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Most climate solutions are getting smarter. Solar panels can track the sun. Electric vehicles are equipped with the equivalent of an iPad and may soon be able to drive themselves (according to some people). Startups are inventing stoves with batteries that charge when energy is cheap and heat pumps that learn how you use your home and adjust accordingly.
But when it comes to permanently removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, the market is pushing in a different direction. There, it seems, there’s growing excitement for the dumbest, most primitive solutions companies can come up with.
The case in point this week is a $58 million agreement between Frontier, a fund started by tech companies to help grow the carbon removal market, and Vaulted Deep, a startup that collects food waste, poop, and other wet, sludgy, organic material and stashes it away underground. It’s the biggest deal Frontier has made to date, followed closely by a $57 million contract it signed in December with Lithos Carbon, which crushes up rocks and sprinkles the dust on agricultural fields. The rock naturally reacts with carbon dioxide in the air to form bicarbonate, which can essentially lock it away permanently.
There are at least 850 startups around the world trying to figure out the most effective, scalable, low-cost approach to cleaning up the legacy carbon pollution that’s warming the planet. Some of the most promising solutions have involved building big, energy-intensive systems that extract tiny amounts of carbon dioxide from the ambient air. One company I recently wrote about is manufacturing millions of tennis ball-sized sponges that will be stacked in trays, absorb carbon from the air, and then transferred into an oven to bake off the carbon.
Is it possible the answer could be as easy as pulverizing rocks and burying waste?
I ran my observation about the growing enthusiasm for dumb ideas past Hannah Bebbington, a strategy lead at Frontier, and she agreed — “totally,” she said, though she preferred the phrase “low-tech.” Compared to some of the earlier stars of carbon removal, Vaulted Deep and Lithos don’t require as much upfront capital investment or years and years of research and development. “At the end of the day, we are really excited about getting to gigaton scale carbon removal, and it doesn’t have to be the sexiest technology.”
So far, it seems, these lower-tech companies have been able to scale quickly. Vaulted Deep, for instance, launched at the end of August last year and has already delivered more than 2,400 tons of carbon removal. By comparison, the only operating direct air capture facility in the United States is capable of removing 1,000 tons of CO2 per year.
Vaulted Deep’s first project is in Kansas, where it is intercepting “woody waste” like grass clippings and tree trimmings that was destined to be incinerated. Once upon a time, when the plants were alive, they sucked up carbon from the atmosphere. If the clipping had been burned, the carbon would have been released back into the air. By slurrifying the waste and injecting it into a deep well, hundreds of feet underground, Vaulted Deep disrupts the cycle, potentially for millennia.
One advantage of this approach is that the carbon capture work is done for free, courtesy of photosynthesis. (Trees, of course, do this too, but not permanently.) Another is that Vaulted Deep uses mature technology to turn the waste into a slurry that can be injected underground. The company was spun out of Advantek, a waste management business that pioneered slurry injection in the 1980s. Most of the substances we inject into the layers of rock underneath our feet are pure liquid or gas, Julia Reichelstein, the CEO of Vaulted Deep told me. Advantek’s technology enables the company to take solid waste and, with minimal processing and energy, get it injection-ready.
The company’s third advantage is being able to pump its waste into “class five” wells, a designation made by the Environmental Protection Agency. Class five is sort of a catch-all category, encompassing shallow wells used for stormwater drainage and septic systems, to deep wells used for geothermal power. Regulations vary by type and by state, but in general, these are much more common and easier to permit than the “class six” wells used for carbon dioxide sequestration. “There’s, you know, 20, 30 years of permit history now on best practices on how you permit a slurry injection well,” Omar Abou-Sayed, the company’s co-founder, told me. “We comply with or exceed all those regulations. So this isn’t a case of, like, move fast and break things.”
All of this allows Vaulted Deep to charge less for carbon removal than many of its peers — closer to $400 per ton, as opposed to upwards of $600. Bebbington, of Frontier, thinks there’s a promising path to bring costs down a lot further if the company can achieve economies of scale by buying the sludgy organic waste in bulk, or move its injection wells closer to where the material originates.
But any climate solution involving biomass raises a host of questions about where the material came from, and what might have been done with it otherwise. Reichelstein said the company’s internal research found that there was almost a billion tons of bio-sludge produced in the U.S. annually. If it could capture all of it, the company estimated, it could sequester more than 300 million tons of carbon away from the atmosphere each year, after taking into account the emissions involved in collecting, processing, and injecting all that waste.
And yet, “The definition of a ‘waste’ is highly contested,” Freya Chay, program lead at the nonprofit CarbonPlan, which analyzes the integrity of different carbon removal approaches, told me.
