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Carbon capture might be EPA’s strongest tool to cut emissions from power plants. That could scramble battle lines.
Carbon capture, one of the most controversial climate solutions, could soon become a centerpiece of U.S. climate policy.
The Environmental Protection Agency is expected to finally unveil its proposal to cut emissions from power plants next week. In the lead up to the announcement, The New York Times reported that the agency is planning to set greenhouse gas emission limits for new and existing power plants based on the reductions that could be achieved by installing equipment to catch emissions from plant smokestacks before they enter the atmosphere.
The funny thing is, whether you see promise in carbon capture or deem it a boondoggle, this is probably the most aggressive approach the EPA can take for power plants. It could even speed up the transition to renewable energy. And for that reason, it’s going to put both proponents and critics of the technology in a weird position, scrambling the usual battle lines on the subject.
Due to the Supreme Court’s ruling in last year’s West Virginia vs. EPA case, the agency’s legal avenues for reducing emissions from the power sector are limited. It can’t force utilities to shut down their fossil fuel power plants and switch to renewables. Instead, it must stick to reductions that can be achieved “within the fenceline” of a power plant.
That leaves a few options. The agency could base its rule on improvements to power plant efficiency. It could look to the potential for coal plants to co-fire with gas or for gas plants to burn hydrogen. But neither would reduce emissions as much as a rule based on carbon capture, Lissa Lynch, a senior attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council told me in an email. And the Inflation Reduction Act, which contained huge tax credits for carbon capture, makes it possible for the agency to argue that carbon capture is an economically feasible solution, as my colleague Robinson Meyer has reported.
Here’s the twist: That doesn’t mean that every plant would have to install carbon capture. States would have the authority to create their own implementation plans to comply with the standard, and a range of options for how to do it. They might choose to shut down some power plants and replace them with renewables, or operate plants less frequently. But since renewables are so cheap, shifting to solar, wind, and batteries may be the more common response than investing in carbon capture.
The research firm Rhodium Group recently modeled the potential emission reductions from carbon capture-based power plant rule, taking into account new tax credits from the Inflation Reduction Act, and found that only about 20 gigawatts’ worth of coal and gas plants would end up installing carbon capture by 2035. By comparison, some 700 gigawatts of coal and gas plants operate today.
Over the past few years, under increased pressure from investors to show what they are doing about climate change, the oil and gas industry has ramped up its advocacy for carbon capture. Many fossil fuel producers and electric utilities now have net-zero plans that rely heavily on the technology. In 2021, ExxonMobil announced plans to work with 15 other companies to develop a $100 billion carbon capture hub in Houston. DTE, a Michigan utility that owns power plants in California, may have even engineered an entire dark money campaign to convince California regulators to make carbon capture part of the state’s climate plan.
In the American Petroleum Institute’s 2021 Climate Action Framework, the lobbying group said one of its goals was to “Fast-track the Commercial Deployment of Carbon Capture, Utilization and Storage,” and wrote that it “supports federal policies to achieve the ‘at-scale phase’ of CCUS commercial deployment.” (CCUS stands for carbon capture, utilization, and storage.)
On social media, API paints carbon capture as a present-day solution. “Advancements in carbon capture technology from the brightest minds in the energy industry are slashing emissions and creating a cleaner future,” it recently tweeted.
\u201cAdvancements in carbon capture technology from the brightest minds in the energy industry are slashing emissions and creating a cleaner future.\u201d— American Petroleum Institute (@American Petroleum Institute) 1680725045
At the same time, large swaths of the environmental community have joined together to oppose the technology. In July 2021, more than 500 organizations signed on to a letter to U.S. leaders in Washington arguing that carbon capture is not a climate solution. “Simply put, technological carbon capture is a dangerous distraction,” the groups wrote. “We don’t need to fix fossil fuels, we need to ditch them.” Many, many environmental groups have published treatises on why carbon capture is unproven, too expensive, harms communities, and prolongs dependence on fossil fuels.
But as the new power plant regulations loom, proponents of carbon capture have started to temper their enthusiasm, citing some of those same concerns.
In comments submitted to the EPA in March, the American Petroleum Institute’s vice president of natural gas markets, Dustin Meyer, only mentions the technology as an afterthought, underscoring that it isn’t viable yet. After a long section highlighting the benefits of switching from coal to natural gas for power generation, he writes, “In the future ... new technologies like CCUS can offer additional opportunities to reduce emissions.” The American Petroleum Institute declined to comment for this story.
