§16298d Carbon Removal

Summary

The Secretary must set up a research, development, and demonstration program to test, validate, and improve ways to remove carbon dioxide from the air at large scale. The program must work with other federal agencies, including the Department of Agriculture, and include the Office of Fossil Energy, the Office of Science, and the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy. It can study and test things like direct air capture and storage, bioenergy with carbon capture, enhanced geological weathering, farming practices, forest management and planting trees, and other planned natural or artificial carbon sinks. When picking and developing technologies, the Secretary must consider land use and ecosystem impacts, ocean acidification, net greenhouse gas effects, commercial feasibility, near-term impact, the potential to remove carbon on a gigaton scale, and economic cobenefits. The Secretary must also set up a competitive prize program to reward precommercial capture from dilute media and commercial direct air capture, and must create rules for the prize process and for monitoring and verification. For commercial prizes, awards will pay per metric ton of verified CO2 captured, will be equal for each winning facility, and must not exceed $180 per metric ton for CO2 stored in saline formations (smaller amounts may be set for use with enhanced oil recovery or other qualified uses consistent with section 45Q(f)(5) of title 26). The law requires grants to one or more direct air capture test centers to support pilot and demonstration work, front-end engineering design, and economic studies. The Secretary is encouraged to support pilot systems that capture 10–100 tonnes per year and demonstrations that capture more than 1,000 tonnes per year. The Secretary must promote collaboration across relevant offices and work with the EPA and other agencies to improve methods that measure and track carbon removal. Defined terms (one line each): dilute media — air or other media with CO2 below 1% by volume; prize competition — the competitive technology prize called for in the law; qualified carbon dioxide — CO2 captured from ambient air and then measured and verified at disposal, injection, or use (some recaptured CO2 used in enhanced oil recovery is excluded); qualified direct air capture facility — a facility that captures CO2 directly from ambient air and captures more than 50,000 metric tons per year (natural springs and natural photosynthesis are excluded); eligible project — a direct air capture project or a component of a regional hub; regional direct air capture hub — a regional network of capture projects, users or buyers, transport, and storage infrastructure. Deadlines and funding: certain actions must happen not later than 2 years after December 27, 2020, and the Secretary must solicit hub proposals not later than 180 days after November 15, 2021, with selections made within 3 years after the proposal deadline. The law authorizes $3,500,000,000 for regional hub work for fiscal years 2022–2026. Annual authorizations to carry out the whole section are $175,000,000 for FY2021 (including $15,000,000 for precommercial dilute-media prizes and $100,000,000 for commercial direct air capture prizes), $63,500,000 for FY2022, $66,150,000 for FY2023, $69,458,000 for FY2024, and $72,930,000 for FY2025.