Feasibility and Carbon Capture and Sequestration: Will Commercial Deployment of Carbon Capture and Sequestration Pass the Test?

The United States’ government has developed a policy that supports the use and deployment of commercial level carbon capture and sequestration as a method for reducing carbon emissions from major electricity generating sources. The Environmental Protection Agency must determine which current provisions of the Clean Air Act are best used to regulate greenhouse gases and then apply the feasibility principle to determine what level of emissions reductions will be required. The Clean Air Act will be, at best, a clumsy tool for regulating greenhouse gases, and the feasibility determinations that the Environmental Protection Agency will have to make in setting the technology-based standards under the Act are inexact and time consuming. In order for America to act efficiently and effectively to address climate change causing greenhouse gas emissions and to put in place innovative technology, such as carbon capture and sequestration, new legislation should be enacted which establishes a new statutory regime for the regulation of these chemicals and a new, less discretionary process for putting innovative and highly effective emissions reducing technologies in place.