For example, some companies are eyeing the use of agricultural waste like corn stalks, which are often left to decompose in fields, but also add nutrients to the soil. If the corn waste is removed and processed and buried underground, will that increase the use of carbon-intensive fertilizer? What if the waste was going into a landfill? There, it would have broken down eventually, but much more slowly than if it had been burned.
These questions get more complicated as projects that utilize waste biomass scale up. Once there’s more of a market for the material, will those counterfactuals that support what Vaulted Deep is doing — like that the waste would have been incinerated — still hold? “It's really hard to govern system-level risks with project-level rules, but that is the situation we are in,” said Chay.
At a second project location, in Los Angeles, Vaulted Deep is collecting sewage from the city’s wastewater treatment facilities that otherwise would have been trucked hundreds of miles out of the city and spread on farmland to decompose, releasing CO2 both during the transport and as it decays. The city has actually been paying Advantek to dispose of some of its sewage since 2008. But now, because of the Frontier deal, the company will drop its fee, allowing the city to divert even more of the waste for slurry injection.
Chay didn’t have any immediate concerns about Vaulted Deep’s biomass sourcing. In fact, she highlighted the co-benefits the company would provide. Oftentimes biomass waste is contaminated with toxic chemicals, and Vaulted Deep is preventing it from getting dumped in communities. “We should celebrate that,” she said.
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to correct the type of waste diverted for the Kansas project.
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The administration seems to be pursuing a “some of the above” strategy with little to no internal logic.
The Department of Energy justified terminating hundreds of congressionally-mandated grants issued by the Biden administration for clean energy projects last week (including for a backup battery at a children’s hospital) by arguing that they were bad investments for the American people.
“Following a thorough, individualized financial review, DOE determined that these projects did not adequately advance the nation’s energy needs, were not economically viable, and would not provide a positive return on investment of taxpayer dollars,” the agency’s press release said.
It’s puzzling, then, that the Trump administration is pouring vast government resources into saving aging coal plants and expediting advanced nuclear projects — two sources of energy that are famously financial black holes.
The Energy Department announced it would invest $625 million to “reinvigorate and expand America’s coal industry” in late September. Earlier this year, the agency also made $900 million available to “unlock commercial deployment of American-made small modular reactors.”
It’s hard to imagine what economic yardsticks would warrant funding to keep coal plants open. The cost of operating a coal plant in the U.S. has increased by nearly 30% since 2021 — faster than inflation — according to research by Energy Innovation. Driving that increase is the cost of coal itself, as well as the fact that the nation’s coal plants are simply getting very old and more expensive to maintain. “You can put all the money you want into a clunker, but at the end of the day, it’s really old, and it’s just going to keep getting more expensive over time, even if you have a short term fix,” Michelle Solomon, a program manager at Energy Innovation who authored the research, told me.
Keeping these plants online — even if they only operate some of the time— inevitably raises electricity bills. That’s because in many of the country’s electricity markets, the cost of power on any given day is determined by the most expensive plant running. On a hot summer day when everyone’s air conditioners are working hard and the grid operator has to tell a coal plant to switch on to meet demand, every electron delivered in the region will suddenly cost the same as coal, even if it was generated essentially for free by the sun or wind.
The Trump administration has also based its support for coal plants on the idea that they are needed for reliability. In theory, coal generation should be available around the clock. But in reality, the plants aren’t necessarily up to the task — and not just because they’re old. Sandy Creek in Texas, which began operating in 2013 and is the newest coal plant in the country, experienced a major failure this past April and is now expected to stay offline until 2027, according to the region’s grid operator. In a report last year, the North American Electric Reliability Corporation warned that outage rates for coal plants are increasing. This is in part due to wear and tear from the way these plants cycle on and off to accommodate renewable energy sources, the report said, but it’s also due to reduced maintenance as plant operators plan to retire the facilities.
“You can do the deferred maintenance. It might keep the plant operating for a bit longer, but at the end of the day, it’s still not going to be the most efficient source of energy, or the cheapest source of energy,” Solomon said.
The contradictions snowball from there. On September 30, the DOE opened a $525 million funding opportunity for coal plants titled “Restoring Reliability: Coal Recommissioning and Modernization,” inviting coal-fired power plants that are scheduled for retirement before 2032 or in rural areas to apply for grants that will help keep them open. The grant paperwork states that grid capacity challenges “are especially acute in regions with constrained transmission and sustained load growth.” Two days later, however, as part of the agency’s mass termination of grants, it canceled more than $1.3 billion in awards from the Grid Deployment Office to upgrade and install new transmission lines to ease those constraints.
