The Navajo Nation's Dine Power Authority and Desert Rock Energy Co. last week filed suit in U.S. District Court in Houston to force the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to act on their air permit application for the $3 billion, 1,500-megawatt coal-fired Desert Rock power plant, according to an earlier Associated Press report.

The Navajo enterprise and the Houston-based Sithe Global Power, which are partners in the proposed plant, applied to EPA for a permit in early 2004, the AP reported.

"Typically, it doesn't take this long, but there is really no normal time frame," said Margot Perez-Sullivan, an EPA spokeswoman in San Francisco. "It really depends on the complexity of the project, and in this case, it is a complex process."

The process has gotten even more complex with the introduction in Congress earlier this month of a global warming bill that bar any new coal-fired power plants being built without controls on global warming emissions, according to the Gallup Independent.

And, according to the Independent, Dine Power Authority General Manager Steven Begay told the Navajo Nation's Economic Development Committee recently that the new bill is what is holding up the EPA permit. 

The bill, introduced by Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., and Rep. Edward Markey, D-Mass., on March 11 is called the "Moratorium on Uncontrolled Power Plants Act of 2008," (pdf download), according to  the Independent.

Waxman is chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee and is senior member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, while Markey heads the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming.

"Comprehensive economy-wide regulation to address global warming is coming soon," Waxman said in a news release (pdf download) announcing the legislation. "But new uncontrolled coal-fired plants are being built today. My legislation says: `No new plants without emissions controls.' The alternative is senseless -- locking in decades of additional global warming emissions and requiring greater emissions reductions across the U.S. economy to compensate."

More than 100 new plants have been proposed, and if even just a portion of those new plants are built, they will emit more than a hundred million tons of carbon dioxide a year, Waxman's news release said.

The bill would place a moratorium on either the EPA or states from issuing permits to new coal-fired plants without the state-of-the-art technology to capture and permanently sequester the plant's carbon-dioxide emissions, according to the Independent.

And under the bill that moratorium would be in effect until a comprehensive federal regulatory program for global warming pollution is put into place, the paper said. 

Begay said that while Desert Rock will have state-of-the-art technology, there is no carbon-capture technology available yet on a commercial scale, so that the plan is to build Desert Rock so the plant can be retrofitted with a carbon-capture system when it becomes available, the Independent said.

But installation of such a system would be costly -- an estimated $450 million for each of the two 750-megawatt units proposed for the $1 billion plant -- and would result in less power to sell, the Independent said.

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