The Big Business of Burying Carbon

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.”

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.

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,”

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

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.