Category Archives: Global CCS Institute

Blog posts at the Global Carbon Capture & Sequestration Institite

Global CCS Institute

Can Skyonic combine chemical production and pollution mitigation to transform carbon capture into a profitable business? | Global CCS Institute

I recently caught up with Skyonic, an Austin (Tex.)-based carbon capture startup that is expanding a demonstration unit into a production-scale facility at a cement plant in San Antonio, Tex. Due to come on line in 2012, Skyonic’s new deployment is designed to snare 75,000 metric tons of CO2 per year from the cement kilns’ exhaust and convert it into saleable materials.

Founded in 2005, Skyonic has attracted plenty of buzz for its SkyMine process which transforms the CO2 in smokestack exhaust into a buffet of industrial chemicals – including chlorine, hydrogen, magnesium carbonates, sodium bicarbonates, and sodium carbonates – at lower costs than today’s commodity chemical manufacturing methods, according to Joe Jones, Skyonic’s CEO and founder.

Versatile as its technology promises to be, Skyonic’s business model could prove to be as important. That is, if Jones can get the finances to work. With a solution that promises to generate revenue from both pollution reduction services and chemical production, Jones argues that Skyonic is on track to deliver carbon capture services cost effectively without the need for a regulatory price on carbon.

Notably, Skyonic’s recipe also pulls SOx and NOx and heavy metals such as mercury from flue gases. This scrubbing process is, of course, one that big power plants have used for many years. Jones says Skyonic’s SkyMine process can remove these pollutants more cheaply and at smaller scales than today’s methods.

The Environmental Protection Agency has been ratcheting up pressure for power plants to cut emissions of criteria pollutants, which is in turn driving demand for treatment technologies. Last May, the EPA officially recognized the SkyMine process as a “multi-pollutant control” to help power plants comply with the tougher new rules for hazardous air pollutants (known by the acronym, NESHAP, or also as the “utility air toxics rule”).

Jones ran through the numbers for SkyMine for me when we spoke. According to the company’s Jan. 2011 announcement: Current wet-limestone and SCR scrubbing is only scalable for large (400 megawatt or greater) facilities and costs US$400–650 per kilowatt of generating capacity. The SkyMine process can operate down to the 10 megawatt equivalent level and costs less per kilowatt. Additionally, Jones said, current scrubbing technologies release CO2 as they capture acid gases; SkyMine does not.

Skyonic’s technology impressed Department of Energy researchers sufficiently that in July last year, the company was awarded $25 million – the lion’s share of a $106 million tranche of DOE funds distributed to a half dozen U.S. companies all focused on productizing CO2 .

The DOE monies are the second dollop that Skyonic scored from Washington, coming on top of a $3 million grant at an earlier stage of the technology’s development.

“If carbon capture and sequestration policy is going sideways right now,” Jones told me, “demand for technologies that cut conventional pollutants is moving forward.” Their appeal is they can offer a market viable way to develop technology that can in time be focused on CO2 capture, should a cap and trade program emerge.  “This is a neat little key that fits into the public policy hole right now.”

Writing in GreenTechMedia.com last December, Eric Wesoff rightly points out that that the chief question mark hanging over Skyonic’s ambitious claims is whether the technology will be truly economic and CO2 negative at an industrial scale.

Jones believes SkyMine bests CCS because of his technology’s superior economics. “Mineralization is the way to get rid of CO2. You don’t have to do open-heart surgery with the plant.” Since Skyonic’s approach is a post-combustion process, existing facilities can be retrofitted relatively easily, he said. Nor does the process require pipeline transport or geological storage and may therefore be more saleable to policy makers and the public.

Putting some numbers on his claims, Jones told GreenTechMedia that Skyonic’s current “carbon penalty” is 43 per cent, less than what he estimates is the range for CCS, if one includes the full energy toll posed by CO2 capture, compression, transportation and injection. Jones added: “The DOE’s assessment of our process is the most important and the DOE says the process has a negative carbon footprint. It consumes CO2 . Period.”

