Chairman Capito Questions CCUS Leaders on USE IT Act Implementation, CCUS Project Permitting

To watch Chairman Capito’s questions, click here or the image above.

 WASHINGTON, D.C. – Today, U.S. Senator Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.), Chairman of the Senate Environment and Public Works (EPW) Committee, led a hearing on advancing carbon capture, utilization, and sequestration (CCUS) technologies, and examining the implementation of the Utilizing Significant Emissions with Innovative Technologies Act or USE IT Act.

During the hearing, Chairman Capito questioned Kevin Connors, Assistant Director for Regulatory Compliance and Energy Policy at the Energy and Environmental Research Center; Dan Yates, Executive Director of the Ground Water Protection Council; and Jack Andreasen Cavanaugh, Manager of Carbon Management, U.S. Policy and Advocacy at Breakthrough Energy. In her questions, Chairman Capito asked about the pace of USE IT Act implementation, how to improve the permitting process for CCUS projects, and the importance of bipartisanship in these efforts. 

HIGHLIGHTS:

USE IT ACT TASK FORCES: “The USE IT Act was signed in 2020. I also alluded to the two CCUS Permitting Task Forces that have been established, one for federal lands, and one for non-federal lands. I'm interested to know…now that these Task Forces have been chartered and are operating, do you believe that will make an impact on identifying opportunities to improve the permitting, through these Task Forces, as the law requires?”

NEED FOR RELIABLE ENERGY: “We have a repeating theme here, and I mentioned it in my in my opening statement of the reliabilities, because not only is this an intensive process, the process we see on AI and other things are putting great pressures on our potential for providing electricity for all of this.”

PERMITTING IS KEY: “The key to all of this, and it's not the only key, but it's the key to every one of these projects, is a permitting process that you can move along. You can't permit a nuclear plant, you can't permit a pipeline, you can't permit a transmission line. You're sort of, at every point of the project, all hands point to permitting, and so any help that you can give us with permitting, Class VI, and those pipelines, I think, will cross benefit all projects.”

IMPORTANCE OF BIPARTISANSHIP FOR PERMITTING AND CCUS: “As Senator Whitehouse said, this is going to be a bipartisan push. It's the only way to do it effectively, to get it into legislation, because we see what happens with the regulatory environment, as the shifts of Administrations go from one to the other at the federal level.”

Click HERE to watch Chairman Capito’s opening statement.

Click HERE to watch Chairman Capito’s questions.

 

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