Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton Thursday backed a bill proposed by Sens. Heidi Heitkamp (D-N.D.) and Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) that would extend and expand the section 45Q tax credit for carbon dioxide sequestration and utilization.
“[W]e need to invest in carbon capture and sequestration, which will reduce emissions from coal and natural gas combustion, and will help us meet the global climate challenge more quickly and at lower cost, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. That’s why I support Senator Heidi Heitkamp and Senator Sheldon Whitehouse’s Carbon Capture Utilization and Storage Act, which Senator Kaine has also co-sponsored,” Clinton said in a written statement.
The 45Q tax credit is worth $20 per ton of CO2 captured for geologic storage and $10 per ton for CO2 captured and used in enhanced oil recovery. The program currently is supposed to expire once 75 million tons of credits have been used.
The Heitkamp-Whitehouse bill would make the credit permanent, dropping the 75-million-ton cap and increasing the credit to as much as $35 per ton of carbon captured for utilization and $50 per ton captured using permanent geologic carbon storage. Credits under the bill would be available to industrial sources of CO2, not just the electric sector as has been the case thus far.