Natural gas to benefit from still-tighter environmental regulations
✍ Scribed by Roy, Randel E.
- Publisher
- John Wiley and Sons
- Year
- 2007
- Weight
- 533 KB
- Volume
- 14
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0743-5665
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
W lawsuits and other threats, one would think that some environmental discussions were about last week's episode of Homicide, rather than the environmental debate currently being played out in the press. The political and economic struggle that wraps the environmental debate is so intertwined that at times it is hard to tell which of the three tactics mentioned above is driving the movement. Most assuredly it is all three, which makes the struggle that much more intense.
It is hard to see through most of the smoke created by this struggle, and even more difficult to uncover an unbiased evaluation of the economic costs associated with environmental regulations. Therefore, the goal of this article is to quantify the impact of recent environmental regulations on the gas industry, specifically, the Clean Air Power Initiative (CAPI). Our analysis will steer clear of the skirmish currently going on between the warring factions on this issue. Instead, it will focus o n a plant-by-plant analysis of the economics of attaining SO,, NOx, ROCKS (fine particulate matter) and CO, emissions levels in a competitive, deregulated environment.
Legislative and Regulatory Issues
Because of the way historical environmental regulations are tied to proposed regulations, it would be appropriate first to provide an overview of the recent history of environmental