According to Justine Calma, author of The Verge, a technology website, on Tuesday (August 3), a new generation of pipeline projects may emerge as a bipartisan infrastructure agreement is being passed by Congress. It is worth mentioning that the pipeline is not transporting traditional oil and natural gas, but carbon dioxide, which is heating up the earth. The massive bill would allocate money for new infrastructure to capture carbon dioxide and transport it to places where it could be buried underground or used to produce products such as carbonated drinks.
Carbon capture technology is designed to remove carbon dioxide directly from the source of emissions, but it remains controversial among climate activists, many of whom believe it is the wrong solution and a distraction from emissions reduction targets. But a new bipartisan infrastructure plan in Congress will invest billions of dollars in the idea, committing the country to an ambitious carbon capture and removal program that has never been attempted on such a scale.
"The infrastructure bill opens the floodgates for carbon capture pipelines," Alan Ramo, a professor emeritus at Golden Gate University School of Law, tweeted.
The new rules focus primarily on addressing industrial emissions using carbon capture and removal, rather than emissions from the power sector. The Biden administration has particularly encouraged carbon capture in industries such as cement and steel, which are difficult to electrify and decarbonize. (Cement alone accounts for 8% of global carbon dioxide emissions.) Focusing on these industries may prevent carbon capture technology from being used to extend the life of coal-fired power plants or other high-emission energy sources, a problem faced by carbon capture technology used in the power industry.
The new infrastructure bill will fund a type of industrial carbon capture and storage network. There has been a great deal of progress in the technology to remove carbon dioxide at the source, so the new bill uses most of the money to build a network of pipelines to take carbon dioxide away from the original point of emission. The bill also provides funding for projects that may serve as destinations for carbon dioxide, use it in commercial products, or inject it into underground storage. The full text of the bill, released by
US senators on August 1, redefines a range of emerging carbon capture and removal technologies as a new type of critical infrastructure. "CO2 transport and storage infrastructure is similar to previous deployment barriers faced by other types of critical national infrastructure, such as high capital costs, which require federal and state support, plus private investment, to overcome these barriers," the bill reads.
All told, the bipartisan infrastructure package earmarks more than $8.58 billion for carbon capture and removal. Most of the money is used to finance infrastructure for the transport of carbon dioxide and to find a final destination for it. The U.S. Department of Energy will receive $100 million to design "transportation infrastructure," or pipelines to carry carbon dioxide. There is also $2.1 billion for low-interest loans and grants for CO2 transport infrastructure projects between 2022 and 2026.
The bill would also give the Department of Energy $2.5 billion over five years to develop "large-scale commercial" projects to safely store carbon dioxide. It sets aside money to allow oil wells to bury carbon dioxide deep into geological formations. The bill specifically focuses on the Outer Continental Shelf — offshore areas beyond state jurisdiction — as a place for carbon sequestration and allows the Interior Department to permit carbon storage projects there. The bill also creates a grant program for States and local governments to purchase and use products made from captured carbon, which could include products such as concrete and plastics.
The bill also envisions "direct air capture" plants — facilities that absorb carbon dioxide directly from the atmosphere — at four regional centers across the United States. Over the next five years, $3.5 billion will be spent on these "regional centers", each of which will absorb at least 1 million tons of carbon dioxide per year (roughly the annual energy consumption of 120,000 homes in the United States).
Carbon capture and removal is still expensive and at a relatively early stage of development, meaning it may only be developed with significant government funding. And even less attention has been paid to the pipeline infrastructure that supports it. Noah Deich, president of Carbon180, a nonprofit group that
promotes carbon removal technology, said, "The question is who will pay for this huge pipeline in the first place, because there are only a few projects." "Basically, that's what the legislation incentivizes, to build the big pipeline from the beginning, so that the chicken-and-egg problem is overcome and more and more industrial projects can be implemented."
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