Politicians have waited so long to get serious about tackling rising global temperatures that preventing the most dangerous warming will likely require capturing carbon dioxide at source and removing already emitted carbon from the air.
The US has a head start on CCUS and CDR in part because the country’s oil and gas industry has long used CO2 to boost production.
But current and planned carbon capture and removal activities extend well beyond these oil industry roots.
The Biden administration wants carbon capture and removal technologies to be capable of operating at the “gigatonne” scale by 2050.
The first comprises technologies that capture CO2 at the source, for example from fossil fuel-burning power plants, factories or other large industrial facilities.
The US is at the forefront of global efforts to commercialise carbon capture and removal technologies.
Much of the recent activity around carbon-removing technologies in the US is attributable to the 45Q tax credit, a section of the federal tax code that supports CCUS and CDR deployment.
Recent action in Congress would provide investors and companies even more long-term federal policy certainty.
The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law allocated more than $10bn for “carbon capture, direct air capture and industrial emission reduction”.
Lower carbon capture requirements – 12,500 tonnes per year for industrial facilities and 18,750t/yr for power plants – would make more projects eligible for the credit.
For carbon capture projects that meet wage and labour requirements, credit amounts would increase from $50/t to $85/t for CO2 locked away in geological storage and from $35/t to $60/t for CO2 used in enhanced oil recovery.
A Senate vote on the massive spending bill was headed for an end-of-year vote before West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin, the Democrats’ primary holdout, said on 19 December he could not support the House version of the bill.
Senate Democrats cannot pass the Build Back Better Act without Joe Manchin’s vote; and Manchin will not vote for the bill without provisions to preserve his state’s coal and natural gas power plants and jobs.
Manchin and a handful of other Senate Democrats are also working to lower or eliminate the 75% CO2 capture requirement for power plants included in the House version of the Build Back Better Act, arguing it would limit the number of plants that can claim the credit.
Congress should not provide an unlimited subsidy to the fossil fuel industry that would entrench coal and gas power plants,” several environmental NGOs wrote in a 9 December letter to Senator Ron Wyden, chair of the Senate’s Finance Committee.
Republicans support it because they believe it will enable the US to use the country’s vast fossil fuel reserves indefinitely; Democrats believe carbon removal will likely be necessary to prevent even more dangerous planetary warming.
In early November 2021, the DOE announced the “Carbon Negative Shot”, the third target launched under its new Energy Earthshots Initiative, a program intended to accelerate breakthroughs in solutions to reach net zero by 2050.
DOE launched a new Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations on 21 December, staked with $20bn from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, to fund demonstration projects in sectors such as hydrogen, energy storage and carbon capture.
At Petra Nova, where a CCS project was added to an existing coal-fired power plant located near Houston, Texas, the CCS system was mothballed in May 2020, with the operator, NRG, blaming “the effects of the worldwide economic downturn, including the demand for and the price of oil”.
Last month, the Iowa Fertilizer Company signed an agreement with Navigator CO2 Ventures to transport and store up to 1.13 million tonnes of CO2 annually via the proposed Heartland Greenway, a 1,300-mile pipeline system that would send CO2 from Midwestern industrial facilities to a site in Illinois for underground storage.