Jones told the Austin Statesman that the construction of Skyonic’s pilot facility is slated to conclude in 2012 with a total project cost in the neighborhood of $135 million. Funding in addition to the government’s share has come from venture investors.

Turning carbon capture into a profitable business, rather than a costly regulatory hurdle, seems like a smart path here in the U.S., especially as the budgetary outlook continues to darken for continued, let alone heightened, research subsidies for carbon capture and other clean technologies.

Enhanced oil recovery, which I wrote about last month, looks to be one of the biggest potential markets for carbon capture and use. And in coming posts I aim to profile the other companies pursuing carbon capture and use technologies backed by the DOE in its July 2010 funding announcement. In addition to Skyonic, these include Alcoa, Calera, Novomer, Phycal and Touchstone Research Laboratory.

Read or comment on the original post here:
http://www.globalccsinstitute.com/community/blogs/authors/adamaston/2011/08/17/can-skyonic-combine-chemical-production-and-pollution-m

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Researchers find that PECONFs might offer a better CO2 sorbent at lower costs | Global CCS Institute

The search for a material that can soak up high volumes of CO2, at a low cost, remains a tantalizing goal at labs around the world.  Ideally such a material will mop up lots of CO2 under certain conditions, but happily let it go under others. Likewise, it should be particular to CO2, such that it won’t absorb other gases. And it should be fairly stable across a range of chemical conditions and heat levels. Last but not least, it shouldn’t be too costly.Earlier this month, chemists at Lehigh University, in eastern Pennsylvania, released findings of a new porous material that promises to do all that, and maybe more. The researchers, Kai Landskron, Paritosh Mohanty and Lillian D. Kull reported their findings on 19 July in the journal Nature Communications.

Results of the study show that the new material captures CO2 almost as well as more expensive materials in use today, but works at lower pressures, and is stable at temperatures as high as 752 degrees Fahrenheit. The combination suggests it would be cheaper to deploy given that current materials achieve optimal performance only in conditions that are costlier to maintain.

Quoted by Australia’s ABC News, lead research Dr Landskron said he believes the material can be mass produced on a large scale. “We can make this material… simpler than most other materials can be made,” he said. “We can make them from relatively inexpensive building blocks in simple solution reactions, by so-called polycondensation reactions.”

The material still has a long way to get from lab to power plant though. CSIRO’s Dr Lincoln Paterson, who focuses on carbon capture, told ABC News’ Meredith Griffiths that Dr Landskron’s work is a fundamental advance but “…still needs to be taken a long way towards practical application.” He added: “The tests they’ve got so far are that it performs extremely well in the laboratory and it uses low cost materials.”

For those with the appetite, here’s what I could find on the chemical recipe for this new material. According to USA Today, the team reacted two chemicals, hexachlorocyclotriphosphazene and diaminobenzidine, to create a gel. Once dried the material formed porous electron-rich covalent organonitridic frameworks (or PECONFs) that proved to have a strong appetite for CO2.

Here’s how the researchers describe it in their abstract:

Here we report the synthesis and CO2, CH4, and N2 adsorption properties of hierarchically porous electron-rich covalent organonitridic frameworks (PECONFs). These were prepared by simple condensation reactions between inexpensive, commercially available nitridic and electron-rich aromatic building units. The PECONF materials exhibit high and reversible CO2 and CH4 uptake and exceptional selectivities of these gases over N2. The materials do not oxidize in air up to temperature of 400 °C.

For a deeper dive, click through to the full article here: “Porous covalent electron-rich organonitridic frameworks as highly selective sorbents for methane and carbon dioxide.” (Subscription required.)

This is just the latest in a string of research findings looking for lower cost sorbent materials. Back in April, I checked out promising lab work showing that a form of treated sawdust might offer an affordable option as a CO2 sorbent. See ‘Capturing carbon with sawdust‘ 6 April, 2011.