Southern Company, which owns gas and electric utilities across six states, submitted extensive comments to the EPA arguing that carbon capture was “many years away.” The company manages and operates the National Carbon Capture Center, where it conducts research on the technology. Its climate plan suggests that some 21% of its electricity generation will come from natural gas plants with carbon capture by 2050. And it’s in the process of conducting an engineering study to install the technology on one of its natural gas plants in Alabama.
But carbon capture isn’t ready for commercial deployment, Southern writes, using an example that’s often cited by critics of the technology — Petra Nova. Petra Nova is a carbon capture project at a coal-fired power plant in Texas that was mothballed in 2020 when it lost buyers for the captured carbon. While it operated, it experienced frequent outages and failed to capture the amount of carbon it was designed to. Its failure, Southern writes, illustrates that more research is needed to reduce the cost of carbon capture and improve reliability and performance, “which are critical when facilities are required to meet regulatory emission limits.”
Meanwhile, some of the loudest proponents of carbon capture in the upcoming EPA regulations have been environmental groups like the Natural Resources Defense Council, Evergreen Action, and the Clean Air Task Force. This isn’t exactly surprising. These groups, in particular, have historically been supportive of carbon capture technology.
“Industry has been touting the promise of carbon capture and storage for decades,” Lynch of the Natural Resources Defense Council told me. “It hasn’t been widely deployed on power plants because there currently aren’t any federal restrictions on the amount of carbon pollution that power plants can emit.”
Jay Duffy, litigation director at Clean Air Task Force, said the industry’s claims are unfounded. He cited studies by the Department of Energy’s National Energy Technology Laboratory which show that carbon capture is economical, when considering the new tax credits in the Inflation Reduction Act. There are already 13 vendors offering the technology for gas-fired power plants, he said.
Moving forward, some of carbon capture’s biggest critics might find that they need to support a carbon capture-based standard. The Center for Biological Diversity submitted comments to the EPA criticizing the technology, but did not suggest an alternative basis for the rule. When I asked Jason Rylander, legal director for the organization’s Climate Law Institute, whether they would support a standard based on carbon capture, he didn’t say no.
“The big problem is that the existing fossil fuel fleet is essentially uncontrolled for climate pollution in the middle of a climate crisis,” he told me. “That has to stop.”
Rylander couldn’t say where his organization would come down on the rule without seeing it, but he said that if it was based on carbon capture, there would have to be “extremely strong guardrails to ensure the safety and performance of the equipment.” But he also acknowledged that the EPA’s increasingly tough regulatory environment for power plants, along with tax incentives for clean energy in the Inflation Reduction Act, could mean that very little carbon capture would ultimately get built.
“It may very well be that the majority of plants meet these standards by other means.”
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A list of terminated grants obtained by Heatmap contains a number of grants that will cost jobs and revenue in Republican-led states.
The Trump administration terminated billions in climate and clean energy grants on Wednesday, in what appears to be yet another act of retribution against Democrats over the government shutdown. White House budget director Russell Vought announced on X that “nearly $8 billion in Green New Scam funding to fuel the Left's climate agenda is being cancelled,” noting that the projects were in 16 states, all but two of which — Vermont and New Hampshire — have Democrats in their governor’s mansion. A Department of Energy release published late last night further clarified that it was terminating 321 awards supporting 223 projects, with a total closer to $7.5 billion.
But a list of the 321 canceled grants that the Department of Energy sent to Congress, obtained by Heatmap, tells a different story. While much of the funding was awarded to blue state-based companies, the intended projects would have benefitted communities elsewhere, including in Texas, Florida, and Louisiana.
The list identifies the grants by their award numbers, and includes information on the DOE office overseeing the grant, the recipient name, and state. The document does not specify the project names, the programs under which they were awarded, or the amounts awarded.
That leaves a lot of open questions about the true impact of the terminations. It’s unclear, for instance, whether the $7.5 billion price tag the Department of Energy assigned to the cancellations is an estimate of the total amount awarded or the unspent remainder still in the agency’s coffers. Five of the listed projects, worth nearly $900 million, were already announced as terminated in an earlier round of cuts back in May.
Many of the projects listed have signed contracts with the government, are already well underway, and have spent at least some of their award. For example, the Northeast Energy Efficiency Partnerships has already published copious educational materials related to its community-driven transportation plan for the Northeast, a project supported by one of the terminated grants.
The list does seem to confirm that blue state grants were the hardest hit, with 79 award cancellations in California, 41 in New York, 34 in Colorado (Secretary of Energy Chris Wright’s home state), 33 in Illinois, and 31 in Massachusetts.
