Biden’s Mad War on Natural Gas Will Not End Well for Americans

Even as the Biden administration’s regulatory agencies are moving to render the building of new natural gas power plants too costly to justify, a consensus has formed in the analyst community that the added power demands from AI will require a big expansion of natural gas generation to ensure grid stability.

Over a span of less than 20 days in April and May, Biden regulators at the Environmental Protection Agency and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission published new regulations that, according to grid expert Robert Bryce, add more than 1 million words targeting natural gas to the federal register.

On April 25, the EPA finalized new power plant emission rules that will essentially force the retirement of America’s remaining coal-fired power plants by 2030 by rendering them too costly to continue operating. Most media reports focused on that aspect of the new regulations, which had been anticipated.

Reporters gave less attention to the fact that the new rules also constitute a clear effort to make it near-impossible to finance and operate additional gas-fired power plants over the same time. The requirement that new gas plants be accompanied by costly carbon capture and storage (CCS) capability adds millions in additional costs and would also consume as much as 30% of the power generated by the plants, greatly diminishing their profitability. The fact that some operators have already tried and failed to add CCS to at least five such plants in the US leads to an almost inevitable conclusion this rule is intentionally structured to shut down the natural gas power industry in the US.