Big Coal Wants You to Pay to Fix Its Problem

Fossil fuel producers may need $90 billion a year or more to spread carbon capture technology. Some of the world’s biggest fossil-fuel producers are calling on taxpayers to help them kick their pollution habit.

The world’s biggest oil, natural gas and mining companies are stepping up their campaign to deploy carbon capture and storage, or CCS, as way to slow global warming. But with a potential $90-billion-a-year price tag, it’s too rich for them to do it on their own. The technology siphons pollution away from the chimneys of industrial plants and injects it permanently underground.

It holds the promise of reducing greenhouse gases without overhauling the world’s energy system. For all its potential, CCS raises unpalatable questions for policymakers about how to fund it, and nobody in the industry has worked out a solution beyond either direct subsidies or much higher carbon taxes. Either of those measures would make burning fossil fuels much less economical.

Bloomberg