WASHINGTON – The Environmental Protection Agency said Friday that it would delay issuance of a new rule limiting emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases from new power plants after the electric power industry objected on legal and technical grounds.
The rule, proposed a year ago and scheduled to be finalized on Saturday, would have put in place the first restrictions on climate-altering gases from the power sector in the United States. Agency officials said it would be rewritten to address the concerns raised by the industry, which said that strict new carbon standards could not be met using existing technology.
An E.P.A. spokeswoman said the agency had received more than two million comments on the proposed rule. She would not speculate on when a revised standard would be issued.
"We are continuing to work on the rule," said Alisha Johnson, the E.P.A. press secretary. "No timetable has been set."
The draft rule, introduced last March by Lisa P. Jackson, then the E.P.A. administrator, would have limited carbon dioxide emissions from new power plants to 1,000 pounds per megawatt-hour.
Gina McCarthy, the head of the agency's air and radiation office that wrote the rule, has been tapped to head the E.P.A. Her nomination is currently before the Senate.
Newer power plants burning natural gas already easily meet the new standards, so the rule presents little obstacle for new gas plants. But the rule would have effectively killed any new coal-fired plants, because they emit nearly twice as much carbon per unit of electricity as natural gas plants and there is currently no available technology to bring their emissions under the limit.
Coal today provides about 40 percent of electricity generation in the United States and is the single-largest source of emissions associated with global warming.
The new rules do not apply to existing plants, but the acting administrator of the E.P.A., Robert Perciasepe, said this week that the agency expected to propose a standard for existing power plants sometime in the next 18 months. The new plant rule must be completed before the agency can finalize standards for existing plants.
Coal industry officials and coal-state politicians denounced the rule for new power plants as part of what they termed the administration's concerted "war on coal" and flooded the E.P.A. with hostile comments. Utility industry officials pointed out that the new rule broke with past agency practice by lumping all types of power plants under a single emissions standard, rather than adjusting the limits depending on location, fuel source, combustion technology and other factors.
Industry officials said they expected the agency to rewrite the rule to provide more flexibility and to allow different limits for different types of plants.
Jeffrey R. Holmstead, who led the E.P.A.'s air quality office in President George W. Bush's administration and who now represents business clients, said the agency had concluded that the standard as proposed would not survive a certain court challenge.
"I think E.P.A. recognizes that what it proposed just flies in the face of what the statute says and what E.P.A. has been doing under the Clean Air Act for the past 40 years," Mr. Holmstead said.
"There's no way it can stand up in court," he said. "They cannot simply declare that the best technology for building a coal plant is to build a natural gas plant."
Mr. Holmstead said it was not surprising that the agency was missing a deadline for a rule this complex and controversial.
"The E.P.A. misses more deadlines than it meets," he said.
David Doniger, the director of the climate and clean air program at the Natural Resources Defense Council, said that "the delay in completing this standard is regrettable, but despite industry hopes, there is no actual evidence that E.P.A. is planning to weaken its proposal."
"The reason no one is building new coal plants is that they can't compete with gas and wind, even without new standards," Mr. Doniger said. "Millions of Americans concerned about climate change sent in public comments demanding strong carbon pollution standards for both new and existing plants, and E.P.A. needs to act without further delay."
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