Global CCS Institute

Fretting over a ‘valley of death’ for basic CCS research | Global CCS Institute

As Christopher Short pointed out on these pages earlier this week, American Electric Power (AEP)’s recently suspended operations at its Mountaineer project in West Virginia, a move which underscores how policy uncertainty is having a corrosive effect on viable CCS projects. Short reminds us that, based on Global CCS Institute projects data, Mountaineer is just one of a half dozen US projects that have been shelved partly because of a lack of federal carbon policy. 

There’s a second troubling dimension to this policy problem that occurred to me while catching up on what should otherwise pass for good news in the realm of CCS research and development.

In investment circles, the phenomenon is known as the ‘valley of death’. It happens when promising early-stage technologies fail not for lack of groundbreaking performance improvements, but for a lack of finance or other business-related barrier to scaling.

In the case of CCS, the absence of clear policy means that promising research has fewer paths to scale up for commercial  deployment.

Here’s what brought the thought to mind. On 12 June, just two days before AEP’s announcement, the US Department of Energy (DOE) expanded by three the group of projects designed to confirm the safety of long-term sequestration of CO2. (Find details of the projects further down.)

It’s welcome news, of course, but given the AEP news, generally dim prospects for US carbon policy, and resulting indecision among both private and public-sector players, there’s a worrisome question over how the results of the DOE’s valuable CCS research can evolve.

Take a step back. Much has been written about the failings of the US R&D machine. The country is inarguably blessed with many of the planet’s finest research universities, and is famously skilled at incubating discoveries. But we’re notoriously poor at commercializing those advances. Exceptions exist, to be sure, such as IT and software, but the spectre of ‘invented here, built there’ haunts much of US economic and job growth policy discussions.

Now there’s reason to argue that just such a pattern is setting up in CCS. And there’s certainly risk that a ‘valley of death’ may open up, distancing CCS R&D  projects from crucial commercialization opportunities.

The DOE is seeding numerous R&D projects, but there’s a decreasing population of commercial players who can take on the risk of commercializing them. Likewise, talented researchers drawn to carbon related technical fields face dimmer prospects with the erosion of mid-stage projects.

Now, back to the good news. Cribbing from Carbon Capture Journal, here are details of the projects being newly funded. Funding for the trio will total $34.5 million over four years:

* Blackhorse Energy, based in Houston, Texas, plans to inject approximately 53,000 tons of CO2 into a geologic formation located in Livingston Parish, Louisiana. The project will assess the suitability of strandplain geologic formations for future large-scale geologic storage of CO2 in association with enhanced oil recovery. Additionally, they will test the efficacy of increased storage using short-radius horizontal well technology to inject supercritical CO2 and CO2 foam into the reservoir.

* The University of Kansas Center for Research, in Lawrence, Kansas, will inject at least 70,000 metric tons of CO2 into multiple formations. The project will demonstrate the application of state-of-the-art monitoring, verification, and accounting tools and techniques to monitor and visualize the injected CO2 plume and establish best practice methodologies for MVA and closure in ‘shelf clastic’ and ‘shelf carbonate’ geologic formations.

* Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University, in Blacksburg, Virginia, will test the properties of coal seams, and evaluate the potential for enhanced coalbed methane recovery by injecting approximately 20,000 tons of CO2 into un-mineable coalbeds. (Click here for further details at Carbon Capture Journal.)

As a signal of continuing commitment to CCS, this is encouraging. Given political realities in the US, where legislative policy is blocked by partisan politics, the White House is smart to use federal agencies—the DOE and Environmental Protection Agency, mainly—to spur the climate policy agenda.

But in the absence of full-blown federal policy, I can only wonder: how far can this approach really go, for how long?

Global CCS Institute

Can big oil jump-start CCS? Expanding enhanced oil recovery could absorb decades’ worth of U.S. coal-plant CO2 emissions | Global CCS Institute

Just how big is the potential to sequester power-plant CO2 emissions into the U.S. oil patch?

