The U.S. finally has a climate law. Get ready for more pipelines.
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The U.S. finally has a climate law. Get ready for more pipelines.
Understanding what the IRA means for CCS.
Greetings from Astoria, Queens, where the tides seem to be turning against a proposal to massively upzone a low-slung industrial part of the neighborhood with some of the cheapest housing close to transit options.
At a time when New York City desperately needs more housing, the Innovation QNS redevelopment promises at least 12 high-rise towers containing offices, retail space, and 2,800 apartments, about 700 of which would be designated for seniors or low- and middle-income earners. Local opponents, including the Queens borough president, say that’s far from enough to cushion the current community against the economic shockwave a luxury housing boom on that scale would send. The City Council will decide its fate.
Warning that an influx of tech workers would spur rent hikes, Astoria’s elected officials, including U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, rallied to successfully stop Amazon from building a new headquarters in neighboring Long Island City in 2019.
And a similar proposal to Innovation QNS – albeit three times smaller, so lower stakes – imploded earlier this year after Harlem’s new socialist Councilmember Kristin Richardson Jordan said the project failed to meet her standards for affordability and community support.
Rents are going up either way. The only real long-term solution to that problem is to build as much new housing as possible. As a renter living in an unregulated apartment just a few blocks away, it’s hard to see how the redevelopment serves my short-term interests. But as a New Yorker with no plans to ever permanently leave the five boroughs, it’s hard to see how blocking any potential source of new housing serves my long-term interests. Conveniently, no one with power over this has asked me what I think anyway.
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I’m writing today to share what I learned when I set out to answer the question: What will the Inflation Reduction Act mean for carbon capture and storage?
Congress appropriated roughly $370 billion in climate and energy funding as part of the law, including massive, decade-long tax credits designed to reduce long-term demand for oil and coal. It marks the start of what Robinson Meyer described elegantly in The Atlantic as a new era of reindustrialization in the United States, one that may yield “more refineries, more factories, and more goods production than a fossil-fueled America—while also having cheaper cars, healthier air, and fewer natural disasters."
Among the many sectors set to take off on the back of generous new subsidies is the business of capturing, transporting, and ultimately doing something with carbon dioxide.
The new law dramatically increases the payouts from the long-standing 45Q federal tax credit for capturing CO2, making the costly work of using chemicals and heat to filter carbon dioxide out of smokestacks potentially profitable for many refineries, factories and even some power plants. As a result, economic modelers predict that the U.S. could be diverting up to 200 million metric tons of CO2 per year from the atmosphere and burying it back underground.
“Yes, there were technical challenges to first-of-a-kind projects. Some succeeded, some did not,” Jesse Jenkins, an assistant professor at Princeton University who modeled the IRA’s impact on emissions, told me. “The reason the industry didn’t take off is not technical hurdles. It’s the economic case. And this legislation will change that.”
Ethanol producers could be among the first beneficiaries, as my friend Lee Harris wrote in The American Prospect last week. The corn-based fuel additive has a destructive climate impact, so that sector is hardly the best one to illustrate the potential upsides to more carbon-capture deployment.
But for facilities making things like chemicals, steel, and cement, which require temperatures that are hard to reach without fossil fuels, there aren’t many options besides carbon capture to reduce emissions. And the industrial sector produces 24% of the U.S. greenhouse gasses, making it the third-largest source.
“My opinion is always that it’s much easier to justify CCS in certain industrial applications than it is in the power sector,” Rebecca Dell, a carbon-capture expert and the industrial emissions lead at the San Francisco-based ClimateWorks Foundation, told me.
On the other hand, Dell said, “if the new 45Q is not used at a wide variety of industrial facilities, then something has gone very seriously wrong.”
If Senate Democrats manage to pass their so-called “side deal” to reform project permitting, this carbon-capture buildout will likely mean a lot more pipelines to channel CO2 to where it can be used or stored. The higher-end estimates suggest the nascent carbon-management industry will need about 30,000 miles of new pipeline – more than all the gas pipelines in California, New York and Pennsylvania combined. And models suggesting the IRA will slash U.S. emissions 40% below 2005 levels by the end of this decade – as opposed to 30% without the IRA’s clean-energy subsidies – don’t account for the impact of permitting reform.
That’s hardly the only uncertainty. No one really knows exactly how an intervention on this scale into the energy economy might shake out. As I explained here last week, the IRA can only fund as many projects as state regulators will approve, and there are signs that many want to use the power of federalism to destructive partisan ends.
As Notre Dame researcher Emily Grubert told me, there’s no guarantee that the complex supply chain network that conveys fossil fuels from the ground to engines, stovetops, and blast furnaces will hold steady as non-fossil energy sources conquer an ever-larger portion of the economy.
One thing that does seem assured, however, is that the arrival – at last – of a federal climate law has not heralded an end to the suffering communities living near heavy fossil-fuel polluters.
The legislation “is riddled with concessions to the big carbon-based industries that at present prey on our communities at the expense of their health, both physically and economically,” Rafael Mojica, the program director at the Michigan environmental justice group Soulardarity.
As one EJ activist told Politico: “We’ve been sold out.”
The full story has a lot more detail, and you can read it here on HuffPost. This is the most in-depth piece I have yet written on carbon capture. I’m constantly learning more. Please tell me what I missed, or what I should report on next. Email me by replying here or alexander.kaufman@huffpost.com.
In other news:
The IRA’s climate spending is historic – in the U.S. But China and European Union states are spending as much or more. Bloomberg
Mining companies are gearing up for an IRA-driven boom. E&E News
As droughts yield undersized and oddly-shaped produce, British farmers are pleading with supermarkets to relax aesthetic standards for fruits and vegetables and buy them anyway. The Times
Chevron is jumping into a rural news desert with a “local news site” featuring propagandistic stories about what’s going on in Texas – written by a PR professional in San Francisco. Earther
The IRA’s direct-pay provisions could boost publicly-owned utilities, which previously couldn’t claim write-offs for the federal taxes they don’t pay. The Prospect
Thanks to an obscure 1907 legal precedent, all 4,703 New Yorkers who filed claims against the city after their homes flooded during Hurricane Ida were denied. The City
Thank you for reading. Here’s something nice.