VOICES: Solyndra's fossil fuel cousins

By Phil Mattera, Dirt Diggers Digest
Republicans show no signs of relenting in their effort to exploit the bankruptcy filing of federally-backed solar equipment company Solyndra to delegitimize not only the Obama Administration's renewable energy policies but the very concept of green jobs.

A key element of the campaign is the depiction of Obama as having a hippie-like preoccupation with wind and solar energy. What the Republicans conveniently ignore is that Obama hedged his bets. While running for the presidency and after taking office he also promoted non-flower-power forms of energy such as nuclear and coal. Much to the chagrin of his supporters in the environmental movement, Obama embraced the industry-contrived idea of "clean coal," otherwise known as carbon capture and storage (CCS).

It is widely forgotten that the 2009 Recovery Act (ARRA), now being vilified for appropriating funds for the loan guarantees given to Solyndra and other solar firms, also included a provision for subsidizing CCS projects. ARRA provided $3.4 billion for the Department of Energy's Fossil Energy R&D Program. Of that amount, $1.52 billion was to support large-scale demonstration projects involving the capture of carbon emissions from industrial sources. "Stimulus Money Puts Clean Coal Projects on a Faster Track" was the headline of a March 2009 article in the New York Times.

The brave new era of CCS did not begin auspiciously. In August 2009 it was revealed that consultants working for an industry front group called the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity had forged letters from non-profit groups to members of Congress expressing opposition to a climate bill that was being considered at the time.

In October 2009 the Energy Department announced a set of modest-sized CCS grants to companies such as Archer Daniels Midland, ConocoPhillips and Shell Chemical. Two months later, DOE handed out a set of much larger grants totaling $979 million to American Electric Power Company, Southern Company and Summit Texas Clean Energy.

And in August 2010 the Energy Department awarded $1 billion in ARRA funds to a large CCS project operated by several companies under the name FutureGen Alliance. In a previous incarnation, FutureGen had been funded by the Bush Administration -- largely to justify inaction on greenhouse gas emissions -- but that money was cut off as the result of a cost study that later turned out to have a major math error.

So how has all this turned out? In July, the CCS movement was dealt a severe blow when American Electric Power announced that, despite the federal aid it was receiving, it would suspend work on its flagship Mountaineer carbon capture project in West Virginia. AEP said it based the decision on the weak economy and the uncertain status of climate policy.

Later that month, Bloomberg BusinessWeek published a report called "What's Killing Carbon Capture," which pointed out that the Mountaineer suspension was only one of a series of recent cancellations or postponements of CCS projects in the United States and other countries. Meanwhile, FutureGen 2.0 is years away from operation and may never justify the federal government's huge investment.

In other words, renewables are not the only kind of energy alternatives that are in trouble. If Republicans want to use the Solyndra case to argue the failure of green job creation, they have to acknowledge that clean coal initiatives promoted by the fossil fuel sector are also going nowhere.

And if they really want to be honest, they would admit that the reasons for setbacks in wind and solar as well as in carbon capture go far beyond the handling of ARRA grants by the Obama Administration. The feeble economy presents a formidable obstacle for any new industry. A dysfunctional policy environment made even more toxic by the rise of climate change denialism creates even more turmoil for energy industry innovators, whether in the renewable or the CCS camp. It may also be the case that those innovators just don't have a viable business plan.

Of course, the Administration's critics are not going to concede any of this. Anti-green job demagoguery will be with us for some time to come.