In a word, “vast,” says a recent report released last month by MIT and The University of Texas at Austin that evaluated the capacity of the oil sector to pump CO2 into ageing wells to boost oil recovery, a process known as enhanced oil recovery, or EOR.

Aligning oil-producing areas with potential supplies of power-plant CO2, the researchers identified a variety of geographies that could accept an estimated 15 years or more of current, total CO2 output from U.S. coal plants, or approximately 3,500 gigawatt-years-equivalent of CO2.

That’s a potentially huge wedge to remove from the country’s climate challenge, given that coal plants account for about 30% of total US CO2 emissions.

(Jump to the bottom for links to the report and related resources.)

What’s more, domestic U.S. oil output would surge. The report estimates that, using the full CO2 output of coal-fired power plants to drive more petroleum from oil reservoirs, an additional 3 million barrels per day could be produced by 2030. That would be a 50 per cent increase over current domestic output.

The promise of scaling up CCS to expand EOR is nothing short of tantalizing. Near term, there is no larger potential source of commercial demand for CO2. The U.S. needs more domestic oil and the resulting economics could substantially subsidize the scaling up of CCS technology.

To be sure, widespread adoption of combining EOR-CCS faces major hurdles. The report names: a lack of CO2 transport and injection infrastructure; regulations remain underdeveloped at best; and there are scant and inconsistent incentives to match up supply and demand of CO2. Each of these shortcomings, the authors conclude, could be overcome with better government coordination.

There’s a long way to go. To get to the levels imagined by the report – that EOR could absorb a full year’s worth of coal plant CO2 output for 15 years – the industry has a long way to go. At its current scale, the industry could only handle 3 percent of that amount.

Here’s how the industry looks today, by that measure:

  • Demand for CO2, from current EOR operations – EOR uses about 115 million metric tons (MT) of CO2 per year currently.  Of this, 65 million MT are “new”,  rather than recycled CO2 being re-injected. This “new” CO2 comes mostly from natural geological CO2 reservoirs, and is pumped to oil wells via a network of pipelines.
  • Supply of CO2, from coal-fired power plants – Coal-fired power plants in the U.S. produce about 2,000 million MT of CO2. As a share of the total, EOR’s current demand (65 million MT of CO2) amounts to 3 per cent. Put another way, EOR’s appetite for CO2 could be met today with the emissions from approximately 10 gigawatt electric (GWe) of high-efficiency (supercritical) baseload coal power plants capacity, according to the report.

For a deeper dive into the MIT Univ. of Texas study, along with the research papers underlying the report, and other related material, follow the links below:

  • The report, summarizing the findings of a conference held in June last year, was published in May 2011 and can be downloaded from the Univ. of Texas here. You can view the individual academic presentations given at the July 2010 meeting at the homepage of MIT Energy Initiative, here.

Check out the original post at:
http://www.globalccsinstitute.com/community/blogs/authors/adamaston/2011/07/13/can-big-oil-jump-start-ccs-expanding-enhanced-oil-recov

Global CCS Institute

Firing up first world’s first coal-fired CCS plant: Five questions for Southern Co | Global CCS Institute

After two years of construction, Southern Co.  flipped the switch on the world’s largest-scale, coal-fired CO2 capture facility at a site on the banks of the Mobile River, in Barry, Alabama last month.

Teaming up with Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, Southern Co. brought on line a 25-megawatt, coal-fired carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) facility on a patch of river-side land that is home to the James M. Barry Electric Generating Plant, one of the largest in Southern Co.’s portfolio.

With more than 42 gigawatts of total generating capacity, and 4.4 million customers, Atlanta-based Southern Co. is one of the largest electric utilities in the United States.
For more details on the Barry CCS project, I had a quick exchange with Southern Co.’s Nick Irvin, a principal research engineer, just before the July 4th long weekend.

What carbon capture technology is the facility using? 

