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Yves here. We regularly post about how carbon capture is a scam, due to questionable measures among other reasons, lack of verification that the promised action actually takes place, and common double-dealing.
This article announces a new study that harshly criticizes the carbon capture program included in the Biden Deflation Act: carbon capture and storage. We’ve highlighted previous reports that criticized it as an indulgence for oil companies, but the account is fast. It appears that carbon capture and storage projects are often fraudulent, expensive, prone to failure, and ineffective.
By Olivia Rosane, staff writer for Common Dreams. Originally published on Common Dreams
As the US moves to invest in climate solutions, will the money go to projects that will significantly reduce emissions and transition the nation’s energy system away from fossil fuels?
A report released Wednesday by the labor-led and environmental justice research organization Empower found that just 34 carbon capture and storage (CCS) projects in Texas could receive between $3.2 billion and $33 billion in annual tax breaks.
At the same time, most of the carbon dioxide pipelines in the state are owned by large oil and gas companies such as Kinder Morgan, Occidental Petroleum, and ExxonMobil that played a major role in creating the climate crisis in the first place.
“Carbon capture and storage is the most cost-effective and efficient solution to carbon reduction. That’s not really where we need to invest our money,” said Paige Powell, policy manager at Commission Shift, at a press conference announcing the new study. “And public dollars from the federal government to fossil fuel companies are our dollars, our taxpayer dollars that could be better spent elsewhere.”
“I think it’s important for us to ask ourselves, if carbon capture gets so many public dollars, why is there so little public input?”
In its report, Epower identified 98 carbon dioxide-related projects in the state of Texas, including 47 pipelines and 13 Class VI Geological Storage projects. These projects are currently funded primarily through tax credits and US Department of Energy (DOE) relief; the report’s authors found little evidence of any private investment.
“Our report clearly lays out how carbon sequestration credits are making the system in favor of the oil and gas industry to the tune of billions of dollars,” Empower’s Samuel Rosado said in a statement. “Public funds and tax breaks are major sources of revenue for CCS projects. Without significant federal investment, the private sector sees many CCS projects as unprofitable.”
The primary CCS tax credit is the 45Q tax credit, which assigns a dollar value to every metric ton of carbon dioxide captured and stored indefinitely. Although this credit was first created by the Energy Improvement and Extension Act of 2008, the Depreciation Act expanded it, increasing the credit to $85 per metric ton. At the same time, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act earmarked more than $8 billion for DOE’s CCS programs.
“These are important bills that were passed that allowed CCS to be more financially viable than ever before,” Rosado said at the briefing.
Yet climate and accountability advocates worry that the money is being misdirected.
Powell noted that CCS technology has been around for 50 years, but has failed to advance.
“All of these projects were very unprofitable, and they didn’t increase the way renewables and other climate solutions work, mainly because the technology is the problem,” Powell said. “It is unsafe, fraught with mechanical failure, not to mention very expensive compared to other climate solutions.”
Dominic Chacon of the Texas Campaign for the Environment said the expansion of the CCS industry amounts to a form of “greenwashing.”
“It’s basically a PR marketing ploy to downplay the obvious dangers associated with fossil fuels, to try to rebrand this industry as something we need in the future,” Chacon said.
Autumn Hanna, vice president of Taxpayers for Common Sense, noted that there is a history of fraud in past allocations of CCS funding.
“A Treasury investigation found that from 2010 to 2019, 90% of tax credit filers failed to comply with the IRS. [Internal Revenue Service] and the EPA [Environmental Protection Agency] needs,” said Hanna in a statement. “Instead of throwing good money after bad, we should be focusing our limited resources on climate solutions that we know are safe and effective.”
At the same time, the decline of federal CCS ended up injecting carbon dioxide into depleted oil wells to extract more oil, the only profitable use of the technology.
“Continuing these subsidies and tax breaks for oil companies, which are largely used to extract fossil fuels, greatly weakens their climate benefits,” Hanna said at the forum.
In Texas specifically, there are concerns about the safety of CCS infrastructure and its impact on ecosystems and communities, given the state’s weak regulatory culture.
“Our state oil and gas regulator, the Railroad Commission of Texas, is reluctant to manage the industry in a way that protects people and the environment,” Powell said.
The Empower report found that 19 CCS projects are associated with at least 24 million acre-feet of water, threatening both coastal areas and rivers. The authors of the reports also encountered a lack of transparency.
After filing Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests with the Environmental Protection Agency to obtain information about CCS projects, they obtained pages of documents written at the behest of the companies and with the permission of the EPA.
“This is very dangerous when it comes to corporate response and transparency in environmental issues, because all the pages are edited from FOIA requests and public information requests that are very important to communities and the safety of these communities,” said Rosado.
Advocates have called for greater transparency and accountability regarding public funding for untested and expensive climate solutions.
Hanna called for a “pause in this whole thing until we start answering the big questions that exist instead of autopilot expansions and extensions that carry huge costs and, again, leave us with these big questions and this lack of transparency.” and looking.”
Community groups in the Lone Star State are petitioning the EPA to deny the Texas Railroad Commission’s request to have primary oversight of CCS projects in the state.
“Allowing Texas to continue down this path is irresponsible and only serves oil and gas interests. “That’s why it’s important that the Environmental Protection Agency not give the Railroad Commission of Texas control over dangerous CCS projects, which have proven to be in the pocket of the oil companies, who profit while putting our communities at risk,” Powell. said the statement. “We need to plan new lessons here in Texas and Washington to promote climate solutions that really work.”
To that end, Commission Shift is also urging concerned citizens to comment on the new EPA draft permits for CCS projects in the Permian Basin.
“Let them know that we need an extension to review the permits and that we really don’t want these here in the Permian, it’s not the right place for all these projects,” said Powell.
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