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The science is still out — but some of the industry’s key players are moving ahead regardless.
Wind and solar are out. Clean, firm power is in.
Especially with carbon capture tax incentives on the verge of disappearing, perhaps At One Ventures founder Tom Chi is onto something.
The House budget bill may have kept the 45Q tax credit, but nixing transferability makes it decidedly less useful.
Direct air capture isn’t doing everything its advocates promised — yet. That doesn’t make it a scam.
Congratulations to Mati Carbon, an enhanced rock weathering startup that works with farmers in India.
The culture wars are threatening one of the few bipartisan areas of climate policy.
Carbon capture has always been contentious, but its biggest critics have traditionally been climate activists on the left. Now, in an unexpected twist, it seems to be getting caught up in the same conservative climate culture war that has overwhelmed electric stoves and ESG investing.
Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, took to social media this week to castigate the Republican supermajority in his state’s legislature for hosting a hearing on a bill about carbon sequestration. “Carbon sequestration is a scam!” he said in a pre-recorded video. “It’s part of climate ideology, and it should not be in law in the state of Florida, certainly should not be the work of a Republican supermajority.”
The video was uncanny. DeSantis sounded like the ideological activists he thought he was attacking. The idea of capturing carbon from industrial plants and storing it underground has long held bipartisan appeal among policymakers — attractive to Republicans in oil and gas states that want to keep those industries in business, and to Democrats as a way to reach across the aisle on climate solutions
The Florida bill in question isn’t just about carbon capture technology. It would create a carbon sequestration task force to make recommendations for how the state can increase carbon uptake in the environment — in trees, soils, and the ocean — in addition to using equipment to capture it and store it underground. These kinds of initiatives have long been popular with Republican policymakers, as well, in no small part because they can be pursued without talking about fossil fuels at all. During Trump’s first term, he championed the then-popular idea of planting a trillion trees as a climate solution.
In the video, DeSantis mischaracterizes the bill as calling for “injecting carbon into our soil, aquifers, and even our ocean floor,” conflating nature-based and technological storage solutions and making the legislation sound all the more threatening.
The video is not the only recent example of a prominent Republican coming out against carbon capture and sequestration. In March, Scott Perry, a Republican Congressman from Pennsylvania, co-sponsored the “45Q Repeal Act” with Ro Khanna, a progressive Democrat from California. The bill proposes killing the 45Q tax credit, a subsidy that pays between $60 and $180 for every ton of carbon pumped underground. The amount depends on from where the carbon was captured and whether it is simply sequestered underground or used to pump oil out of aging wells, a process called enhanced oil recovery.
Khanna and other Democrats have introduced bills to kill 45Q each year for the past several years, arguing that it was primarily subsidizing more oil production to the tune of hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars, fueling climate change rather than slowing it. But this is the first time a Republican has signed on as a co-sponsor. Perry painted the bill as a way to “reduce overregulation and fraud” and to help pay for the tax cuts that Trump has asked for. “The 45Q tax credit subsidizes technologies that serve no purpose beyond distorting energy markets,” states a press release from Perry’s office.
“It’s one of these, what we would call Baptist/Bootleggers type of coalitions,” David Reiner, a political scientist and professor of technology policy at the University of Cambridge, told me. “The people who hate climate change and the people who hate the idea that the way of solving climate change would be to engage the oil and gas industry.”
The environmental news outlet DeSmog has also reported on a growing conservative backlash to carbon capture in Canada, with a far-right group called Canada Proud running anti-carbon capture ads to its more than 500,000 followers on Facebook. “Carbon capture is billed as a green technology that stops carbon from entering the atmosphere,” the ads said. “But is it really good for the environment? As it turns out, not really.” Environmental groups like the Sierra Club, the Center for Biological Diversity, Greenpeace, and Food and Water Watch have been saying the same thing for years.
The rhetoric around carbon capture tends to oversimplify complex challenges into absolute statements. Critics say that carbon capture “doesn’t work” or is a “false solution.” Advocates say it’s “proven” technology that’s already avoided millions of tons of carbon from entering the atmosphere.
It’s true that to date, captured carbon has mostly been used to get more oil out of the ground. Oil and gas companies have thus far benefited more than people or the environment, despite their exaggerated advertisements saying otherwise. For many potential use cases, it’s far easier and cheaper to use renewable energy than capture and sequester carbon. The technology is expensive, and without heavy subsidies, it either isn’t economic or would increase energy costs. There are some cases, however, such as removing carbon from the atmosphere or decarbonizing cement production, where it could be one of the best solutions. The technology’s most progressive proponents often argue that the criticisms of carbon capture can be addressed with better policy. But there are no powerful political coalitions pushing for a different vision.
On the contrary, the most powerful proponents of carbon capture are pushing for more generous subsidies. In February, John Barasso, a Senator from Wyoming, introduced “The Enhancing Energy Recovery Act” with six Republican co-sponsors. The bill would expand 45Q so that all carbon sequestration projects, whether they increase oil production or not, qualify for the same amount of tax credit.
Reiner, the political scientist, mostly dismissed the significance of the DeSantis video to the broader policy debate around carbon capture. “Ron DeSantis doesn’t like carbon capture. Well, who cares?” he told me. There’s not much going on with carbon capture in Florida anyway. “The way the Senate works is it vastly over-represents the western, resource-rich states, all of whom have been very enthusiastic supporters of this,” Reiner said. “It’s very easy for Ron DeSantis to posture on this topic. It’s much harder to imagine that would gain a lot of traction in the Senate Republican leadership.”
