Big Oil to Benefit From Biden's Carbon Capture Tax Credits: Report

As the U.S. moves to invest in climate solutions, is the money going toward projects that will meaningfully reduce emissions and transition the nation's energy system away from fossil fuels?

A report released Wednesday by worker-owned corporate accountability 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 subsidies.

At the same time, most of the carbon dioxide pipelines in the state are managed by the major oil and gas companies like Kinder Morgan, Occidental Petroleum, and ExxonMobil that 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 solution. It's really not where we need to be investing our money," said Paige Powell, the policy manager at Commission Shift, at a press briefing announcing the new research. "And the public dollars coming 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 is receiving so much public dollars, why is there little public input?"

For its report, Empower turned up 98 carbon dioxide-related projects in the state of Texas, including 47 pipelines and 13 Class VI Geological Storage projects. These projects are currently primarily funded through tax breaks and U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) subsidies; the report authors found little evidence of any private investments.

"Our report clearly lays out the way carbon capture tax credits rig 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 funding and tax breaks are the largest sources of revenue for CCS projects. Without the massive federal investment, the private sector deems most CCS projects unprofitable."

The main tax credit for CCS is the 45Q tax credit, which assigns a dollar amount for every metric ton of carbon dioxide captured and permanently stored. While this credit was first created by the Energy Improvement and Extension Act of 2008, the Inflation Reduction Act expanded it, raising the credit to $85 per metric ton. At the same time, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act earmarked more than $8 billion for the DOE's CCS programs.

"These are the key bills that were enacted that enabled CCS to be at least more financially available than it previously was," Rosado said in the briefing.

Yet climate and accountability advocates are concerned that the money is being misdirected.

Powell noted that CCS technology had been around for 50 years, but had failed to advance.

"All of these projects have been largely unprofitable, and they haven't expanded the way that renewables and other climate solutions have, primarily because the technology is problematic," Powell said. "It's unsafe, it's fraught with mechanical failures, and not to mention wildly expensive when compared to other climate solutions."

Dominic Chacon of the Texas Campaign for the Environment said that industry boosting of CCS amounted to a form of "greenwashing."

"It is essentially a marketing PR branding ploy to downplay the obvious risks associated with fossil fuels, to try and rebrand this industry as something that we need for the future," Chacon said.

Autumn Hanna, the vice president of Taxpayers for Common Sense, noted that there was a history of fraud in past allocation of CCS subsidies.

"A Treasury investigation found that from 2010 to 2019, 90% of tax credit claimants failed to comply with IRS [Internal Revenue Service] and EPA [Environmental Protection Agency] requirements," Hanna said in a statement. "Instead of throwing good money after bad, we should focus our limited resources on climate solutions we know are safe and effective."

At the same time, most federal CCS subsidies actually ended up going toward injecting carbon dioxide into depleted oil wells in order to extract even more oil, which is currently the only profitable use of the technology.

"Continuing to funnel these subsidies and tax breaks to the oil companies, which mostly use it to extract more fossil fuels, really weakens its supposed climate benefits," Hanna said in the briefing.

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.

"We need to chart a new course here in Texas and in Washington to incentivize climate solutions that actually work."

"Our state oil and gas regulator, the Railroad Commission of Texas, is reluctant 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 river environments. The report authors also ran into a lack of transparency.

After filing Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests to the Environmental Protection Agency to access data about CCS projects, they received documents with entire pages redacted on the behest of the companies and with the permission of the EPA.

"This is very dangerous when it comes to corporate accountability and transparency on environmental issues, because entire pages were redacted from FOIA requests and public information requests that are incredibly important for communities and safety in these communities," Rosado said.

The advocates called for greater transparency and accountability around public financing for untested and expensive climate solutions.

"I think it's important for us to ask ourselves, if carbon capture is receiving so much public dollars, why is there little public input?" Chacon asked. "There is no public transparency on this technology."

Hanna called for putting "the breaks on the whole thing until we start to really answer some big questions that are out there instead of just autopilot expansions and extensions that carry huge costs and, again, leave us with these big questions and this lack of transparency and oversight."

Community organizations in the Lone Star State are petitioning the EPA to reject the Texas Railroad Commission's request to have primary oversight over 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 critical that the Environmental Protection Agency not hand over regulation of dangerous CCS projects to the Railroad Commission of Texas, which has shown that it's in the pocket of fossil fuel companies, which stand to profit while putting our communities at risk," Powell said in a statement. "We need to chart a new course here in Texas and in Washington to incentivize climate solutions that actually work."

To that end, Commission Shift is also urging concerned residents to comment on new EPA draft permits for CCS projects in the Permian Basin.

"Let them know we need an extension to review the permits and that we really just don't want these here in the Permian, it's not the right place for all these projects," Powell said.