“We fully support legislative moves to promote CCS development in the USA and hope that the Senate includes CCS in the wider energy and climate legislation that is being discussed on the Hill now,” said Bellona USA Director Jonathan Temple.

“Congress has a lot to do before the election season begins to dominate the US political scene. We hope that Senators can complete their work on climate and energy legislation before they return to their home states for the summer recess,” he said.

But comprehensive energy and climate change legislation is still expected to be delayed some weeks by a raft of discussions on Wall Street regulatory reform. Speaking on Friday, however, Obama told repoters that he expects energy and climate to be scooped up immediately by the Senate once financial regulatory reform is worked out.

Further, the proposed CCS bills skirt the issue of putting a price on carbon, which Senate bill is expected to do across multiple sectors of the economy. After the climate bill’s release, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, a Nevada Democratic, will work with committee leaders on changes to the legislation that will secure the 60 votes necessary for its passage.

Obama’s chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, met with environmental leaders and other key administration allies to map out strategy on the Senate bill. Multiple sources familiar with the meeting said Emanuel and deputy chief of staff Jim Messina insisted that the administration would help push the bill this spring or summer, ClimateWire reported.

The climate legislation is expected to put a price on carbon dioxide across multiple sectors of the economy, while also expanding domestic oil, gas and nuclear power production. After its release, Majority Leader Harry (D-Nev.) plans to work with key committee leaders on changes to the legislation that can garner 60 votes.

“(Climate legislation) is one of these foundational priorities from my perspective that has to be done soon,” Obama said of the climate bill Friday during a White House meeting of outside experts helping the administration on economic recovery plans, ClimateWire reported.

Obama predicted several weeks of Senate debate on the financial reform package, with lawmakers working behind the scenes on a climate bill that must get support from industry if it has any chance of passing.

“There has been a good bipartisan process taking place that would put a price on carbon,” Obama told reporters. “The one thing will be for the business community to be with us on this.”

Obama said he expected a tough political fight cobbling together the votes on the Senate bill, which lead authors John Kerry, Democrat of Massachusetts, South Carolina Republican Lindsey Graham and Joe Lieberman, Connecticut’s Independent, have dubbed the “American Power Act.” The Senate trio plans to release the bill next Monday, US media reports said.

“I fear that if we don’t take these steps soon, we’re going to have some big, big problems,” Obama said.

CCS to widen ‘American Power Act’?

The CCS bills that will come before the Senate for discussion on Tuesday are meant to sway coal states toward the broad parameters of climate and energy legislation that is currently stalled in the Senate. A committee aide told ClimateWire that  the CCS measures to be discussed tomorrow could make their way into the committee-passed energy bill if it moves forward.

The CCS bill will focus on promoting research into carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) technologies, building incentives for commercial scale projects as well as clarifying the thorny issue of ownership of underground pore space, or aquifers, in rock to facilitate sequestration projects on federal lands.

Last month, Republican Senator George Voinovich Ohio introduced draft CCS legislation, saying in a statement, “We can’t move to the next step of our energy future without addressing the technologies we need today. “I believe we can pass a responsible bipartisan solution to protect jobs and our economy, rather than a countrywide cap-and-trade scheme.”

West Virginia Democratic Senator Jay Rockefeller, who jointly introduced the measures with Voinovich will tomorrow give testimony on part of the proposals, the language of which offers $20 Billion in incentives for early CCS deployment, said ClimateWire.

The coal industry seems to be placated for the moment, but the Voinovich-Rockefellar measure falls far short of the $60 billion proposed in lat year’s house climate bill – falling a two thirds short of what many critics would have liked to see.

“Conceptually, an incentive programme to speed up adoption of CCS is valuable, but this one is too little money (…) and it lacks the most important ingredient, which is a price on carbon pollution,” Daniel Weiss, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress Action Fund, told Climate Wire last month.

The Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee will also take up tomorrow CCS legislation offer by Pennsylvania Democrat Bob Casey, which would authorize some $3.8 billion in spending for carbon capture and storage research and demonstration programmes.

Casey’s bill would authorize $1.45 billion for a large-scale commercial demonstration program at the Energy Department, $420 million for a carbon capture research program, $820 million for a carbon storage research program that would include a focus on using CO2 for enhanced oil recovery, and $1.12 billion for a research program on advanced “clean coal” power generation, including advanced turbines, fuel cells, hydrogen production and advanced gasification.

“If you have carbon capture and sequestration … how do you manage that and deal with that systemically?” Casey said recently. “We’ve got to make sure that we’ve got a framework in place that deals with the liability issues, the litigation issues really, that’ll arise from that change in policy.”