The department didn’t track expenditures until 2010, and it’s still investing large amounts of taxpayer money in the technology.
None achieved “economic viability.” The most common way for CCS power plants to offset costs is to help oil companies enhance production by injecting captured carbon into their wells, but that negates some of CCS’s value as a solution to carbon pollution.
The second study, just issued by the University of Chicago and energy research company Rhodium Group, assesses a provision in the Build Back Better bill passed by the House but stalled in the Senate.
The answer is that tax breaks for mature technologies — like the century-old tax benefits for fossil fuel production — usually are not.
And because it does nothing to eliminate carbon pollution as coal and gas are extracted, processed and transported, it fails the desirability test compared to renewable energy technologies that produce no carbon at all once they are in place.
It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that Congress keeps spending money on CCS not because it’s the best way to reduce carbon pollution but because it would postpone the retirement of fossil fuels from the world’s energy mix.
Becker is also executive director of the Presidential Climate Action Project, a nonpartisan initiative founded in 2007 that works with national thought leaders to develop recommendations for the White House as well as House and Senate committees on climate and energy policies.