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President Biden’s early climate efforts Priority popular actions: rejoin the Paris agreement, buy clean energy and vehicles, and eliminate fossil fuel subsidies. But the administration’s strategies to drive the country towards net-zero emissions also rely on a less obvious, though less sensitive, area: capturing or removing the massive amounts of carbon dioxide that causes global warming.

In July, the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Fossil Energy named it “and Carbon Management,” signaling A marked shift in an institution that has traditionally focused on developing more efficient ways to extract fossil fuels and turn them into energy. Now, backed by nearly 750 federal employees and nearly a billion dollars in budget, the main goal of the office is to develop better and cheaper ways to clean up climate polluting industries.

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Among the new priorities are: developing technologies and techniques that can prevent CO2 from escaping from factories and power plants, remove it from the atmosphere, transform it into new products, and store it forever.

Office placed a few researchers He focused on these issues in leadership roles, including the naming of Shuchi Talati as chief of staff. He will oversee many changes in the agency with him. Jennifer Wilcox, assistant chief secretary. Talati was previously an advocate of decarbonisation and recycling, deputy policy director at Carbon 180 and a fellow at the Association of Concerned Scientists.

President Biden’s agenda $1 trillion infrastructure billThe Senate has already passed. information technology provides billions of dollars develop direct air capture facilities Pipelines that can absorb CO2 from the air, moving it, and places where it can be buried in geological formations underground.

Many in the climate movement argue that carbon capture is a distraction from the core mission of eliminating fossil fuels as quickly as possible. And the field is full of failures, including various Energy Supported Departments. confectionery about $2 billion FutureGen clean coal project.

But research reveals that it would be much more difficult and more expensive to eliminate emissions and prevent dangerous levels of warming without carbon capture and removal, especially in heavy industries where there are few other options. and number successful commercial projects growing worldwide, reducing emissions from steel, hydrogen and fertilizer plants.

In the interview below, I asked Talati what role carbon capture should play in our response to climate change and how the Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management is working to accelerate progress in this area.

The interview below has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Why was it important to change or expand the jurisdiction of your office?

When it comes to climate targets, net zero in particular is playing an increasingly important role for carbon management to play. This means recognizing that we have to not only deal with our ongoing emissions, but also manage the carbon that goes with it for every type of fossil fuel burned.

Ensuring that these two are linked on behalf of our office is important in terms of how this office does its job and how it is perceived. Because we do not want to do any work that has nothing to do with reducing the environmental impacts of fossil fuels.

How does the Department of Energy see carbon capture and storage as particularly relevant to broader efforts to accelerate decarbonisation and address climate change?

Where we can transition to renewables, we want to make those choices. But where we can’t, CCS [carbon capture and storage] It has a really important role. We know that in industries like cement, CCS is absolutely necessary to capture these emissions.

We can capture not only emissions from the actual energy needed, but also emissions released during the production process where there are no other mechanisms to prevent this CO2. CCS is an incredibly versatile way to capture emissions from many of these hard-to-decarbonize industries.

When it comes to the electricity sector, especially when looking at natural gas, there are many natural gas power plants that do not retire until 2035. 100% clean electricity target. That means more than 200 gigawatts that will continue to run on natural gas. So CCS is really the only option to keep it clean.

I also want to say that we have never demonstrated this technology for natural gas before. So if we really want to understand the real costs and what commercialization will actually look like, we must first invest in promotion. That’s really what our office can do.

Many climate activists view carbon capture support as similar to giving a social license for the fossil fuel industry to continue operating. How do you react when you hear people raise these concerns?

I understand where most of these criticisms come from. This has not necessarily been an industry that is simple. And I think it’s really challenging that it has to do with the fossil fuel industry, and that’s something we’re grappling with.

But I think when it comes to the stable infrastructure we have, and especially when we look at the industrial sector – it’s not necessarily about the fossil fuel industry, it’s about creating products we know we’re going to need like concrete – we have to think about emissions and what it means to reach zero. There really is no other option.

The role of our office and the federal government is to make sure we do this properly and create a responsible industry and environmental safety measures around this technology that did not exist in the past.

You mentioned the role that carbon capture could potentially play for natural gas power plants that will continue to operate for decades. But do you expect carbon capture to play a role in building new power generation energy going forward?

To be honest, I think it really depends on the market and how private companies view their investments.

We only support reduced fossil fuels, so when it comes to building new natural gas, our support largely depends on whether that CCS infrastructure is there. And I think a really important component of that is reliable storage. Currently, too much CO2 is used for enhanced oil recovery [freeing up remaining oil from wells] and around geological reservoirs and around products made of CO2 with long-term storage, such as building materials, we want to make sure we help create a durable storage infrastructure.

Even if this is an effective tool for cement plants or some elements of existing natural gas plants, there is still a reasonable fear that there may be a fraud here. These emissions could leak more from both plants and extraction sites than companies say, as carbon storage sites are not working as efficiently as hoped. How can we get the industry to do them reliably?

I think that’s the role of our office, and I think that’s the role of this administration. I totally agree. I think we need to make sure that reliable storage is actually working. We have experience with the way CO2 is stored in depleted oil and gas reservoirs, but not much experience with saline aquifers. [permeable rocks filled with salt water].

We need to do demonstration projects. We need to have [monitoring, reporting, and verification] robust and large-scale talent that we rely on. This requires investment from the government and truly private capacity.

I also think there are leaks throughout the natural gas supply chain of our infrastructure. This is actually one of the priorities we’ve listed in our upcoming budget: reducing methane gas.

This means changing the way our office has often worked in the past. We want to change the conversation so that it has the least possible environmental impact from the extraction that takes place.

The advancing infrastructure bill includes direct financing of air capture facilities. What role does the Department of Energy think direct decarbonization from the air play in efforts to address climate change?

It’s incredibly exciting that this is the largest investment in carbon removal in history. The fact that we recognize the need to have focused demonstration funds for direct aerial capture is the first of its kind globally. And so [the Department of Energy] It plays a really important role in investing in these early technologies, demonstrating them and really helping private companies capitalize on the incredible work they’ve done in this space.

When it comes to direct air capture, these shows are incredibly expensive. And $3.5 billion actually doesn’t go as far as most people think.

We are incredibly excited about this technology. But there are others that I think deserve equal focus, enhanced mineralization [developing ways to accelerate the natural process by which certain types of minerals capture carbon dioxide].

When we talk about engineered decarbonization, I think advanced mineralization hasn’t quite caught its moment in the sun yet. [Direct-air capture] first thing that comes to mind and we want to change that. Advanced mineralization incredible scaling capacity.

How do you feel about tension or if there is a tension between increasing carbon removal and also paying attention to: potential limits so that we can do this?

This is an incredibly important question.

Carbon dioxide removal should not be applied where we can reduce emissions in other ways. For companies, this means reducing their emissions through energy efficiency or electrification or whatever other means. Avoiding emissions first is always a priority. Always. It will be more efficient to do this, as it will be cheaper. Carbon removal is difficult. Expensive. And the industry doesn’t exist at scale yet.