Southern Company teamed up with Mitsubishi Heavy Industries which, together, we are responsible for the CO2 capture plant design and operation. This facility utilizes the KM CDR Process, a capture technology which was developed jointly by Mitsubishi Heavy Industries and The Kansai Electric Power Co.

The first step, of course, is coal combustion, which generates electricity and gives off a flue gas. A share of the flue gas from the main coal power plant is piped to the CCS facility. There, as part of the KM CDR process, the flue gas reacts with KS-1, an amine solvent, which captures the CO2. This creates a flow of CO2 that can then be separated from the KS-1, compressed and sent to a sequestration off site.

What made the Barry plant the site of choice?

Barry was chosen on the basis of the facility’s size and status as a flagship site among Southern Co.’s fleet. The main facility here – the James M. Barry Electric Generating Plant – is home to seven generating units, powered by coal and natural gas, with a total nameplate generating capacity of 2,657 megawatts. The CCS plant takes a slipstream of the existing plant’s flue gas, equivalent to about 25 megawatts out of the total 700-megawatt gas flow.

What volume of CO2 are you capturing?

The facility is designed to capture about 500 metric tons per day, pulling about 90 per cent of the CO2 out of the inbound flue gas slipstream. Annually, it will operate with the capacity to capture 150,000 tons to 200,000 tons of CO2.

How is the CO2  being handled?  

Pipeline construction is underway to pump the CO2 to a site about 12 miles away.  Beginning this autumn, the Southeast Regional Carbon Sequestration Partnership will transport the captured CO2 through a pipeline to the Citronelle Oil Field, which is operated by Denbury Resources.

There the CO2 will be injected 9,500 feet into a deep saline geologic formation. The CO2 is being injected into an oil-drilling region but it is not being used for enhanced oil recovery. The CO2 is being sequestered in a formation about 3,000 feet above the deeper oil deposits, where it will remain permanently stored.

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), along with its program participants -Denbury Resources, Electric Power Research Institute and Southern States Energy Board – are managing the design and operation of the pipeline and injection system.

What’s next for Southern Co.’s CCS strategy? 

The goal at first Southern Co. is developing options to reduce emissions and meet potential regulatory requirements. We want to look at technologies of the future as an option to do this.  In addition to the Barry CCS project, the company is also:

  • Managing the DOE National Carbon Capture Center in Alabama, where we’re testing the next generation of technologies to capture carbon dioxide emissions.
  • Building a commercial-scale, 582-MW generating plant in Kemper County, Mississipi, using local lignite and the company’s Transport Integrated Gasification (TRIG) technology, with 65 per cent carbon capture and re-use.
  • Drilling wells to assess geologic suitability for carbon storage at other power Southern Co. power plants
  • Partnering with universities to train the next generation of CCS engineers and to advance the industry’s geologic testing capabilities.

Other resources: For more information on Mitsushishi’s KM CDR process, which is described as less energy-intensive than other CO2 capture technologies, see this introduction. Mitsubishi is rolling out the process at a variety of other facilities globally which are listed here.

Check out the original story here:
http://www.globalccsinstitute.com/community/blogs/authors/adamaston/2011/07/06/firing-first-world%E2%80%99s-first-coal-fired-ccs-plant-five-qu

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Capturing carbon from the air? Economics make it a non-starter, says blunt U.S. physics report | Global CCS Institute

There has been tantalizing, if very early, progress in the technology of capturing CO2directly from the atmosphere. If such “air capture” could be done economically, developers of the technology imagine it could radically lower the costs and complexity of carbon capture and sequestration (CCS).

But a recent study has cast serious doubts that such an approach could ever be economically viable.

First, a reminder of how air capture could simplify the development of carbon capture infrastructure. As now envisioned, most CCS regimes would require power plants to capture emissions at or before the smokestack, then pipe the CO2 some distance to regions with the right geology to entomb the greenhouse gas.

Building the pipeline system to transport these gases within North America, an industry insider once explained to me, could be comparable in scale and cost to the construction of the grid of natural gas pipelines that criss-cross the continent, and that have taken most of a century to build.

