Wyoming Electricity Rates Will Increase Due To Carbon Capture

Wyoming's Governor Mark Gordon wants to move the state to "net negative," which is less than "net zero" regarding carbon capture.

The Wyoming House has passed a bill that pushes coal plants to install carbon-capture retrofits by 2033. That pushed back the original deadline by 3 years.

Carbon capture is going to make energy in Wyoming even more expensive.

Rep. Donald Burkhart, R-Rawlins, chairman of the House Minerals, Business, and Economics Development Committee, said Monday that the legislation, Senate File 42, is needed to reflect shortcomings from the original law enacted four years ago. (Cowboy State Daily).

The bill will also allow public utilities to recover that expense with a surcharge from customers not to exceed 2% of each customer’s total electric bill.

Looking across the nation, and the world, we can see that carbon capture has not had the impact that was hoped for.

New York’s path to net zero aligns closely with European countries.

Energy costs are rising, and European industries are shutting down.

Aluminum production is down 12%, crude steel production is down 10%, paper production is down 6%, and chemical production is down 5%. (Times Union).

A semiconductor manufacturer was hoping to expand in New York. But the slow switch to net zero is hampering the energy supply needed for expansion.

GlobalFoundries’ current factory in Malta, New York, campus employs 2,500 people, according to the Times Union, and the expansion would add 1,500 more jobs. It would also create 9,000 construction jobs between the Malta project and another expansion at a Vermont facility. (JTN).

The Times Union reports that New York’s industries are warning that “reliability margins” are being stretched to the breaking point, which could mean brownouts, meaning grid-wide drops in voltage during periods of high demand.

As Wyoming's Black Hills Energy explains it:

“The research and studies regarding low-carbon energy portfolios, and specifically carbon capture, are quickly developing,” Black Hills Energy attorney Jana Smoot White told the Wyoming Public Service Commission.

“They’re probably not at a state where we would be comfortable presenting a final plan at the end of next month.”

In the video below a climate scientist from Oxford explains why carbon capture does not work.

Problems include: Developing technology to comply with the mandate and attracting 3rd party operators.

Carbon capture could cost up to $1 billion per coal unit.

It's a cost that would be passed on to ratepayers, (the public).

Worldwide Carbon Capture Is Failing.

After billions of dollars have already been spent over decades with no actual carbon capture success, the Petra Nova coal plant in Texas finally closed for good last year. It was a complete failure.

The San Juan Generating Station in New Mexico was once the biggest capture project in the world. It's closing.

The U.S. Department of Energy spent $6.9 billion on the feasibility of CCS for coal. Nothing came of it.

Carbon Capture Takes A Lot Of Energy.

CCS takes a new power plant to run the system. That's using more energy to get rid of what they're trying to get rid of.

Governor Gordon wants Wyoming to team up with Colorado on direct capture.

Those systems are expensive to create. It requires a lot of energy to run and doesn't actually capture enough to make any meaningful difference.

Carbon Capture Actually Increases Emissions.

The way these systems are currently set up they produce more CO2 than the system removes. 

If they think that the power to run the system can be run by wind farms, they are sadly mistaken.

“Succesful” capture projects only exist at facilities where the carbon is injected into existing wells to extract more oil. This is referred to as “enhanced oil recovery.”

Past Storage Failures

Failure during injection has called blowouts that result in large amounts of CO2—leaking back into the air.

A CO2 pipeline in Mississippi ruptured last year. All that time, money, and resources, for what?