DOE Puts Money Behind Carbon Removal
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From CNBC
The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced more than $2.3 billion for three efforts to advance approaches that reduce carbon dioxide (CO2) pollution. At the heart of the funding is the goal to:
Address the impacts of climate change
Create well-paying jobs
Prioritize community engagement and environmental justice
$2.25 billion, funded by the President’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, will be used to accelerate geologic carbon storage projects each capable of permanently storing at least 50 million metric tons of captured CO2.
Two other funding opportunities, totaling $91 million, aim to increase the number of available CO2 storage sites and to advance critical carbon management technologies.
Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm, in her announcement of the funding progress, acknowledged that carbon capture and storage is controversial, with critics saying it will reduce incentives for producers to reduce emissions.
Granholm reiterated that decarbonization is not a zero-sum game—that we can remove CO2 from the atmosphere while also reducing new emissions. She said: “Anything we can do to decarbonize is a good thing.”
She pointed out that carbon capture technologies will be important to compensate for hard-to-decarbonize sectors of the economy and that fossil fuels will be a part of the global energy infrastructure for a while.
As we keep saying, the energy transition won’t be linear. Nor will it be a nice “turn off the fossil fuels switch, turn on the green energy one” process.
