Trump’s Energy Shakeup Will Spare Carbon Capture

US President-Elect Donald Trump is promising plenty of 180-degree pivots when it comes to energy. Yet one priority of the current administration is likely to stick.

Carbon capture and storage has bipartisan support, with advocates touting it as an important tool for paring pollution. Under outgoing President Joe Biden, the Environmental Protection Agency has put CCS at the center of efforts to curtail power-plant emissions.

But greenlighting the infrastructure necessary to transport all that trapped carbon dioxide away from power stations and refineries — and then lock it underground — has proved anything but easy.

The EPA has a backlog of about 150 applications for wells to store captured CO2, including some filed three years ago. The agency has only authorized two since a key CCS tax credit was expanded under Biden’s signature climate law a couple of years ago.

Enter Trump. During his first term, the Republican’s EPA gave two states the lead role vetting CO2 storage wells within their borders (a feat only one additional state has managed under Biden), helping accelerate permitting and construction.

What’s more, Trump’s new pick to lead the EPA, former Republican Representative Lee Zeldin of New York, has been vocal in his support for carbon capture.

While in Congress, Zeldin cosponsored legislation aimed at luring more financing to the technology. He also hailed the importance of a “robust partnership” between the government and industry to advance CCS deployment.

Environmentalists “talk a good game about how important carbon capture is,” said Tom Pyle, president of free-market advocacy group the American Energy Alliance. But that’s stacked up against “how little the administration did to advance the ball on this.”

Now, the stage is set for swifter permitting. In Pyle’s view, it could be “ironic to see how quickly the Trump administration can clear away the bureaucracy on this.”

–Jennifer Dlouhy, Bloomberg News