The potential for coal to help meet the Nations future energy needs is almost unlimited. With the Nations abundant coal reserves coupled with its low cost, coal will continue to be a reliable, domestic energy resource even in a world concerned about carbon emissions and climate change. The challenge will be to find cost effective ways to use coal in a manner that meets our nations environmental and climate goals, preserves our national energy security and continues to provide low cost power and products for the American consumer. Experience dictates that the barriers to continued coal use can be overcome through collaboration between the public and private sector. The DOE "Clean Coal Technology Program" has, over the past 20 years, created new generations of technologies that have drastically reduced emissions of criteria pollutants at low cost to the consumer. However, coal now faces a new environmental challenge with the threat of climate change. Technology will be the solution to insuring coal continues to provide the same benefits to the environment and the consumer, but only through strong government support of a focused DOE Clean Coal program.

In 2007, Congress announced its intent to develop legislation that would regulate the emissions of carbon dioxide from sources within the U.S., which will have implications for continued coal use in this country. Nevertheless, many believe that regulations on climate emissions will limit carbon dioxide emissions while coal use continues to grow. Under such a scenario, carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) is the critical enabling technology that has the potential to significantly reduce CO2 emissions while also allowing coal to meet the worlds pressing energy needs. If CCS technology is the means by which we anticipate the continued use of our abundant coal reserves to produce low cost electricity, the partnership between government and industry to jointly develop viable CCS technologies has never been more important. This task will require a monumental effort on behalf of both government and industry in terms of the funding to support the R&D and the level of commitment necessary to develop these technologies.

CURC has developed a strategy in order to achieve CO2 emissions reductions from coal fired power plants through a phased approach in the short term (2015 to 2020), while we continue to focus on research, development and demonstration (RD&D) of technologies that will enable us to achieve even greater CO2 emissions reductions in the long term (2025 and beyond). There are several actions that can be taken in the near term to achieve CO2 emissions reductions from coal fired power plants. Encouraging efficiency increases from the existing fleet of coal fired power plants and from new coal plants now under development will result in near term reductions of CO2 emissions and less coal used per unit of electric power output. This has the added benefit of meeting increases in electricity demand over this same time period without increasing CO2 emissions. Increasing the fleet efficiency, coupled with early, integrated demonstrations of carbon capture technologies and storage capabilities will insure the opportunity exists for long term carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) technologies to become commercially available. Encouraging these early actions now will allow us to immediately act in reducing CO2 emissions without undue economic burden as we simultaneously bridge the gap towards CCS technology that will, through continued RD&D, ultimately enable us to achieve near zero CO2 emissions from coal use.