But when I began looking up projects by their award number, I found that many would actually have benefitted Republican strongholds. Take, for example, Moment Energy, a Delaware-based company that was awarded $20 million by the Office of Manufacturing and Energy Supply Chains to build the first certified manufacturing facility in the United States producing battery energy storage systems from repurposed electric vehicle batteries. The plant was set to be built in Taylor, Texas, creating 50 construction jobs and 200 new permanent positions. After receiving the Energy Department’s stamp of approval, the company raised a $15 million Series A funding round in January to help finance the plant.
Also listed are a $10 million grant for Carbon Capture Inc, a California-based company, to conduct an engineering study for a direct air capture plant in Northwest Louisiana, and a $37 million grant to New York-based Urban Mining Industries to build one of its low-carbon concrete manufacturing plants in Florida. Linde, the global industrial gas company based in Connecticut, had $10 million to build hydrogen fueling stations for heavy duty trucks in La Porte, Texas, clawed back. BKV, a Colorado-based natural gas company set to study the transportation of captured CO2 by barge throughout the Gulf Coast region, also had its $2.5 million grant canceled.
In addition to hurting investments and jobs in Republican states, the Department of Energy’s cancellations also target some unlikely victims. The list names 16 grants for General Electric, including 11 for GE Vernova, the company’s manufacturing arm, which produces natural gas turbines and components for wind energy generation; many of those awards were for wind technology research projects. The agency also canceled 24 grants for the Institute for Gas Technology and the Electric Power Research Institute, the research arms of gas and electric companies’ two biggest trade groups, respectively. Several of these awards funded research projects into carbon capture and storage.
Also on the list was a more than $6.5 million grant for a controversial study to retrofit the Four Corners coal plant in New Mexico with carbon capture equipment. The plant is currently scheduled to close in 2031.
Back in May, Wright promised Congress his agency’s review of Biden-era climate funding would be over by the end of the summer. “Certainly in the next few months, by the end of this summer — hopefully before the end of this summer — we will have run through all of the four or 500 large projects that are currently in the pipeline at the DOE,” he said during a House Appropriations Committee hearing.
As reported yesterday by Bloomberg, two regional Hydrogen Hubs in California and the Pacific Northwest — projects awarded funding from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law to develop full hydrogen production and consumption ecosystems — are on the list. That leaves the agency’s intentions for the remaining five hubs scattered throughout the Midwest, Midatlantic, Appalachia, the Great Plains, and Texas unclear. And while the list includes a few smaller grants for early-stage Direct Air Capture Hubs, it is still a mystery whether the Department of Energy plans to support the two more advanced direct air capture projects in Louisiana and Texas that were selected for $1.2 billion under the Biden administration.
On a major energy acquisition, carbon cycle cash, and a cheaper EV
Current conditions: Hurricane Imelda hit Bermuda as a Category 2 storm • Storm Amy, the first named UK storm of the season, will bring heavy rains and wind to Scotland, England, and Wales on Friday • Sudan’s Ministry of Agriculture declared a state of emergency this week after the Nile River rose to record levels.
The Department of Energy said on Wednesday that it is terminating 321 grants supporting 223 projects, cutting a total of more than $7.5 billion in funding for clean energy projects. While the Department has not yet specified what the awards were, Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought posted to social media yesterday that the canceled projects were located across 16 Democrat-led states. An administration official told Bloomberg that at least two of the projects in question were hydrogen “hubs” under development in California and the Pacific Northwest. The cuts come on top of $13 billion in climate funds that had not yet been dedicated to specific projects that the Department of Energy said it would “return” in late September, as instructed by the reconciliation bill.
The Department of Energy has left the recipients of billions in obligated funds for climate projects in limbo since Trump took office. Secretary of Energy Chris Wright said the agency was “reviewing” the awards in May. He testified in Congress that his office would make a decision about many of them by the end of the summer, but this week’s terminations — amid the government shutdown — are the first announcement the agency has made since an initial batch of cuts at the end of May.
The Trump administration said Wednesday that it is putting $18 billion in funding for New York City transit projects on hold while it investigates violations of a rule barring diversity considerations in hiring that the Department of Transportation published on Tuesday. “The timing is, shall we say, noteworthy,” my colleague Matthew Zeitlin wrote on Wednesday, “not least because the Democrats’ two top congressional negotiators — Representative Hakeem Jeffries and Senator Chuck Schumer — are both from New York.” In a statement, Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy blamed those two lawmakers for the shutdown, lamenting that thanks to them, “USDOT’s review of New York’s unconstitutional practices will take more time.”
