Energy and Commerce Dems call for a hearing on storage technology

The top Democrats on the House Energy and Commerce Committee pushed again yesterday to talk more about tackling climate change, firing off a letter that asked the committee's Republican leadership to schedule a hearing on ways for industrial plants to trap and store their emissions. Government researchers and the energy industry have been working on carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology for decades as a way to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions of fossil fuels, but it has not been tested at the scale of a full-sized power plant. According to the new letter from Energy and Commerce Committee ranking member Henry Waxman of California and the ranking member of the Subcommittee on Energy and Power, Rep. Bobby Rush of Illinois, it is time to look at recent developments, such as a new National Energy Technology Laboratory report that maps the potential storage sites beneath the United States, Canada and Mexico. The laboratory's "atlas" shows that North America has enough room to hold 500 years' worth of carbon dioxide from smokestacks.