Anna Littlefield is the director of the program for low carbon energy technologies for the Payne Institute in the Colorado School of Mines.
It is not a secret for anyone that carbon capture is growing – and the United States leads the peloton. The capacity of the United States alone for the capture, use and storage of carbon, or CCUs, should increase septuple By 2035. In 2023, the capacity to capture carbon by 2030 announced increase by 35%.
In the United States there is already 14 operational commercial installations which can capture and store approximately 21.4 million metric tonnes of CO2 per year, equivalent to Annual emissions of 5 million passenger vehicles. And new projects continue to be announced. Since 2018, when the Congress has improved the 45Q tax credit, which supports CCUs, there have been more than 120 CCUS projects announcement in the United States. In 2023, Chevron announcement He extended his Bayou Bend CCS project, positioning it as one of the country’s largest carbon storage projects.
Despite all these investments and these decades of proven operations, criticisms continue to insist that technology does not work – apparently because it has not evolved quickly enough. An American scientific title of 2017 asked: “Will carbon capture and storage ever work?“An environmental group said technology”will not work“, While others call it a”pipe dream. “”
This story allows other criticisms to suggest that any federal support for technology is badly allocated. Two American legislators recently introduced the 45q ABEAL ACTA bill to repeal the 45Q tax credit. The representative Scott Perry, r-pa., One of the sponsors of the bill, called CCUS “ineffective technology and provided on the market”. CCU opponents applaud Legislation.
What these criticisms are neglecting is that the main challenge faced by CCUs is the regulatory uncertainty created by current federal policies.
Fifteen years ago, The working group on the capture and storage of carbon was created and brought together the American environmental protection agency and the Ministry of Energy in order to accelerate deployment. In the internestitutions working group Keystone report Emitted the same year, the working group concluded that the CCUs were faced with any insurmountable technological obstacle.
We know that it is true because the oil and gas industry captures, shipped and storing CO2 to improve oil production for half a century. The Global CCS Institute Operational project database is additional proof that technology works.
So why are CCUs not faster? As a 2015 MIT newspaper note: “The absence of a robust and complete regulatory framework creates an environment of uncertainty that slows down the progress of CCS demonstration projects.”
Unfortunately, little has changed in the past decade.
EPA emits permits for CO2 injection wells through the Underground injection control program. These are known as class VI Wells. To date, the EPA has only published 11 final license decisions For class VI wells – and more than 150 more requests remain under examination. Many of these permits have been blocked at EPA for years.
We must recognize that the examination of class VI permit requests is not an easy task. These applications are deepened, encompassing detailed technical assessments, complete modeling of underground and robust risk management strategies. Composing the challenge, the regional offices of EPA have an unequal distribution of the license load: region 6 of EPA, which includes Texas, currently has 59 requests under examination, representing a substantial part of the national total.
To help tackle this backwards, many states put pressure for primacy – where EPA delegates the main authority to the states to supervise and allow these wells. States regularly authorize class VI wells in a month of months, not years.
The first state granted the primacy For the VI WELLS class, the Dakota of the North in 2018. Since then, only three other states have obtained primacy: Wyoming in 2020, Louisiana in 2023 and Virginia-Western West Just this year. Texas – The state with the largest class VI Wells awaiting EPA approval – has been waiting for the approval of its primacy request for years.
It is difficult to suggest in a credible way that CCUs do not work or is “ineffective” technology when the operating environment created for it is anything but stable.
The Trump administration called for a reform, aimed at helping American industry to develop and compete. With this objective in mind, eliminating the back of the class VI license applications – which would release investment in America, creating Tens of thousands of new jobs And Strengthen the world competitiveness of America – should be obvious.