By Jeff St. John
As the Biden administration prepares to shell out billions of dollars on carbon capture and storage projects, a government watchdog report offers a warning about how not to do it.
In a report released last month, the U.S. Government Accountability Office summarized its findings on the federal government’s efforts to get carbon capture and storage off the ground at coal-fired power plants across the country. The GAO found that these efforts were tainted by major flaws that led to hundreds of millions of dollars of wasted taxpayer money.
Under the Obama administration, the Department of Energy poured more than a billion dollars into carbon capture and storage (CCS), money allocated by Congress under the 2009 stimulus bill. While the DOE’s investments in capturing carbon from industrial sites achieved some success, its investments in capturing carbon from coal plants most decidedly did not.
The GAO reports that the industrial CCS projects were held to higher standards and subjected to more oversight and scrutiny than the coal-plant projects. “[S]enior management directed DOE to bypass some cost controls to help struggling coal projects,” the GAO report states.
The result: Not a single coal-plant CCS project that DOE invested in is still operating today. Only one of the eight projects it funded was ever completed, and that one was shut down last year.
The GAO report offers an autopsy of sorts for the well-publicized failures of coal-plant CCS projects over the past decade. It also provides a warning of the potential for wasted funding on future projects and a list of stricter oversight measures that it suggests could prevent such an outcome.
The report details how DOE spent nearly $1.1 billion on a series of CCS projects from 2010 to 2017, funded through the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. Of that funding, about $438 million went to three CCS projects at industrial sites, two of which were completed and continue operating today.
Over the same time period, nearly $684 million was spent on eight CCS projects at coal plants. Of those projects, three were scrapped in the planning phase before DOE invested significant amounts of money into them.
But the DOE continued to support the remaining five projects, “even though they were not meeting key milestones,” according to the GAO report. DOE ended up spending nearly $472 million on four of the five projects that ultimately never got built, including two highly publicized FutureGen 2.0 projects — nearly $300 million more than it had budgeted to spend at the phase of development the projects had reached at the time they were discontinued.
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