THE NET-ZERO BLOG
Climate policy analysis and updates from Sacramento
Direct Air Capture Hubs: California projects successful in receiving DOE grants
Earlier today, the Department of Energy announced the recipients sharing in $1.2 billion in Direct Air Capture (DAC) Hub funding made available via the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. In this blog post, we highlight the projects in California that were successful in receiving federal funding. We explore the state’s remaining challenge in attracting the remaining full-scale funding grants available.
The challenges of carbon capture and storage in California: Commercial frameworks
California has significant ambitions for carbon capture and storage, with a goal for this technology to make-up 25% of the state’s net-zero portfolio. However, there are currently no operating CCS projects in California. In a previous post, we highlighted how an immature regulatory framework is a key reason for this and identified opportunities to address this barrier. Here we examine a second key barrier, which is the lack of a commercial framework to attract the substantial and diverse CCS investments required to help fully decarbonize California’s economy in only 22-years.
The challenges of carbon capture and storage in California: Regulatory issues
The 2022 Scoping Plan identified the need for 100 million tons of carbon capture and storage (CCS) to achieve net-zero emissions by 2045. This is a significant share – equal to about 25% of the total solution. However, there are currently no operating CCS projects in the state. Can California reliably deploy this technology and infrastructure in the timeframe required by the Scoping Plan, and if so, how can we get from here to there? In this technical blog post – the first of a two-part series – we analyze the first main barrier: lack of a regulatory framework.
Final Scoping Plan identifies key role for carbon dioxide removal
Today, the California Air Resources Board released its proposed 2022 Final Scoping Plan, providing a roadmap for how the state can achieve net-zero emissions by 2045. The Plan identifies a key role for technological carbon dioxide removal, including direct air capture and bioenergy with carbon capture and storage.
California advances toward climate goals: carbon capture and storage
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change identified that technologies that capture, transport and store carbon dioxide are essential for achieving net-zero emissions targets. SB 905 (Caballero; Skinner) establishes a comprehensive framework to deploy carbon capture and storage in California. In this blog post, we review SB 905 and describe how capturing CO2 from industrial and bioenergy point sources as well as directly from the air can help California achieve its climate goals. This blog post is the final instalment of our three-part review of California’s 2022 legislative session on climate and clean energy.
Missed opportunity: Draft Scoping Plan fails to address biomass pile burning and decay
California recently released a draft version of its main climate plan, finding that it is preferable to open burn or leave to decay in the forest a significant portion of biomass residues resulting from wildfire prevention treatments. This is a missed opportunity: as a robust strategy to collect and convert forest waste into carbon-negative wood and energy products is a promising path to enable the state’s goal of treating one million acres per year and reduce the risk of high-severity wildfire. In this technical blog post, we analyze the role of forest biomass in the Draft 2022 Scoping Plan.