Broad & Bipartisan Backing: Carbon Management Technologies Enjoy Broad Support

November 01, 2024

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by Leo Duke and Diana Leane (Carbon Capture Magazine) ... (P)olitical, business, economic, and environmental leaders agree on the need for these technologies as part of the overall mix of technologies to address climate change.

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45Q Sets the Foundation for Commercial Deployment of Carbon Management Technologies
Today, there are 14 domestic commercial-scale facilities with the capacity to capture and store approximately 20 million metric tons of CO2 per year, representing nearly half of the global deployment of the technology to date. Historically, carbon capture technology has been primarily applied in those industrial sectors that emit a pure stream of CO2, such as ethanol production or natural gas processing. However, enhancements to the 45Q tax credit have turbocharged interest in applying carbon management technologies across emitting sectors.

This August marked the second anniversary of the IRA, a critical milestone for the section 45Q tax credit, the foundational policy for the deployment of carbon management technologies. The 45Q tax credit provides a credit on a per-metric ton basis for carbon that is captured from emitting facilities or directly from the air and then permanently stored or reused to make useful products. Today, thanks to these historic policies in support of carbon management, there are now nearly 220 announced carbon management projects in the US across a range of emitting sectors.

45Q Tax Credit Structure
Below, we detail several recent techno-policy developments for the deployment of these climate-crucial technologies across power, industry, CO2 transport, and promising developments in carbon removal.

Deploying Carbon Capture Technologies at Point Sources

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First, the industrial sector relies on fossil fuels to provide high-temperature heat that cannot be easily substituted with renewable sources. Additionally, many industrial processes directly emit CO2, meaning these emissions are directly produced and emitted by the chemical or physical conversion of raw materials into finished goods and cannot be abated without carbon capture. These so-called process emissions are responsible for approximately one-quarter of the emissions from the industrial sector.

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CO2 pipelines are the backbone of the economywide deployment of carbon management technologies across the United States.

The continued safe operation of CO2 pipelines is paramount as the industry expands. With over 5,000 miles of CO2 pipelines in operation, incidents are rare, and the industry has maintained an excellent safety record, according to a new issue brief from the Great Plains Institute. However, as carbon management projects grow, we must ensure the continued safe operation of these systems. To that end, the federal Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA) is working on updated regulations to ensure safety standards as this network expands as additional capture and removal facilities come online. As the nation continues to invest in carbon management technology, ensuring the safety of CO2 pipelines is crucial. The forthcoming PHMSA regulations and federal funding efforts must continue the commitment to building a safe and sustainable carbon transport infrastructure.

In parallel, the BIL provided DOE $2.1 billion through the Carbon Dioxide Transportation Infrastructure Finance and Innovation Act (CIFIA) to offer access to capital for large-capacity, common-carrier carbon dioxide transport projects. To meet net zero emissions by midcentury, we must see a networked system of CO2 pipelines transporting CO2 from emitting sources or the air, to secure geologic storage. READ MORE

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North Dakota Wants Your Carbon, But Not Your Climate Science -- A $9 billion plan to entomb CO2 emissions has a distinctly non-environmental attraction for the people of the Great Plains: It could allow the region to keep pumping oil and burning coal. Bloomberg)

Excerpt from Bloomberg: Jason Erickson is a landman on the ranches and farms of western North Dakota. Traditionally, the title refers to someone who brokers the deals wildcatters need to drill for oil on private land. But Erickson belongs to a new breed in that old line. What he does is different, an inverse. He seals land deals so that atmosphere-warming carbon dioxide—hundreds of millions of tons of it—can be pumped deep underneath.

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This carbon-sequestration project, which Erickson first began peddling to his neighbors more than three years ago, would be the largest of its kind in the US, an $8.9 billion venture by Iowa-based Summit Carbon Solutions LLC. Using carbon capture—until recently a fringe technology, and one that’s still largely shunned in environmentalist circles—Summit aims to pool emissions from 57 ethanol plants across the region and lock them more than a mile into the Earth, capitalizing on a federal tax credit that pays companies to bury CO2.

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At the pipeline’s endpoint, though, on the ranches beneath which Summit hopes to bury its CO2, the plan is broadly accepted.

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Of all the climate solutions at America’s disposal, carbon capture might be the most polarizing. The environmental left, in organizations such as the Sierra Club and Food & Water Watch, has rejected it as a costly, potentially unsafe tool designed to prolong the life of legacy fuels like ethanol, coal and oil. Some on the right, meanwhile, despise carbon capture for a different, entirely incompatible reason: their stubborn conviction that climate change is not, in fact, a problem.

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The state, he (North Dakota governor, Doug Burgum) predicted, could become a mass importer of carbon dioxide, bringing in greater volumes than its coal stacks and oil field flares emitted. Burgum suggested that North Dakota could even go on to become America’s first “carbon negative” state, with the greenhouse gas not only offsetting but reenergizing oil production, thanks to a process known as enhanced oil recovery.

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Industry is also moving ahead. In late 2021, Exxon Mobil Corp. bid on about 100 shallow-water leases in the Gulf of Mexico, a signal of its apparently serious interest in storing carbon beneath the seabed there.

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Big Oil is now so heavily invested in the approach, the Wall Street Journal reported, that it warned former President Donald Trump’s campaign against dismantling the Inflation Reduction Act, particularly sections of the climate law that subsidize carbon capture and carbon removal.

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The Energy Department projects that by 2050 the US will need to capture 400 million to 1,800 million metric tons of CO2 annually, more than 80 times what the country can capture today.

The question, then, is where to put it.

North Dakota is one of few places in the US where these storage projects are moving forward. Not coincidentally, it’s one of only three states cleared by the federal government to handle carbon-burial permitting themselves rather than having to rely on the much slower Environmental Protection Agency.

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Like the speakers before him, (Trent) Loos hammered on the infringements of eminent domain and the hazards of living near a CO2 pipeline. In Loos’ telling, Summit’s pipeline is the product of a secretive globalist land grab, a deep-seated plot whose roots reach all the way to the United Nations. More than anyone before him, though, he spelled out an environmental basis for right-wing opposition to carbon capture, warning his audience against what he called “the big lie”: that an accumulation of human emissions in the atmosphere is warming the planet. “I’m most concerned about the lie that we’re being told about greenhouse gases, which improve planet health every day,” he said, “and we’re being told we gotta tie ’em up.”

I was struck, leaving Fort Dodge, by how uncompromising the crowd had been. There seemed to be a fault line among those aligned with traditional energy sources. Many of the oil and coal proponents I’d met in North Dakota have become full-throated evangelists for carbon capture, even if they don’t readily concede that the CO2 they aim to capture is altering the climate. Almost everyone I met in Fort Dodge was a purist who balked at any concessions to the energy transition.

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More than 90% of the area Summit needs for its carbon injection plans is signed on, well above the 60% threshold North Dakota requires for the project’s storage component to go forward. CO2 doesn’t recognize fence lines, of course, and if the state’s oil and gas industry regulators approve Summit’s injection plans, the company could inject beneath (Kurt) Swenson’s land with or without his permission. But Swenson might still represent a threat to North Dakota’s carbon sink ambitions via a lawsuit he and a group called the Northwest Landowners Association are pursuing against the state’s carbon storage laws. If successful, their case could ensure that the rights to property thousands of feet underground are treated much the same as the rights to the land on the surface—an outcome that would likely leave companies trying to bury CO2 entangled in costly skirmishes over eminent domain. READ MORE