Coal remains an important part of the nation’s all-of-the-above energy strategy and advanced fossil energy technologies will play a large role. The Department is working with the industry to support those innovative technologies from the lab to comme...
August 21, 2014
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This week I delivered a keynote address at Coal-Gen, an annual conference of more than 2,000 coal industry professionals. I shared an experience not from my time at the Department of Energy, but rather from my time as an entrepreneur in the media industry.
From the time I worked in print and broadcast media to today, I have witnessed the Internet and digital devices shift the way people get their news. The outlets that are innovating and embracing digital news are the ones succeeding today despite the change in their business environment.
Currently, the energy industry and in particular, coal, is experiencing a similarly major shift in industry dynamics to what the newspaper industry faced. A decade ago, coal was by far the largest fuel source for electricity in the United States. But in the past decade, cleaner energy sources like natural gas, wind and solar have become more abundant as costs have declined and concerns about greenhouse gas emissions have grown.
Still, coal remains an important part of the nation’s all-of-the-above energy strategy and advanced fossil energy technologies will play a large role. The Department is working with the industry to support those innovative technologies from the lab to commercial scale.
The National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL) works in public-private partnership to support research and demonstration of early-stage technologies. For example, its partnership with Great River Energy is helping to increase operating efficiencies and reduce the emission of pollutants at the company’s Coal Creek Station in North Dakota using a new fuel enhancement system.
The Department’s Office of Fossil Energy is supporting nearly $10 billion worth of demonstration projects to demonstrate large-scale integrated carbon capture, utilization and storage (CCUS) projects in a number of industries, using a number of different technologies CCUS at scale and to provide data, knowledge, and experience.
The Department is also helping technologies as they move from demonstration to commercial scale. Just last month, the Department announced that it is partnering with NRG Energy and JX Nippon to construct the Petra Nova Project in Houston, Texas. The $469 million project will be the first U.S. commercial-scale post-combustion CCS retrofit and the largest in the world. It is expected to annually capture 1.4 million metric tons of carbon dioxide from 240 MW of generation.
For those technologies that are on the edge of widespread commercial deployment, the Department’s Loan Programs Office (LPO) is poised to help by providing loan guarantees. In December, LPO announced an $8 billion Advanced Fossil Energy Projects solicitation that can help the coal industry finance projects that avoid, reduce, or sequester greenhouse gases. The solicitation is applicable to projects along the entire fossil fuel value chain, including anything from extraction to generation to greenhouse gas removal to efficiency improvements.
Whether it’s the news or the coal industry, innovation is the key to future success. Loan guarantees can be an important financing tool for the innovations that will help the coal industry be an important part of the nation’s energy mix into the future.
Peter W. Davidson
Peter W. Davidson served as Executive Director of the Loan Programs Office (LPO) at the U.S. Department of Energy from May 2013 to June 2015. Mr. Davidson oversaw the program’s more than $30 billion portfolio of clean energy and advanced vehicle loans and loan guarantees, making it the largest project finance organization in the U.S. government. Mr. Davidson was responsible for ensuring that the LPO carries out its mission to accelerate the deployment of innovative clean energy projects and domestic advanced vehicle manufacturing. By providing debt capital to a broad range of renewable energy, advanced fossil energy, and nuclear energy projects, as well as advanced vehicle manufacturing facilities, the LPO is supporting economic development across the U.S., promoting an “all-of-the-above” energy strategy, and reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
Prior to leading the LPO, Mr. Davidson was Senior Advisor for Energy and Economic Development at the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey and was the Executive Director of New York State’s economic development agency, the Empire State Development Corporation. Prior to his government service, Mr. Davidson was an entrepreneur who founded and managed six companies in Spanish language and other niche markets, broadcasting, publishing, marketing and digital preferred services. Early in his career he was an executive in the investment banking division of Morgan Stanley & Co.
Since 2001, Mr. Davidson has also been Chairman of the JM Kaplan Fund, a New York City based philanthropic organization. Under his leadership, grant making has focused on reducing New York City’s carbon footprint; supporting immigrant integration in the U.S. and archeological conservation world-wide.
Mr. Davidson has a BA from Stanford University and an MBA from the Harvard Business School.