The Biden Administration Ever More Delusional On Energy

Three and a half years into the Biden Administration, and to an ordinary citizen on the ground it might seem like not that much has changed as to energy. Despite hundreds of government actions and initiatives in an all-of-government regulatory onslaught to transform the energy economy, the important things have been remarkably stable. Production of oil and gas are actually up, and prices increases have been relatively modest — far less than one might have anticipated from the extreme regulatory hostility to production. The percentage of what is called “primary energy” (that is, energy for everything, not just electricity) coming from fossil fuels has remained nearly unchanged. EIA data here for 2022 (latest I can find) show about 79% of U.S. primary energy from fossil fuels, barely changed since Biden took office, and indeed very stable for decades.

Perhaps this situation of stable energy production and consumption results because it reflects what markets and consumers want and need to satisfy their demand for energy. So do you think that the hyperactive regulators might just relax and let the consumers have what they want?

Unfortunately, that is not how this works. Even as the energy producers and consumers have figured out endless workarounds to avoid the fossil fuel suppression that the Bidenauts attempt to impose, the little regulatory tyrants have been busy preparing new bouts of punitive restrictions. Last week saw a round of some of the most sweeping regulatory edicts yet. The regulators really plan to put the people in their place this time.

In the new round, the regulators have gotten farther and farther away from anything realistic, anything consistent with the laws of physics or thermodynamics, anything that might actually work. We are now well into the world of fantasy and delusion.

On last Thursday (April 25), the Administration, via the EPA, announced a suite of no fewer than four final rules “to Reduce Pollution from Fossil Fuel-Fired Power Plants.” Essentially, this is the replacement for the Obama Administration’s so-called “Clean Power Plan,” that ordered a complete re-do of the electricity generation system to gradually shutter fossil fuel plants and replace them with unworkable “renewables.” That Plan got struck down by the Supreme Court in June 2022 for being far beyond anything the EPA was authorized to do under its statutes.

So here is the new Rule covering the comparable subject. The title is “New Source Performance Standards for Greenhouse Gas Emissions from New, Modified, and Reconstructed Fossil Fuel-Fired Electric Generating Units; Emission Guidelines for Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Existing Fossil Fuel-Fired Electric Generating Units; and Repeal of the Affordable Clean Energy Rule.” The document is 1020 pages long because, hey, we’re the EPA, and anything worth doing around here deserves a Rule of at least a thousand pages.

And how does this new Rule achieve the goal of reducing “greenhouse gas emissions”? You could probably spend all week trying to read the thing without ever figuring that out. EPA’s press release makes the following claim:

“EPA’s final Clean Air Act standards for existing coal-fired and new natural gas-fired power plants limit the amount of carbon pollution covered sources can emit, based on proven and cost-effective control technologies that can be applied directly to power plants.”

And what is the “proven and cost-effective control mechanism” they are talking about? The AP summarizes it here in a few words:

Coal-fired power plants would be forced to capture smokestack emissions or shut down under a rule issued Thursday by the Environmental Protection Agency.

It’s the “capture of smokestack emissions” — otherwise known as carbon capture and storage, or CCS. I had a post last August at the time this Rule had been proposed and comments were being received. In my August post I highlighted some of the comments, including those from the states of Ohio and West Virginia. Those comments made mincemeat of any possible claim that CCS technology was either “proven” or “cost-effective.” Not only has it never been proven, but it’s impossible for it ever to work economically. There are many long quotes from comments in that post. Here are just a few.

From the Ohio comment, page 4:

A study of 263 carbon-capture-and-sequestration projects undertaken between 1995 and 2018 found that the majority failed and 78% of the largest projects were cancelled or put on hold.  After the study was published in May 2021, the only other coal plant with a carbon-capture-and-sequestration attachment in the world, Petra Nova, shuttered after facing 367 outages in its three years of operation. . . . [T]his [SaskPower] facility is the world’s only [remaining] operating commercial carbon capture facility at a coal-fired power plant.   And it has never achieved its maximum capacity.  It also battled significant technical issues throughout 2021—to the point that the plant idled the equipment for weeks at a time.  As a result, the plant achieved less than 37% carbon capture that year despite having an official target of 90% . . . . 

From the West Virginia comment, pages 24 - 25:

Take efficiency to start. CCS units run on power, too. An owner can get that power from the plant itself. But this approach makes the plant less efficient by increasing its “parasitic load”—and CCS more than triples combustion turbines’ normal parasitic load. . . . This is the cause the Wyoming study analyzed that showed installing CCS technology would devastate plants’ heat rates and lower net plant efficiency by 36%.

There is endless more of same. The fact is that CCS technology is neither “proven” nor “cost-effective.” It is nowhere after 30 years of trying because it cannot be done economically. It cannot be done economically because it is, in effect, a war against the Second Law of Thermodynamics. To capture more and more of the CO2 from the plant takes more and more of the plant’s output of energy, until in the limiting case you use all the energy of the plant and still some small amount of the CO2 escapes. The whole idea of CCS is to avoid having the disorder of the universe increase by the method of putting sufficient energy into trying. Won’t ever work. See also, perpetual motion machines.

Well, the sensible comments have all been rejected and EPA has just gone ahead and done what it was always planning to do, which is to order up something that can’t ever work economically and can only result in forcing the closure of an energy system that works without any idea of something realistic to replace it.

The deadlines for this start around 2030. Most likely between now and then either the Supreme Court will strike this down, or we’ll get a Republican administration that will sweep it all away. In the meantime we have completely ignorant and tyrannical regulators ordering up an energy system that can’t possibly work and heedless of the enormous destruction that they will likely cause if not stopped.

And that’s only part of what these fools were up to last week on the energy front. Here from Wednesday (April 24) is a “Fact Sheet” issued by the White House on another totally delusional effort: “Biden-⁠Harris Administration Sets First-Ever National Goal of Zero-Emissions Freight Sector, Announces Nearly $1.5 Billion to Support Transition to Zero-Emission Heavy-duty Vehicles.”

I’ve got some news for them: the freight transportation sector (trucks and railroads) is not going to convert to electricity any time soon. At least this announcement was not a regulation mandating the conversion, but only the supposed setting of a “national goal,” with no idea of how it could possibly be achieved or at what cost. The $1.5 billion mentioned is an irrelevant rounding error of a figure that maybe could buy 10,000 new electric trucks (in a sector with at least 3 million existing non-electric ones), and the 10,000 trucks would be mostly useless for the purposes in question.

These people become more and more detached from reality with each passing day. They seem to have no idea how much damage they are doing, and they don’t care a bit. Somehow they have convinced themselves that they are “saving the planet,” when if they could do even a little arithmetic they would know that their efforts cannot possibly move the needle on that effort. It’s just another week in the Biden Administration energy clown show.