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The water is coming from the generating station in Thompsons, Texas. The Petra Nova Carbon Capture Project shut down in 2021, because of high costs.
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The Biden administration wants to put more money into projects that will capture CO2 emissions from power plants and industrial facilities before they escape and heat up the planet. According to a recent report by the Government Accountability Office, carbon capture technologies that the Department of Energy has supported have mostly fallen flat.
Since 2009, the Department of Energy has given about $1 billion to carbon capture and storage demonstration projects. Nine coal plants and industrial facilities would have been equipped with devices that scrub most of the CO2 out of their emissions if they had panned out. Once captured, the CO2 can be sent to underground storage.
That is not what happened. Only one of the six coal plants that the DOE gave $684 million for actually got built and started operating. Only two of the three industrial facilities received money. The GAO says that the DOE may risk spending taxpayer funds on demonstrations that have little likelihood of success if they don't have more accountability.
There should be more congressional oversight.
The GAO says there should be more congressional oversight of DOE-funded demonstration projects. The GAO recommends that the DOE do a better job of choosing which projects to fund and that the DOE should establish more consistent schedules and budgets for projects.
The US is about to get a big boost in funding for CCS projects, so it is critical to figure all these things out. Congress passed a bipartisan infrastructure bill in November that included $2.5 billion for CCS demonstration projects. It also includes $6 billion for large-scale CCS projects. The new infrastructure law marks the largest investment in carbon capture and storage in the history of the technology.
If Democrats push through their budget reconciliation bill, there could be more money on the way. The bill would give power plants a maximum tax credit of $85 per ton of CO2 captured compared to the current $50 maximum. Under the new parameters in the bill, power plants would need to capture at least 75 percent of their emissions in order to qualify for a tax credit. Some CCS advocates think the high standard could chill investment in the technology, so they want to eliminate it.
The Clean Air Task Force says that cold feet doomed CCS demo projects at coal plants. One of the groups pushing to get rid of the 75 percent requirement is a nonprofit.
Coal power projects were not great candidates for demo dollars because they couldn't get outside investor support, according to Lee Beck, international director of carbon capture at the Clean Air Task Force.
Falling natural gas prices and uncertainty around markets for carbon credits negatively affected the economic viability of coal plants with carbon capture technologies, according to a report. Adding CCS to power plants increases the cost of electricity production.
Industrial facilities that make ammonia can be more cost effective than power plants because they often produce more concentrated streams of CO2. Carbon capture devices hooked up to coal plants require more energy to run because the CO2 in coal plant emissions is relatively diffuse. Beck said the DOE spending at industrial sites was a success since two of the three projects got up and running.
Current trends indicate that many new coal power plants will continue to be built in coming decades, and the DOE said developing CCS technologies for new coal plants is important. The GAO says that the US will need to rely on CCS for climate change.
Fossil fuel subsidies are simply called that.
The GAO report only shows that CCS projects are a bad investment according to other environmental advocates. The policy director at the Grassroots Global Justice Alliance wrote to The Verge that they should stop using hundreds of millions of dollars to prop up industries that are responsible for the climate crisis. Federal investments for CCS are greenwashing.
According to the GAO report, CCS and a power plant have yet to be rolled out at a commercial scale. The technology has been used by the fossil fuel industry for enhanced oil recovery. Fossil fuel companies capture carbon dioxide deep in the ground to push out hard-to-reach oil reserves. Critics of CCS say the technology is just a tactic to keep the oil and gas industry afloat as the world looks to renewable energy to stave off the climate crisis. They worry that the captured CO2 might extend the life span of gas and coal power plants.
The International Energy Agency warned in a landmark report this year that new oil, coal, and gas infrastructure needs to stop in order to avoid catastrophic climate change. The agency formed in the 1970s to protect the world's oil supply but has recently been called upon to eliminate greenhouse gas emissions.
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