The new funding opportunity may ultimately just shuffle awards around from one coal plant to another, or put previously-awarded projects through the time-and-money-intensive process of reapplying for the same funding under a new name. Up to $350 million of the total will go to as many as five coal plants, with initial funding to restart closed plants or to modernize old ones, and later phases designated for carbon capture, utilization, and storage retrofits. The agency said it will use “unobligated” money from three programs that were part of the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act: the Carbon Capture Demonstration Projects Program, the Carbon Capture Large-Scale Pilot Projects, and the Energy Improvements in Rural or Remote Areas Program.
In a seeming act of cognitive dissonance, however, the agency has canceled awards for two coal-fired power plants that the Biden administration made under those same programs. One, a $6.5 million grant to Navajo Transitional Energy Company, a tribal-owned entity that owns a stake in New Mexico’s Four Corners Generating Station, would have funded a study to determine whether adding carbon capture and storage to the plant was economically viable. The other, a $50 million grant to TDA Research that would have helped the company validate its CCS technology at Dry Fork Station, a coal plant in Wyoming, was terminated in May.
Two more may be out the window. A new internal agency list of grants labeled “terminate” that circulated this week included an $8 million grant for the utility Duke Energy to evaluate the feasibility of capturing carbon from its Edwardsport plant in Indiana, and $350 million for Project Tundra, a carbon capture demonstration project at the Milton R. Young Station in North Dakota.
“It’s not internally consistent,” Jack Andreason Cavanaugh, a global fellow at the Columbia University’s Carbon Management Research Initiative, told me. “You’re canceling coal grants, but then you’re giving $630 million to keep them open. You’re also investing a ton of time and money into nuclear — which is great, to be clear — but these small modular reactors haven’t been deployed in the United States, and part of the reason is that they’re currently not economically viable.”
The closest any company has come thus far to deploying a small modular reactor in the U.S. is NuScale, a company that planned to build its first-of-a-kind reactors in Idaho and had secured agreements to sell the power to a group of public utilities in Utah. But between 2015, when it was first proposed, and late 2023, when it died, the project’s budget tripled from $3 billion to more than $9 billion, while its scale was reduced from 600 megawatts to 462 megawatts. Not all of that was inevitable — costs rose dramatically in the final few years due to inflation. The reason NuScale ultimately pulled out of the project is that the cost of electricity it generated was going to be too high for the market to bear.
It’s unclear how heavily the DOE will weigh project financials in the application process for the $900 million for nuclear reactors. In its funding announcement, it specified that the awards would be made “solely based on technical merit.” The agency’s official solicitation paperwork, however, names “financial viability” as one of the key review criteria. Regardless, the Trump administration appears to recognize the value in funding first-of-a-kind, risky technologies when it comes to nuclear, but is not applying the same standards to direct air capture or hydrogen plants.
I asked the Department of Energy to share the criteria it used in the project review process to determine economic viability. In response, spokesperson Ben Dietderich encouraged me to read Wright’s memorandum describing the review process from May. The memo outlines what types of documentation the agency will evaluate to reach a decision, but not the criteria for making that decision.
Solomon agreed that advanced nuclear might one day meet the grid’s growing power needs, but not anytime soon. “Hopefully in the long term, this technology does become a part of our electricity system. But certainly relying on it in the short term has real risks to electricity costs,” she said. “And also reliability, in the sense that the projects might not materialize.”
The collateral damage from the Lava Ridge wind project might now include a proposed 285-mile transmission line initially approved by federal regulators in the 1990s.
The same movement that got Trump to kill the Lava Ridge wind farm Trump killed has appeared to derail a longstanding transmission project that’s supposed to connect sought-after areas for wind energy in Idaho to power-hungry places out West.
The Southwest Intertie Project-North, also known as SWIP-N, is a proposed 285-mile transmission line initially approved by federal regulators in the 1990s. If built, SWIP-N is supposed to feed power from the wind-swept plains of southern Idaho to the Southwest, while shooting electrons – at least some generated from solar power – back up north into Idaho from Nevada, Utah, and Arizona. In California, regulators have identified the line as crucial for getting cleaner wind energy into the state’s grid to meet climate goals.
But on Tuesday, SWIP-N suddenly faced a major setback: The three-person commission representing Jerome County, Idaho – directly in the path of the project – voted to revoke its special use permit, stating the company still lacked proper documentation to meet the terms and conditions of the approval. SWIP-N had the wind at its back as recently as last year, when LS Power expected it to connect to Lava Ridge and other wind farms that have been delayed by Trump’s federal permitting freeze on renewable energy. But now, the transmission line has stuttered along with this potential generation.