Blackrock-owned Global Infrastructure Partners, an investment fund, is in talks to buy energy developer AES for more than $38 billion in “what would be one of the largest infrastructure takeovers of all time,” according to the Financial Times. AES owns utilities in Ohio and Indiana in addition to owning both conventional and renewable energy generation projects across the globe. The company is also the top supplier of renewable energy to corporate buyers in the world. AES stock jumped nearly 17% on Wednesday on the news.
A new report from the Union of Concerned Scientists found that residential customers in seven states that are part of the PJM Interconnection, an electricity market that covers the Mid-Atlantic and parts of the Midwest, are paying nearly $4.4 billion for transmission upgrades intended to deliver electricity to data centers. The finding is not a big surprise — PJM’s own Market Monitor has acknowledged that data center load growth is the primary factor driving up rates. But the report specifically analyzes the amount the whole ratebase is shelling out for transmission projects that only benefit a single customer. It recommends that the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission create a new customer class for such customers and require them to shoulder the cost alone.
Trump has slashed millions in grants for climate science research and plans to cut the federal government’s climate science funding and staff dramatically in next year’s budget. Stepping in to replace some of that lost cash is Schmidt Sciences, a philanthropy founded by former Google CEO Eric Schmidt. Schmidt announced Thursday that it’s committing up to $45 million over five years for research to advance understanding of some of the least-studied parts of the global carbon cycle. For example, one project will measure how much carbon dioxide the Southern Ocean absorbs from the atmosphere with the help of robotic sailboats that can collect data year-round, including during times when it’s too dangerous for research ships to operate.
The 2026 Ioniq 5 Limited. Image courtesy of Hyundai
Hyundai is cutting the price tag on its 2026 Ioniq 5 by nearly $10,000, and will continue to offer $7,500 off the 2025 model — equivalent to the now-expired federal tax credit. The 2026 Ioniq 5 base model will start at just $35,000, making it one of the cheapest EVs available in the U.S.
Some of the industry’s biggest names are joining forces to keep the momentum moving forward.
Climate tech funding has slowed in the face of federal government pushback — but it has certainly not stopped. As the administration has cranked up its hostilities against everything from electric vehicles to wind turbines, companies and investors are responding by getting strategic, forming new coalitions to map, fund, and shape progress in the absence of public support.
Last month I covered the launch of the Climate Tech Atlas, an interdisciplinary effort that includes venture capitalists, nonprofits, and academics working to map out the most salient climate tech opportunities and help guide external research and funding in the sector. There’s also the All Aboard Coalition, which unites big name investors to help plug the missing middle finance gap. Sector-specific investment vehicles are popping up too, like the Oneworld BEV fund, a partnership between major airlines in the Oneworld Alliance and Breakthrough Energy Ventures to advance the commercialization of sustainable aviation fuels. All three of these new initiatives were announced in September alone.
“We are in a unique moment right now,” Carmichael Roberts, a managing partner at BEV told me via email. “Over the past decade, the climate tech ecosystem has made enormous progress driving innovation across every sector of the economy. That puts us in the position to step back and ask first, what areas are still crying out for urgent innovation?”
This year has also seen a number of climate tech companies struggle at key points in their attempts to scale. Sodium-ion battery company Natron Energy shut down in September, while direct air capture leader Climeworks laid off 22% of its staff in May, citing “current macroeconomic uncertainty” and “shifting policy priorities where climate tech is seeing reduced momentum.” Another direct air capture company, Noya, shuttered this August, while the battery recycling company Li-Cycle filed for bankruptcy in May.
Other startups pursuing emerging technologies — from carbon capture to long-duration battery storage, advanced geothermal, and next-generation nuclear — are looking to avoid the same fate. But while federal funding from places such as the Department of Energy’s Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations and the Loan Programs Office once provided an avenue for financing capital-intensive demonstration plants, the Trump administration is now retracting funding, going so far as to cancel contracts with projects previously approved under Biden.
The Oneworld fund, announced in mid-September, is BEV’s first to focus on a specific theme and its first to be backed by an industry coalition. Members of the Oneworld Alliance — which include Alaska Airlines, American Airlines, British Airways, and Cathay Pacific — had already committed to using SAF for 10% of their fuel by 2030, while also “playing an active role in the development of SAF at commercial scale.” Now, with alliance members serving as limited partners in the venture fund, they’ll benefit from the technical and commercial expertise of one of the sector’s most influential VC firms.