At the same time, Reiner said the Florida governor’s comments reflect this broader upheaval happening in areas where there once appeared to be consensus. For example, after Trump was elected, there appeared to be relative agreement that the Inflation Reduction Act was safe because of how much money it was sending to Republican districts. But then the Trump administration came in and immediately began trying to shut down many of the law’s grant programs — a course of action few had predicted, mainly because it’s likely illegal for the president to end grant programs without permission from Congress.
Now, Republicans in Congress are considering axing some of the law’s most beneficial clean energy tax credits to pay for Trump’s tax cut package. Billion-dollar mega-projects to capture carbon directly from the air in Texas and Louisiana have shown up on lists floating around the Hill of programs to kill.
Perhaps more striking than the DeSantis video was a re-tweet of it by Wayne Christian, a Republican on the Texas Railroad Commission. The Commission is a state body that regulates the oil and gas industry in Texas, but whose elected members regularly receive the majority of their campaign donations from the companies they regulate. “You’re right [Governor DeSantis]!” Christian wrote. “Carbon Capture & Sequestration is no different than Wind/Solar subsidies. CCUS is Big Oil placating the Left & taking taxpayer dollars to do so. Energy policies should be meritorious & about consumers.”
On environmental justice grants, melting glaciers, and Amazon’s carbon credits
Current conditions: Severe thunderstorms are expected across the Mississippi Valley this weekend • Storm Martinho pushed Portugal’s wind power generation to “historic maximums” • It’s 62 degrees Fahrenheit, cloudy, and very quiet at Heathrow Airport outside London, where a large fire at an electricity substation forced the international travel hub to close.
President Trump invoked emergency powers Thursday to expand production of critical minerals and reduce the nation’s reliance on other countries. The executive order relies on the Defense Production Act, which “grants the president powers to ensure the nation’s defense by expanding and expediting the supply of materials and services from the domestic industrial base.”
Former President Biden invoked the act several times during his term, once to accelerate domestic clean energy production, and another time to boost mining and critical minerals for the nation’s large-capacity battery supply chain. Trump’s order calls for identifying “priority projects” for which permits can be expedited, and directs the Department of the Interior to prioritize mineral production and mining as the “primary land uses” of federal lands that are known to contain minerals.
Critical minerals are used in all kinds of clean tech, including solar panels, EV batteries, and wind turbines. Trump’s executive order doesn’t mention these technologies, but says “transportation, infrastructure, defense capabilities, and the next generation of technology rely upon a secure, predictable, and affordable supply of minerals.”
Anonymous current and former staffers at the Environmental Protection Agency have penned an open letter to the American people, slamming the Trump administration’s attacks on climate grants awarded to nonprofits under the Inflation Reduction Act’s Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund. The letter, published in Environmental Health News, focuses mostly on the grants that were supposed to go toward environmental justice programs, but have since been frozen under the current administration. For example, Climate United was awarded nearly $7 billion to finance clean energy projects in rural, Tribal, and low-income communities.
“It is a waste of taxpayer dollars for the U.S. government to cancel its agreements with grantees and contractors,” the letter states. “It is fraud for the U.S. government to delay payments for services already received. And it is an abuse of power for the Trump administration to block the IRA laws that were mandated by Congress.”
The lives of 2 billion people, or about a quarter of the human population, are threatened by melting glaciers due to climate change. That’s according to UNESCO’s new World Water Development Report, released to correspond with the UN’s first World Day for Glaciers. “As the world warms, glaciers are melting faster than ever, making the water cycle more unpredictable and extreme,” the report says. “And because of glacial retreat, floods, droughts, landslides, and sea-level rise are intensifying, with devastating consequences for people and nature.” Some key stats about the state of the world’s glaciers:
In case you missed it: Amazon has started selling “high-integrity science-based carbon credits” to its suppliers and business customers, as well as companies that have committed to being net-zero by 2040 in line with Amazon’s Climate Pledge, to help them offset their greenhouse gas emissions.
“The voluntary carbon market has been challenged with issues of transparency, credibility, and the availability of high-quality carbon credits, which has led to skepticism about nature and technological carbon removal as an effective tool to combat climate change,” said Kara Hurst, chief sustainability officer at Amazon. “However, the science is clear: We must halt and reverse deforestation and restore millions of miles of forests to slow the worst effects of climate change. We’re using our size and high vetting standards to help promote additional investments in nature, and we are excited to share this new opportunity with companies who are also committed to the difficult work of decarbonizing their operations.”
The Bureau of Land Management is close to approving the environmental review for a transmission line that would connect to BluEarth Renewables’ Lucky Star wind project, Heatmap’s Jael Holzman reports in The Fight. “This is a huge deal,” she says. “For the last two months it has seemed like nothing wind-related could be approved by the Trump administration. But that may be about to change.”
BLM sent local officials an email March 6 with a draft environmental assessment for the transmission line, which is required for the federal government to approve its right-of-way under the National Environmental Policy Act. According to the draft, the entirety of the wind project is sited on private property and “no longer will require access to BLM-administered land.”
The email suggests this draft environmental assessment may soon be available for public comment. BLM’s web page for the transmission line now states an approval granting right-of-way may come as soon as May. BLM last week did something similar with a transmission line that would go to a solar project proposed entirely on private lands. Holzman wonders: “Could private lands become the workaround du jour under Trump?”
Saudi Aramco, the world’s largest oil producer, this week launched a pilot direct air capture unit capable of removing 12 tons of carbon dioxide per year. In 2023 alone, the company’s Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions totalled 72.6 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent.
