The Big Business of Burying Carbon

The business model envisions that polluters will collect the carbon—and the tax credit—and then pay Bayou Bend a transport-and-disposal fee that Tiller says is likely to be $20 to $25 per ton.

people “have to decide that the risks of CO2 going into the atmosphere are more fundamental than the risks of CO2 going into the ground.”

carbon storage is a “blunt” and “dumb” approach to curbing climate change. “You’re basically just landfilling,” he says, not decoupling the economy from the production of heat-trapping gases. But with it, he adds, “you buy the time to use the scalpel to do all the cool stuff,”

The new subsidy, modeled broadly on ones for renewable energy, gave developers a credit topping out at $50 for every ton of waste carbon dioxide they captured and geologically stored.

The idea is that major emitters will hoover up their own carbon waste, then pay to have it compressed into liquid and injected back down, safely and permanently, into the same sorts of rocks it came from

“We’re talking about a whole area the size of Texas that you can develop for storage,”