Comments to the Department of Energy on Deployment and Demonstration Opportunities for Carbon Reduction and Removal Technologies

ITIF is pleased to submit the following comments to the Department of Energy’s Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Managements request for information regarding efforts to jumpstart a national carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) and direct air capture (DAC) industry. CCS and DAC will be essential technologies to reduce and eliminate carbon emissions across the economy to achieve the nation’s climate goals.

Leading energy and climate experts acknowledge that the United States and the world will need billions of tons of carbon sequestration per year by 2050 to meet emission reduction targets established by the Paris Agreement and elsewhere. Without CCS and DAC it will be much more difficult and costly to reduce and eliminate emissions across various economic sectors, including electricity, cement, iron and steel, and heavy transportation. CCS and DAC complement existing clean energy technologies such as renewable energy and hydrogen by providing alternatives to emissions sources that would otherwise be too costly and/or difficult to decarbonize. Finally, CCS and DAC work in tandem to reduce the flow of emissions and the total stock of emissions.

There are remaining technical, financial, and regulatory hurdles, however, to scaling these technologies in the United States to meet the need for billions of tons of carbon storage. The significant funding provided by the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act opens the most significant opportunity to date to build pilot and commercial-scale demonstration projects. Our comments below are not specific to any one project but rather reflect our views on the broad technical areas and questions.