At a hearing Tuesday evening, county commissioners said Great Basin Transmission, a subsidiary of LS Power developing the line, would now suddenly need new input, including the blessing of the local highway district and potential feedback from the Federal Aviation Administration. Jerome County Commissioner Charles Howell explained to me Wednesday afternoon that there will still need to be formal steps remanding the permit, and the process will go back to local zoning officials. Great Basin Transmission will then at minimum need to get the sign-offs from local highway officials to satisfy his concerns, as well as those of the other commissioner who voted to rescind the permit, Ben Crouch.
The permit was many years old, and there are outstanding questions about what will happen next procedurally, including what Great Basin Transmission is actually able to do to fight this choice by the commissioners. At minimum, staff for the commission will write a formal decision explaining the reasoning and remand the permit. After that, it’ll be up to Great Basin Transmission to produce the documents that commissioners want. “Even our attorney and staff didn’t have those answers when we asked that after the vote,” Howell said, adding that he hopes the issues can be resolved. “I was on the county commission about when they decided where to site the towers, where to site the right-of-ways. That’s all been there a long time.”
This is the part where I bring up how Jerome County’s decision followed a months-long fight by aggrieved residents who opposed the SWIP-N line, including homeowners who say they didn’t know their properties were in the path of the project. There’s also a significant anti-wind undercurrent, as many who are fighting this transmission line previously fought LS Power’s Lava Ridge wind project, which was blocked by and executive order from President Donald Trump on his first day in office. Jerome County itself passed an ordinance in May requiring any renewable energy facility to get all federal, state, and local approvals before it would sign off on new projects.
Opposition to SWIP-N comes from a similar place as the “Stop Lava Ridge” campaign. Along with viewshed anxieties and property value impacts, SWIP-N, like Lava Ridge, would be within single-digit miles of the Minidoka National Historic Site, a former prison camp that held Japanese-Americans during World War II. In the eyes of its staunchest critics, constructing the wind farm would’ve completely damaged any impact of visiting the site by filling the surroundings of what is otherwise a serene, somber scene. Descendants of Minidoka detainees lobbied politicians at all levels to oppose Lava Ridge, a cause that was ultimately championed by Republican politicians in their fight against the project.
These same descendants of Japanese-American detainees have fought the transmission line, arguing that its construction would inevitably lead to new wind projects. “If approved, the SWIP-N line would enable LS Power and other renewable energy companies to build massive wind projects on federal land in and around Jerome County in future years,” wrote Dan Sakura, the son of a Minidoka prisoner, in a September 15 letter to the commission.
Sakura had been a leading voice in the fight against Lava Ridge. When I asked why he was weighing in on SWIP-N, he told me over text message, “The Lava Ridge wind project poisoned the well for renewable energy projects on federal land in Southern Idaho.”
LS Power did not respond to a request for comment.
It’s worth noting that efforts have already been made to avoid SWIP-N’s impacts to the Minidoka National Historic Site. In 2010, Congress required the Interior Secretary to re-do the review process for the transmission line, which at the time was proposed to go through the historic site. The route rejected by Jerome County would go around.
There is also no guarantee that wind energy will flock to southern Idaho any time soon. Yes, there’s a Trump permitting freeze, and federal wind energy tax credits are winding down. That’s almost certainly why the developers of small nuclear reactors have reportedly coveted the Lava Ridge site for future projects. But there’s also incredible hostility pent up against wind partially driven by the now-defunct LS Power project, for instance in Lincoln County, where officials now have an emergency moratorium banning wind energy while they develop a more permanent restrictive ordinance.
Howell made no bones about his own views on wind farms, telling me he prefers battery storage and nuclear power. “As I stand here in my backyard, if they put up windmills, that’s all I’m going to see for 40 miles,” he said
But Howell did confess to me that he thinks SWIP-N will ultimately be built – if the company is able to get these new sign-offs. What kind of energy flows through a transmission line cannot ultimately affect the decision on the special use permit because, he said, “there are rules.” On top of that, Idaho is going to ultimately need more power no matter what, and at the very least, the state will have to get electrons from elsewhere.
Howell’s “non-political” answer to the fate of SWIP-N, as he put it to me, is that “We live on power, so we gotta have more power.”
The week’s most important news around renewable project fights.
1. Western Nevada — The Esmeralda 7 solar mega-project may be no more.
2. Washoe County, Nevada – Elsewhere in Nevada, the Greenlink North transmission line has been delayed by at least another month.
3. Oconto County, Wisconsin – Solar farm town halls are now sometimes getting too scary for developers to show up at.
4. Apache County, Arizona – In brighter news, this county looks like it will give its first-ever conditional use permit for a large solar farm, EDF Renewables’ Juniper Spring project.
5. Putnam County, Indiana – After hearing about what happened here this week, I’m fearful for any solar developer trying to work in Indiana.
6. Tippecanoe County, Indiana – Two counties to the north of Putnam is a test case for the impacts a backlash on solar energy can have on data centers.