Sen. Bill Cassidy, a Louisiana Republican, sees an opportunity to work with President Joe Biden to curb emissions with technologies such as carbon capture and hydrogen — so long as the president and his team recognize a continued need for oil and natural gas.
Biden’s more than $2 trillion infrastructure plan, which makes significant climate change investments, backs legislation that Cassidy and a group of bipartisan senators introduced in March to support the build-out of pipelines to carry carbon dioxide captured from smokestacks or removed directly from ambient air to where it can be stored underground.
The bill, co-sponsored by Delaware Democratic Sen. Chris Coons, would set up a program to offer low-interest loans to carbon dioxide pipelines, similar to existing programs that support transportation and water infrastructure projects. It would also provide federal cost-sharing for commercial-scale projects to store carbon dioxide underground and boost federal and state funding to permit carbon dioxide storage wells.
In an interview with the Washington Examiner, Cassidy said he supports actions by the Biden administration to promote carbon capture and storage, such as those included in the infrastructure package.
In addition to supporting Cassidy’s bill, Biden proposes extending and expanding federal tax incentives for carbon capture technology, a step that also enjoys bipartisan support in Congress. Biden’s plan would also fund 10 pilot projects to retrofit large steel, cement, and chemical manufacturing plants with carbon capture equipment.
Cassidy acknowledged there is still a price barrier keeping low-carbon technologies such as carbon capture and hydrogen from being deployed on a large scale. Even so, he said he sees a market now for the United States to produce and export hydrogen — a versatile energy source that could be used to fuel vehicles, generate power, and store energy — from natural gas.
Pairing that hydrogen production from natural gas with carbon capture could eliminate nearly all the emissions from that process, he argued.
“We should promote that,” Cassidy said. “That is a way to get to net carbon neutrality in a way which uses American natural resources, which preserves the jobs associated with them.”
Cassidy said the U.S. could export the fuel to countries such as Japan and China, where there is currently a demand for hydrogen for vehicles and other energy applications.
He added that producing hydrogen with natural gas is cheaper than so-called “green” hydrogen, produced by using an electrolyzer powered by renewable energy, to split water into hydrogen and oxygen atoms.
There’s undoubtedly a reason Cassidy is promoting these technologies. Louisiana’s economy has long been closely tied to oil and gas production and industrial manufacturing.
Though still too costly now to be deployed widely, carbon capture and removal is seen as the best bet to decarbonize the hard-to-abate industrial sector, in which carbon is often baked into the process to produce materials such as chemicals and concrete. Increasingly, natural gas companies are exploring hydrogen production to continue utilizing their fuel and infrastructure in a lower-carbon future.
Cassidy, though, said he has concerns that ideology could dictate Biden’s climate policies and prompt the administration to restrict production of fossil fuels to appease the far Left, undercutting the ability to promote technologies such as carbon capture and hydrogen produced from natural gas.
Oil and natural gas have a variety of applications beyond just fuel, Cassidy said.
“It’s used for plastics, the chemicals, the lubricants that are going to be part of modern society for decades to come, if not forever,” he added. “I’m in a car right now, and the plastic that I’m banging on makes it lighter so you can get better miles-per-gallon average, or if it’s an electric vehicle, you get more range.” Those applications ultimately reduce emissions, he argued.
Suppose that oil and gas aren’t produced in the U.S. In that case, it will be produced elsewhere, where environmental and labor standards are less protective, Cassidy said, an oft-repeated line from congressional Republicans in opposition to Biden’s climate policies.
“A lot of their policy may appease their friends in the left wing,” Cassidy said of the Biden administration. “It is absolutely the wrong way to decrease emissions.”
