In a Wall Street Journal story published June 28, the carbon capture issue has become a contentious battle amongst oil titans.
On the “opposed” side, both Ben “Bud” Brigham and a pro-fossil-fuels philosopher/Activist Alex Epstein are leading the charge to stop the billions of dollars the Biden administration pushed out the door with the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 to fund his climate programs.
Both urged President Trump and the Republicans separately to cut the tax credits for carbon sequestration claiming there is no climate disaster and that “funneling public money into a nascent technology is a gift to oil behemoths,” stated Brigham.
“It’s just taxpayer dollars that are going to virtue-signaling and are not having any meaningful economic impact at all,” he continued.
Oil giants Occidental and Oklahoma oil billionaire Harold Hamm, as well as the American Petroleum Institute want to not only keep the carbon credits, but expand them. Occidental and Hamm have invested hundreds of millions into the 2,500-mile carbon-capture pipeline ASL has reported on and opposes that will cross Iowa, Nebraska, Minnesota, North Dakota and South Dakota.
Brigham and Epstein have a proponent in the Trump Administration, Energy Secretary Chris Wright, who professes to be a “climate skeptic”. He accused the Biden administration of spending billions of dollars without proper due diligence, including carbon-sequestration projects.
Brigham doubts carbon capture will be profitable without public funding that only distracts from the core mission of fossil fuels companies – finding oil and gas.
We agree. CO2 is plant food. It’s frankly stunning that we are having a debate over whether American taxpayers should be funding plans to build massive pipelines and destroy miles of good farmland in order to sequester this underground. It’s not about good policy, it’s about the money.
