A nerdier room has seldom been assembled in the South Hills of Pittsburgh.

In the middle of it was Steven Winberg, native son and high-ranking official in the U.S. Department of Energy, drinking it in.

“This is going to be huge,” he said, speeding past a poster on methane hydrates — deposits of gas trapped in ice. “Not now, but a number of years from now.”

The room inside the National Energy Technology Laboratory’s South Hills campus was packed with posters and their authors standing beside them, eager to explain their work and how it fits into President Donald Trump’s call for “American energy dominance.”

Mr. Winberg stopped near a presentation about a project in Norway where carbon dioxide will be captured using NETL technology for — fingers crossed — $40 per ton, said Steven Mascaro, federal project manager.

Walking away, Mr. Winberg allowed himself to hope that in the not-too-distant future, it might even be closer to $30 per ton. At that price, companies that need CO2 will be turning to power plants for it, he said. It will go from undesirable to a commodity. 

Many of the posters were variations on the theme of carbon capture and sequestration, research that began under the Department of Energy umbrella in 1997 and, as recently as two years ago, was seen as the only way that new coal power plants would ever surface in the U.S.

The cause is dear to Mr. Winberg’s heart —- as chief of R&D for Consol Energy and program director at Battelle Institute, he pushed to commercialize technology that would take CO2 out of the smokestacks of coal-fired power plants and sequester it underground, safeguarding coal’s place in the power mix.

As a private citizen, he frequently and publicly blamed the government for starving these efforts with inadequate funding.

Since his appointment by President Trump a few months ago as assistant secretary for fossil fuels, Mr. Winberg’s opinions on funding have turned a most inoffensive shade of beige.

“Whatever budget is ultimately decided on, I’m going to manage that budget to the best of my ability,” he said last week. “Whatever that budget is.”

Budgetary bumps

When the Trump administration proposed its budget in May 2017, funding for NETL’s fossil energy programs was to be slashed by more than half — from $618 million to $280 million. Money for carbon capture and sequestration in particular was to be cut by 85 percent.

So far, “Congress has ignored the Trump administration’s request,” said U.S. Rep. Mike Doyle of Forest Hills, who sits on the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Energy.

In the last continuing resolution, Congress gave fossil fuel R&D even more money than it was receiving under the past two budgets. NETL employes 1,250 people, with the vast majority evenly split between the Pittsburgh and Morgantown, W.Va., locations.

While Mr. Doyle said he’s made it clear to Mr. Winberg’s boss, deputy secretary Dan Brouillette, that “such a low number wouldn’t fly in Congress,” the Congressman also said predicting NETL’s future budget is a fool’s errand.

Even though the funding comes from Congress, in many ways the direction is set by the administration and its policies.

That’s why this year, NETL’s annual report of its accomplishments featured a full reprint of the America First Energy Plan that the administration released shortly after Mr. Trump’s inauguration a year ago.

It’s a one-page document which argues that “for too long, we’ve been held back by burdensome regulations on our energy industry” and lists several “harmful and unnecessary policies” such as the Climate Action Plan, which aims to cut greenhouse gases from transportation and power generation, and a regulation that gives federal regulators more control over water quality in waterways and wetlands. Both were decried by the coal industry as job killers.

In her introduction to the annual report, National Energy Technology Laboratory director Grace Bochenek wrote that “advancing the American First Energy Plan is what NETL is all about.”

If the national lab has to justify itself in the face of a new administration, it isn’t lost on its researchers.

Pointing to a researcher’s poster about extracting rare earth elements from coal and coal waste, Mr. Winberg noted how it fits perfectly with an executive order on “critical minerals” signed by President Trump last month. 

A directional shift

The administration’s vision for NETL isn’t just a pared-down budget — and possibly a pared-down physical presence from three labs in South Park, Morgantown, and Oregon to one central location.

It’s also a shift in direction.

The budget request described it as a “refocusing” of its efforts on early stage research, leaving demonstration projects, commercialization and deployment to the private sector.

This would be a change for the laboratory, which in recent years had ramped up its efforts to help companies bring technologies to market.

Mr. Winberg said he hasn’t found it difficult to reconcile Mr. Trump’s vision with his own priorities. Those are rejuvenating the country’s aging coal fleet, developing the next generation of coal-fired power plants, and helping companies figure out how to coax more fuel from oil and gas wells.

By 2030, Mr. Winberg said, the coal plants that produce a large yet diminishing chunk of U.S. electricity will be 50 years old. He wants to keep them running, swapping out old turbines for new ones, installing cutting edge materials.

As far as the next generation of coal plants, Mr. Winberg wants NETL scientists to figure out how to make them smaller, far more efficient and cleaner.

He doesn’t have trouble envisioning U.S. utilities building new coal plants at some point in the future. But Mr. Winberg also is thinking beyond the nation’s borders.

“Everyone wants to focus on CO2 and that’s fine,” he said. “But CO2 isn’t just an issue in the U.S. It’s a global issue.”

Take sub-Saharan Africa, he said, where people who live without electricity will use whatever resources are available to them to gain access to energy.

“Sub-Saharan Africa has access to coal,” he said. And when they’re ready to build coal plants, they can build cutting-edge ones, starting out with a smaller carbon footprint.

“And it would be huge to have an export market for American technologies,” Mr. Winberg said.

The idea of analyzing huge troves of oil and gas well data that companies have been collecting since the beginning of the shale revolution is something Mr. Winberg has been toying with since his time at Consol, he said. It certainly furthers the administration’s enthusiasm for domestic oil and gas production.

But does helping companies get more gas out of the ground square with Mr. Trump’s “refocusing” of NETL?

“I think this is exactly what the administration is talking about having government do,” Mr. Winberg said. “Compiling a broad set of data across the industry — that’s not something that the industry is going to be able to do on their own.”

Anya Litvak: alitvak@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1455.

First Published: January 24, 2018, 7:19 p.m.