Airing New Concerns with US Carbon Capture Policies, with Sheila Olmstead

Notable quotes:

• Federal CCS subsidies could cost the United States billions: “There are some pretty good recent estimates looking at the total fiscal cost of the Inflation Reduction Act’s increase in the 45Q subsidy, suggesting that it'll exceed $100 billion through 2031.” (4:41)
• CCS needs federal funding to survive: “The government payment per ton of carbon dioxide is the market for CCS. There is no other market … Without the federal subsidy, there is no carbon capture. The government subsidy has to be enough to cover the whole cost of this, and it has to continue in perpetuity.” (15:08)
• Firms that produce greater carbon emissions would end up receiving higher subsidies: “This subsidy alters these entry and exit incentives for power plants and industrial facilities in a way that favors carbon intensity over the long run. So, the richer that subsidy is, the more we might expect that we're shaping the fleet of power plants and industrial facilities in the United States in a direction that is exactly counter to what we would like to do as we decarbonize.” (21:24)

Top of the Stack

• “How to Design Better Incentives for Carbon Capture and Storage in the United States” by Sheila M. Olmstead, Benjamin D. Leibowicz, Charles F. Mason, Andrew R. Waxman, Emily Grubert, HR Huber-Rodriguez, and Joseph Stemmler
• Night Watch by Jayne Anne Phillips

The Full Transcript

Daniel Raimi: Hello, and welcome to Resources Radio, a weekly podcast from Resources for the Future (RFF). I'm your host, Daniel Raimi. Today, we talk with Dr. Sheila Olmstead, professor at the Cornell Brooks School of Public Policy, Atkinson scholar, senior faculty fellow at the Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainability, and a university fellow here at RFF.

Along with a group of colleagues, Sheila recently published an opinion piece critiquing the way that the United States incentivizes the deployment of carbon capture and storage, or CCS. Specifically, they argue that current policies could actually lead to more pollution, deter the deployment of alternative energy sources, and cost a whole lot of money. In this conversation, Sheila will make the argument for why the current policy design is flawed and offer some suggestions for how to make it better. Stay with us.

All right, Sheila Olmstead from Cornell and RFF. Welcome back to the show.

Sheila Olmstead: Thank you, Daniel. Thanks for having me.

Daniel Raimi: Yeah, of course. I was looking back at our records and noticed that the last time you were on the show was almost five years ago. It was December 2020 and you were talking about a totally different topic—the Clean Water Rule with my colleague Kristin Hayes. So, I'm wondering if you can remind us how you got interested in working on environmental issues in your career.

Sheila Olmstead: Yeah, of course. I like to tell this story to my students because it shows, in a way, that life is long, and you can follow a twisted journey to your ultimate destination.

I actually was in my master's program in public policy at the University of Texas at Austin. I was doing foreign policy stuff, and I had an internship lined up at the US embassy in Baku, Azerbaijan, between my two years in my master's program. Then, my dad got sick, and I ended up deciding I needed to stay in Austin for the summer.

So, there I was in the era of the bulletin board. Literally, the internship office had paper opportunities posted with tacks on a bulletin board. The only one left at the time, which I realized was going to be an important change for me, was an internship at the state environmental regulatory agency—at the time, it was the Texas Natural Resource Conservation Commission and has now become the Texas Council on Environmental Quality.

I took that internship, and it was delightful. It was in the Office of Border Affairs. I started working on understanding the water and wastewater infrastructure needs of communities called colonias—very low-income communities on the Texas side of the border that had inadequate sanitation, drinking water supply, roadways, and services like trash and schools. I was hooked after working on that and realizing, “Hey, we are in a wealthy state, in a wealthy country, and it's amazing that there are these environmental challenges that have such profound implications for human health. And here they are, right in our backyard.” So, that was it. I started taking environmental policy classes and studying economics, and then here I am today.

Daniel Raimi: That's so interesting. I don't think we've ever talked about this, because I had a similar experience when I was doing my master's program at Duke. I wanted to get a job or an internship in education policy, and I didn't get one. The only one that I got offered was an environmental job at the state environmental regulator.

Sheila Olmstead: We have that in common.

Daniel Raimi: Yeah. So, I took that internship, and the rest is history.

Sheila Olmstead: That's so great. I love that.

Daniel Raimi: Yeah. Cool. As I mentioned in the intro, we're going to talk today about carbon capture and storage, or CCS. The federal government's been subsidizing CCS since 2008, I believe. The policy's called 45Q, because that's the relevant section of the tax code that codifies the subsidy. Can you get us started by giving us a sense of how much deployment of CCS the current policy landscape might actually lead to, and how much it might cost in the years ahead?

