release ozone rule this week
By Devin Henry, The Hill.
The Environmental Protection Agency is set to release a contentious new rule limiting surface-level ozone pollution.
The agency has proposed tightening the current standard on ozone from 75 parts per billion to 65 or 70 parts per billion.
Regulators say they need to raise the standards to help the environment and improve public health. But the proposal has drawn scorn and bitter opposition from Republicans and business groups, who say the rule will be prohibitively expensive and lead to billions of dollars in compliance costs.
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