Project Overview

Goal

Carbon capture, utilization and storage (CCUS) plays a key role in international, national, and sub-national long-run decarbonization strategies, recent research suggests that it may be ready for large-scale deployment, and bipartisan policy initiatives have increased U.S. federal CCUS incentives. Unless the pace of CCUS project development speeds up, however, its role in the ongoing energy transition will remain aspirational. Our goal is to create a new network of scholars working on important questions regarding CCUS economics and policy, so that we can better understand whether the upswell of interest and support for CCUS among U.S. policymakers is warranted, identify barriers to further development, and illuminate tradeoffs between incentivizing CCUS andemploying other climate policy tools.

Objective

Our goals are: (1) to answer a set of key economic questions about the barriers to expanding CCUS in the United States, the effects of current federal CCUS incentives, and the tradeoffs in expanding CCUS relative to other climate policy approaches; (2) to expand the community of social science scholars engaged in research on the economic and policy implications of expanding CCUS; and (3) to foster interdisciplinary research, collaboration and training among scholars and graduate students on these topics.