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Hi, I’m Yves. We’ve been posting regularly about how carbon capture is a scam for a variety of reasons, including questionable measures, lack of verification that the promised actions have actually been taken, and regular double-selling.
This article releases a new study that harshly criticizes the carbon capture plan included in the Biden Inflation Reduction Act, namely carbon capture and storage. We have covered previous reports that criticize this as a rip-off for oil companies, but the findings are astonishing: carbon capture and storage projects appear to be riddled with fraud, catastrophically expensive, prone to mechanical failures, and often don’t work at all.
Article by Olivia Rozann, Common Dreams Staff Writer. A common dream
As the U.S. invests in climate change, is that money being directed toward projects that will significantly reduce emissions and move the nation’s energy system away from fossil fuels?
Report release A study released Wednesday by Empower, a worker-owned corporate responsibility and environmental justice research organization, found that just 34 carbon capture and storage (CCS) projects in Texas could receive between $3.2 billion and $33 billion in annual tax incentives.
At the same time, most of the state’s carbon dioxide pipelines are owned by Kinder Morgan, Occidental Petroleum, ExxonMobil It played a disproportionate role in creating the climate crisis in the first place.
“Carbon capture and storage is the most expensive and least effective carbon mitigation option available, and it’s not where we should be investing our money,” Commission Shift policy manager Paige Powell said at a press conference announcing the new study. “Public dollars paid by the federal government to fossil fuel companies are our money, taxpayer dollars that could be better used elsewhere.”
“I think it’s important to ask, why is there so much public money being put into carbon capture, yet so little public input?”
In its report, Empower found 98 carbon dioxide-related projects in Texas, including 47 pipelines and 13 Class VI geological storage projects. These projects are currently funded primarily through tax incentives and U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) grants, and the report’s authors found little evidence of private investment.
“Our report clearly shows that the Carbon Capture Tax Credit rigs the system to benefit the oil and gas industry by billions of dollars,” Empower’s Samuel Rosado said in a statement. “Public funding and tax incentives are the largest source of revenue for CCS projects. Without significant federal investment, the private sector believes most CCS projects would not be economically viable.”
The main tax credit for CCS is the 45Q tax credit, which allocates a dollar amount for each ton of carbon dioxide captured and permanently stored. The credit was first created by the Energy Improvement and Expansion Act of 2008, but was expanded by the Controlling Inflation Act, which raised the credit to $85 per ton. At the same time, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act allocated more than $8 billion to DOE’s CCS program.
“These are important pieces of legislation that have made it possible for CCS to at least become more financially available than it was before,” Rosado said at the briefing.
But climate and accountability advocates worry the money is being misused.
Powell noted that CCS technology has been around for 50 years but has not made any progress.
“None of these projects are profitable, and they have not caught on like renewables and other climate solutions, largely because the technology is flawed,” Powell said. “They are unsafe, suffer from many mechanical breakdowns, not to mention being very expensive compared to other climate solutions.”
Dominic Chacon A representative for the Texas Environmental Campaign said the industry’s promotion of CCS amounts to a form of “greenwashing.”
“This is essentially a marketing PR branding ploy to downplay the clear risks associated with fossil fuels and rebrand the industry as something we need for the future,” Chacon said.
Autumn HannahThe vice president of the Taxpayers Common Sense Association noted there was a history of fraud in past allocations of CCS subsidies.
“Treasury Department investigations have found that between 2010 and 2019, 90 percent of tax credit applicants failed to comply with IRS and EPA requirements,” Hanna said in a statement. “Instead of wasting money, we should focus our limited resources on climate solutions that we know are safe and effective.”
At the same time, most of the federal CCS subsidies are actually going to injecting carbon dioxide into depleted oil wells to extract more oil, which is currently the only profitable use of the technology.
“Continuing to funnel these subsidies and tax breaks to oil companies, who primarily use them to extract fossil fuels, undermines the inherent climate benefits,” Hanna said at the briefing.
In Texas in particular, there are concerns about the safety of CCS infrastructure and its impacts on ecosystems and local communities, given the state’s weak regulatory culture.
“Our state’s oil and gas regulator, the Texas Railroad Commission, has been unwilling to oversee the industry in a way that protects people and the environment,” Powell said.
The Empower report found that 19 CCS projects overlap with at least 24 million acres of water, threatening both coastal and riverine environments. The report’s authors also encountered a lack of transparency.
When we submitted Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests to the Environmental Protection Agency to access data on CCS projects, we received full pages of documents redacted at the companies’ request and with the EPA’s permission.
“This is extremely dangerous in terms of corporate accountability and transparency on environmental issues because entire pages have been removed from Freedom of Information Act requests and public information requests that are so important to the community and their safety,” Rosado said.
Advocates called for greater transparency and accountability around public funding for untested and expensive climate solutions.
Hanna called for “pausing the whole thing until we really start answering some of the big questions that are out there, rather than just expanding and extending it on autopilot, which will cost a huge amount of money and again leave big questions and a lack of transparency and oversight.”
Community organizations in the Lone Star State Petition The EPA rejected the Texas Railroad Commission’s request for primary oversight over CCS projects in the state.
“Allowing Texas to continue on this path would be irresponsible and will only serve oil and gas interests. That’s why it’s so important that the EPA doesn’t leave regulation of dangerous CCS projects to the Texas Railroad Commission, which is in the pockets of fossil fuel companies, putting our communities at risk while they make profits,” Powell said in a statement. “We need to chart a new course here in Texas and in Washington to incentivize climate action that actually works.”
Therefore, Commission Shift has reached out to concerned residents: comment Regarding the proposed new EPA permit for a CCS project in the Permian Basin.
“Let them know that you need an extension to review the permits, and that you definitely don’t want these projects in the Permian, this is not the right place for these projects,” Powell said.