Air capture could do away with much of that costly network. Whether CO2 is captured at the source, a mile away, or on the other side of the planet, it doesn’t matter to the atmosphere where the CO2 is extracted, so long as the same amount, or more, is removed.

This would make it possible to site CO2 injection operations directly on top of the best geological sites. It could also simplify the CCS challenge in more populated regions, where zoning complexities, property costs, and public anxieties might make local sequestration operations a headache.

A handful of companies are developing early-stage business models headed toward the goal of air capture. Here in New York City, Global Research Technologies (GRT) is working to commercialize “carbon trees” based on a proprietary material being developed at Columbia University that mops up CO2 from ambient air. (For more on the technology, I profiled GRT’s plans over at NRDC’s OnEarth, here.)

Promising as it sounds, there’s a twist. Surveying the carbon balances behind air capture, a panel at the American Physical Society (APS) in May issued an unusually blunt rejection of the viability of such systems in a report entitled Direct Air Capture of CO2 with Chemicals.

The report’s criticism focuses not on the technical viability of direct air capture (DAC) of CO2, but on the peculiar catch-22 carbon balance that powering any such systems would put in motion.

In short, DAC systems would have to be powered by low-carbon energy sources such as renewables. But in any scenario where there are still higher-carbon power plants on the grid, there’s a bigger benefit to simply using the low-carbon energy sources to replace the higher-carbon power plants and hold off on the DAC systems. In other words, DAC doesn’t make sense until big CO2 emitters are virtually eliminated from the globe’s power plant mix.

Here’s how the authors put it…

…[ DAC] is not currently an economically viable approach to mitigating climate change. Any commercially interesting DAC system would require significantly lower avoided CO2costs…. In a world that still has centralized sources of carbon emissions, any future deployment that relies on low-carbon energy sources for powering DAC would usually be less cost-effective than simply using the low-carbon energy to displace those centralized carbon sources. Thus, coherent CO2 mitigation postpones deployment of DAC until large, centralized CO2 sources have been nearly eliminated on a global scale…

As I read it, the report shouldn’t derail research into DAC technologies per se. Given the alarming momentum of CO2 growth in the atmosphere, such tools are potentially powerful aides for the long-term carbon reduction. But the findings should remove the idea that DAC offers a short cut—along with geo-engineering—that could allow humans to continue emitting, business-as-usual, in the hopes that a future, far-off technology will solve the problem of atmospheric CO2 buildup.

“This report provides no support for arguments in favor of delay in dealing with climate change that are based on the availability of DAC as a compensating strategy,” concludes its authors, among whom is Princeton University’s Robert Socolow. Along with Stephen Pacala, Socolow co-authored the hugely influential “carbon wedges” analysis of the climate change challenge.

As Bill Sweet succinctly puts it over at IEEE Spectrum’s EnergyWise blog, the APS report “will take atmospheric capture of carbon off the policy agenda. This means, together with the collapse of an anticipated nuclear renaissance, that coming to terms with climate change will be more challenging than ever.”

Download a copy of the American Physical Society paper evaluation here, as a PDF.

Read the original here:  http://www.globalccsinstitute.com/community/blogs/authors/adamaston/2011/06/07/capturing-carbon-air-economics-make-it-non-starter-says

 

Global CCS Institute

New Jersey pulls out of multi-state greenhouse gas trading regime – signs of 2012 election? | Global CCS Institute

In what could prove to be an early signal of carbon policy dynamics in the 2012 presidential race, the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, the sole multi-state, cap-and-trade program operating in the U.S., was dealt a setback when the governor of New Jersey announced plans to exit the program late last month.

Against a backdrop of record fiscal deficits, New Jersey’s Republican Gov. Chris Christie announced plans to end the state’s participation in the two-year old program, calling it a gimmicky and costly failure.  The move culminated months of political pressure from Republican state legislators as well as campaigns sponsored by conservative national groups to exit the program.

