Crapo: Prepare for big changes in national energy policy

Coming in the wake of Tuesday’s historic national election, which saw dozens of his Republican colleagues swept from power, U.S. Sen. Mike Crapo (R-Idaho) said big changes are coming that will deeply impact state and federal energy policies.

“I feel very confident, and some of us knew this coming, that we will have major pieces of legislation dealing either with cap and trade or some type of carbon tax,” Crapo told a crowded room of Idaho energy leaders at a conference in Idaho Falls Thursday morning.

“The real battle comes when we decide what our national policy will be in regards to coal, petroleum and natural gas,” he said.

The senator expressed his commitment to reducing the nation’s dependence on carbon-based fuels like coal, oil and natural gas, but cautioned that both producers and consumers will be vulnerable during the shift from carbon to renewable energy sources.

“There’s going to be a transition period, probably decades,” he said. “And even then there will be a dependence and heavy usage of carbon-based fuels.”
 
“(Instituting cap and trade or a carbon tax) could significantly drive up the cost of carbon fuels. In doing so, this transition period we’re going to be in will be more expensive,” he added.

Crapo said his preferred strategy is to pursue a broad spectrum of policies, ranging from expanded production of conventional resources and support for new research, to conservation and renewable resources.

“Where (in Idaho) we don’t have the kinds of carbon-based resources, the wind blows here, I can tell you that. The sun shines here, we have great geothermal resources … (and) what a tremendous resource nuclear could be,” he said. “There’s just a long list of things that we, right here in this community, could be engaged with in building an energy cluster.”
 
Where additional research comes in, he said, is in winning the “battle over carbon” – solving the central problem of what to do about greenhouse gases.

That issue was taken up by Steve Aumeier, director of the Energy Systems and Technologies Division of the Idaho National Laboratory. Aumeier is working with a team to develop new “hybrid” energy systems that utilize a combination of renewable sources like wind and biomass with coal and nuclear power to produce low carbon-emitting energy for heating, transportation fuel and electricity.

“Hybrid energy systems really offer an opportunity for this region in the future. It gets us thinking past the marginal barrel of oil … and puts us into the realm of thinking about smarter energy systems,” Aumeier said.

He said that based on research performed at the lab and around the country, using a hybrid system could cut carbon loss from 65 percent, as in current coal-to-liquid technology, to as little as 5 percent.

Taking into account projections that world population will rise to over 9 billion by 2050, using two to three times more energy than today, Aumeier said it’s essential that communities in energy rich areas like the western U.S. find ways to produce power smarter.

“We’re not an energy-poor country … the problem is we need smarter energy systems to unlock those resources,” he said, adding that Idaho’s neighbors possess vast oil, coal and uranium resources, and the state itself has world-class geothermal and wind potential.

“If you can harvest just a fraction of that, that would be significant,” he said.