![]() Musk’s prize will surely help some firms further their technology and reduce their costs, but Silicon Valley solutions won’t create the market that unlocks carbon capture technologies. So too is carbon capture ready to make such a jump. ![]() Research and development money did not unlock the solar market at the turn of the century, rather it was the emergence of a viable business model driven by mandated renewable energy targets that allowed solar to rapidly expand and run down the cost curve, driving further growth. The solution to carbon capture deployment lies in expanding programs like these to provide further incentives to deploy technology.Ĭarbon capture today looks a lot like solar technology 20 years ago, which was on the brink of growing at a rate over 500 times over the next two decades. But they provide mechanisms to help support the industry today and blueprints for new programs in the future. The LCFS program has limited scope and jurisdiction, and its market would be quickly overwhelmed if carbon capture reaches scale. 45Q is temporary in nature, and will expire in a few short years. Similar programs exist in the pacific northwest and a federal program is under development in Canada. The California Low Carbon Fuel Standard (LCFS) provides credits to facilities that capture and store carbon dioxide, with the value of the credit floating based on a mandated trading market and the number of credits granted dependent on the overall carbon intensity of the process. ![]() Just weeks ago the United States Internal Revenue Service (IRS) finalized its rules for a program colloquially referred to as ‘ 45Q’, a tax credit that provides projects with up to $50 per metric ton of CO 2 stored underground. ![]() Thankfully some of these tools are already in place. The only durable solution that enables the scaling of carbon capture technology is a regulatory regime that makes it more expensive to emit CO 2 (through taxes, fees, or otherwise), a regime that pays companies to capture CO 2, or a regime that does some combination of the two. Competing against cheap fossil fuels on a dollar for dollar basis is challenging if not impossible. Real systems aren’t 100% efficient, and further adding in the cost for maintenance, overhead, the water, energy for the CO 2 separation from its source, and financing costs for the equipment to do all this work leads to still higher costs per gallon produced. It’s physically impossible, no matter the advancement of technology, to use less energy to synthesize that fuel. For an idealized system that converts CO 2 and water into gasoline using only exactly as much energy as ends up in the fuel, the cost of the energy to perform the conversion would be $3.69 for each gallon of gasoline produced, assuming electricity at 10 cents per kilowatt-hour. ![]() Even here, however, fundamental laws of thermodynamics require that the energy input required to convert CO 2 into chemicals or fuel is higher than the energy available in the products. The Ultimate Tax Plan Of Donations Of LLC Interests To Charity Leads To The Indictment Of Michael MeyerĪ more scalable solution aims to create a circular economy wherein CO 2 is used to make fuels: even the kerosene used by Musk’s SpaceX could be made this way. ![]()
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