The Biden administration will announce more than a quarter of a billion dollars in funding to boost carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology that some Democratic lawmakers are “skeptical” of, Axios reported Wednesday.
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) on May 11 proposed strict emissions standards for fossil-fuel-fired power plants that effectively required them to use the technology or shut down by 2040. The Biden administration’s recent CCS push has received bipartisan criticism, including from left-wingers like Democratic Rep. Jared Huffman of California and the president’s Special Climate Envoy John Kerry, Axios reported. (RELATED: Biden Admin To Shell Out Billions Putting Solar Panels On Low-Income Housing)
While the recent round of funding is the administration’s “chance to show [CCS] can work,” Huffman told Axios that he was “skeptical.” On Tuesday, Kerry told the Associated Press that the technology “might not work” and questioned whether it would be “price-competitive” even if the technology could be deployed “at-scale,” something the former Secretary of State doubted.
SHARM EL SHEIKH, EGYPT – NOVEMBER 09: U.S. Special Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry attends the UNFCCC COP27 climate conference on November 09, 2022 in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt. (Photo by Sean Gallup/Getty Images)
While the technology has received support from both oil and gas firms and Republican lawmakers in the past, some Republicans, such as Sen. Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia and Sen. Kevin Cramer of North Dakota, have made comments similar to Kerry’s, Axios reported. Cramer told the outlet that the Biden administration is “teasing us with our own ambitions,” and argued that efforts to deploy the technology were happening “too fast.”
The $251 million in funding for the technology, set to be announced by the Department of Energy (DOE) Wednesday, is the first round of CCS funding from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, Axios reported. Of this, $242 million comes from the $2.25 billion Carbon Storage Validation and Testing program, which seeks to provide federal support for both CCS and pipeline infrastructure to pump carbon dioxide to storage sites.
The DOE directed a Daily Caller News Foundation request for comment to a press release detailing the funding. The agency noted that it had invested more than $737 million on research and development projects related to “carbon management,” which the agency views as “essential” to build an “industrial economy” based on green energy.
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