When I asked the BEV team to what degree the current political and economic uncertainties were making partnerships like this more valuable, Eric Toone, another BEV managing partner, responded with a refrain I’ve become familiar with — that the firm only backs technologies that “can ultimately compete on their own merits.” Yet it’s undeniable that the federal government tore up its decarbonization agenda at a moment when many climate tech firms’ investments are almost ready for deployment, a stage when government support can make all the difference.
“Many promising SAF technologies already exist, but they are stuck between lab success and commercial scale,” Roberts told me. “This is the moment when they most need capital, technical rigor, and committed offtake to bridge that gap.” While the Trump administration did maintain and extend the tax credit for clean fuels, it also reduced the maximum credit amount for SAF from $1.75 per gallon to $1, while private funding for SAF production and distribution infrastructure remains inadequate.
Given this landscape and the urgency airlines face in meeting their clean fuel targets, Toone told me the firm is open to backing companies “that are further along than what a typical BEV fund might pursue.” And while sustainable fuels are the first technology to benefit from this type of thematic focus, Roberts said that BEV is already eyeing other sectors where it plans to apply this same funding model.
As of early September, the firm is also part of the All Aboard Coalition. This elite group of venture firms is aiming to raise a $300 million fund by the end of October that will match investments in later-stage venture rounds, filling a gap known in climate tech circles as the “missing middle.” Assembled by Chris Anderson, an entrepreneur and primary convener of the TED Talks conference — which has featured many inspiring climate visionaries — the group includes 14 members such as Khosla Ventures, Prelude Ventures, DCVC, Gigascale Capital, and Energy Impact Partners.
“One of the consequences of being in the front row seat at TED all these years is you get persuaded of certain things,” he told me. “And I definitely got persuaded that climate is the outstanding, major problem we really have to fix.”
The bulk of the capital for the coalition will come from outside investors, though some members will contribute as well, Anderson told me. The goal is to incentivize these hotshots to co-invest with each other, providing a one-to-one funding match if they do so.
“First-of-a-kind rounds seem out of reach for a lot of people in the chain,” Anderson explained, referring to the network of investors that must come together to help a company fund expensive new infrastructure. At this stage, its tech has progressed beyond the capital-light, early-stage rounds but is still considered too risky for traditional infrastructure investors to take on. Companies might be seeking $100 million or more from venture firms that are used to writing checks for orders of magnitude less. “Really the purpose of the fund is to create a collective belief that there is a pathway to getting these companies funded. If you have that collective belief, then it’s much easier for a lead investor to step forward and to pull a few other people in.”
Anderson acknowledged that a $300 million fund will not go “nearly far enough.”
“It’s a starter fund. It’s a proof of concept,” he told me. “The world needs to make a couple hundred of these bets at some point.”
Other coalitions, such as the Climate Tech Atlas, are working to steer the sector towards the best bets. This group — which also includes Breakthrough Energy Ventures, alongside others such as the nonprofit investment platform Elemental Impact, the consulting firm McKinsey, and Stanford University’s Doerr School of Sustainability — has mapped out the technological milestones it sees as the clearest pathways to decarbonization. The aim is to help investors, founders, policymakers and academics alike direct their energies towards the most relevant and investable opportunities, regardless of political headwinds.
“The scale at which the government participates in the development of these new technologies — or puts a thumb on the scale for technologies in particular — will vary,” Sonia Aggarwal, CEO of the policy firm Energy Innovation, which is also a member of the alliance, told me. “But certainly that has no real bearing on the fundamental fact that innovators are out there right now thinking about these grand challenges, and there are exciting new ideas for technologies that can get to that commercial scale in the coming years.”
And indeed, sometimes the most promising ideas can take shape in moments of deep uncertainty. Some of the biggest success stories of recent tech history — Uber, Airbnb, WhatsApp, and Square — all got their start during the 2008 financial crisis or its aftermath. “Some of the strongest companies and founders are building in uncertain times,” Dawn Lippert, founder and CEO of Elemental Impact, told me. “That’s very much what we see right now.”
These groups are far from the only private-sector actors coming together to help navigate industry headwinds. When the Environmental Protection Agency withdrew support for the most widely used U.S.-based carbon accounting model for estimating scope 3 emissions, leading emissions accounting platform Watershed partnered with Stanford University’s Sustainable Solutions Lab to launch an initiative that ensures continued access. And recognizing the difficulty that early stage climate tech startups face in securing insurance, the nonprofit GreenRE Coalition and the philanthropic funder Trellis Climate partnered to create a new type of bond tailored to the needs of climate tech startups.
Whether it will all be enough to accelerate or even sustain much-needed momentum in climate tech funding is impossible to predict. But at least the private sector seems to agree that, in this moment, good old teamwork is worth one heck of a try.