This is not a deathblow to the program but the withdrawal of the second largest state economy in RGGI—pronounced like Reggie—hurts momentum to build low-carbon energy technologies, from renewables to carbon capture and storage (CCS) pilots.  If the governor’s decision survives anticipated legal challenges, it could set a precedent for others. Earlier in May, legislators in three other states rejected bills to pull those states out of the 10-state program too.

RGGI’s ten members, prior to New Jersey’s exit, are shown in dark green. Observer states and provinces are in lime.

As a policy experiment, RGGI was heralded as a potential template for the development a nation-wide carbon cap and trade program, and as such has emerged as a key target for opponents of climate change policy. If the program derails, green energy funding would suffer, too. To date, RGGI has conducted 11 quarterly auctions that have raised nearly $861 million from sales of carbon allowances. According to RGGI data, almost two thirds of the proceeds have been steered to fund energy efficiency and alternative energy technologies.

In the national context, Gov. Christie’s move provides a snapshot of the paradoxical politics of climate change in the U.S. at the moment. While announcing plans to exit the carbon-trading program, the governor simultaneously reversed an earlier position doubting the science behind global warming.
At the RGGI news conference, Christie also pledged to maintain the state’s commitment to renewables, to support the build out of more solar and offshore wind energy, while also pledging to prevent the construction of any new coal-fired power plans in his state. In early June, however, Christie slashed the state’s goal to develop renewable sources of electric power. From a minimum of 30% of all supply by 2021 — one of the most ambitious in the nation — the governor wants to aim for 22.5%, calling the new target more “achievable”.

The governor also released a report saying the state’s emissions had already fallen below goals for 2020, but discounted RGGI’s role in the shift. Quoted by Christa Marshall of ClimateWireNews, Christie said:

“We remain completely committed to the idea that we have a responsibility to make the environment of our state and world better,” Christie said. “We’re not going to do it by participating in gimmicky programs that don’t work.” He said New Jersey would depart RGGI by the end of the year.

“Reduced emissions have been due to increased use of natural gas, and the decreased use of coal. We’re seeing that the market, and not RGGI, has created incentives to reduce the use of carbon-based fuels,” Christie added.

Christie’s decision highlights the dramatic shift in the politics of climate in the Republican Party over the past decade. Keep in mind that RGGI was first championed by George Pataki, top Republican governor of New York in the early 2000s. That was a time, barely a decade ago, when Senator and eventual Republican presidential nominee John McCain also backed climate policy.

A decade later Christie, who has repeatedly denied any intention to run for president, is a darling of the Republican punditry.  And of the few Republican candidates who have officially declared a bid to seek the presidency, Mitt Romney also withdrew from RGGI while he was governor of Massachusetts—although it was before trading had begun and the state later re-joined.

Gov. Christie’s move was not a surprise. An early sign that New Jersey may pull our of RGGI came last year when, like a handful of other governors of deficit-strapped RGGI member states, Gov. Christie redirected $65 million raised from auctions of carbon credits for use in the general ledger.

All that said, RGGI continues to operate, with its next quarterly auction dated June 8. Nine states remain active in the trading pool. These are Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York, Rhode Island and Vermont. Pennsylvania acts as an “observer”, along with three Canadian provinces along the U.S. north-eastern border: Québec, New Brunswick, and Ontario.

It’s worth noting there are two other multi-state climate initiatives in North America. Both are less evolved than RGGI and both face similarly rocky political prospects. They are:

  1. Western Climate Initiative, which includes 11 U.S. and Canadian regions, is larger than RGGI and is slated to come on line in 2015. Its goal: to lower greenhouse gas emissions by 15% by 2020, from a 2005 base.
  2. Midwestern Greenhouse Gas Accord includes six more heavily industrialized U.S. states and one Canadian province, but is the least evolved of the three.

Check out the original post here: http://www.globalccsinstitute.com/community/blogs/authors/adamaston/2011/06/06/new-jersey-pulls-out-multi-state-greenhouse-gas-trading