Sheila Olmstead: Sure. Yeah, it's interesting. The subsidy for CCS, in contrast to subsidies for some other climate-friendly tech, has been remarkably generous and persistent over administrations of many different political flavors. As you noticed, it has been around since 2008. It's really only gotten richer since then. And that's, again, quite different from subsidies for wind and solar, for example, and electric vehicles, which have gone up and down. The wind and solar subsidy has been canceled, so there's been a lot of uncertainty, really for a long time, over those.

But, for CCS, it's been quite bulletproof. And it's hard to know. As you know, there's a lot of uncertainty about exactly how much deployment is going to happen as a result of any policy. But for this one, there are some pretty good recent estimates looking at the total fiscal cost of the Inflation Reduction Act's increase in the 45Q subsidy, suggesting that it'll exceed $100 billion through 2031.

Unlike some of those other climate-friendly subsidies that I just mentioned, the CCS subsidy was not reduced by the recent One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA), or the law that was passed by Congress with the budget and signed by the president. I would anticipate that that cost number is probably still about right. There are some changes we may talk about later that have maybe made it even more appealing for firms to take, so it's possible that those costs could even be higher.

Then, we can think about how, at the level of an individual deployer of CCS for a single 500-megawatt coal-fired power station, studies suggest that payments could amount to $3 billion to $4 billion over 12 years. The subsidy has a 12-year lifetime, basically from the time the firm begins taking it until it expires. If we think about deployment overall, its current level is $85 per ton. That's the 45Q tax credit that could certainly lead to more rapid US deployment of CCS than what we've seen under lower versions of the subsidy.

There's some models suggesting that total predicted carbon dioxide storage could reach 200 million to 800 million tons annually just because of the increase that happened under the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA)—which, as I mentioned, is continuing even under the new rules and budget.

Daniel Raimi: Right. Okay. So, definitely large dollar numbers we're talking about here. Tens of billions of dollars a year, potentially.

Sheila Olmstead: Yes.

Daniel Raimi: You mentioned that the OBBBA changed the 45Q subsidy. That's been a little controversial. We've talked about it a little bit on the show before, but can you just remind us, What was the change? How do you think about that change from an economic perspective?

Sheila Olmstead: This is a great question, and it's one we hear a lot of conversation about. But, I feel like there's been some fogginess with how we talk about it, maybe because we haven't thought that much as economists about carbon capture and storage and the structure of the subsidies for it.

It used to be the case in the IRA and before (so, basically, all versions of the 45Q subsidy) that firms would get a smaller subsidy for capturing carbon dioxide right from their flue gases and storing that by using it for enhanced oil recovery. So, it's a process in which firms will take carbon dioxide, pump it into an aging oil and gas field, and then stimulate and reduce the cost of production from those fields.

This process, called EOR or enhanced oil recovery, does store carbon. Most of the carbon dioxide that is pumped down into the well, into the formation that the firm is getting oil and gas from, does stay underground. So, it is a form of storage, but it used to be the case that it got a smaller payment from the federal government than did what's called geologic storage—in which firms take carbon dioxide from, say, a refinery or a power plant, and then purely store it deep underground. And that could be a saline aquifer, an old oil and gas field, or something like that.

What the OBBBA did is it created parity between those payments, so the EOR subsidy went up. Now, if I'm storing carbon dioxide by stimulating new oil and gas production, I get the same payment as if I just took carbon dioxide from a power plant or a refinery and then stored it geologically without stimulating new production. There's some controversy to this, because just thinking through—wait a minute. If what we're trying to do is decarbonize and shift away from fossil fuels, then why would we be making equal payments for using carbon dioxide to generate more oil production or cheaper oil production?

It's a fair question, but there are three things to think about as we consider whether, from an economic perspective, providing equal payments for these two forms of storage seems right or not.

The first is the source of carbon dioxide. So, if I took emissions—from a power plant or refinery—and used them for enhancing oil recovery by storing most of that carbon underground or geologically in some other fashion, as long as both of those emissions are coming from the same types of anthropogenic sources that would otherwise (or, counterfactually) have been released to the atmosphere, then the two technologies, the two approaches shouldn't differ and shouldn't get different levels of payment. The 45Q subsidy is designed really only to provide payments for that kind of emissions capture—so, for anthropogenic emissions that would otherwise have been released. On that basis, I think we can say parity seems to make sense unless that changes.

In the past, a lot of firms have used naturally sourced carbon dioxide from deposits underground for EOR. So, in a way, if they're switching and using anthropogenic carbon dioxide, that could even be better than we were before.

The second thing that you'd want to think about is, Is there a difference between the long-run storage security you get if you inject carbon dioxide underground to enhance oil production, or if you just inject it purely for storage?

I haven't seen any evidence that those are not equal mechanisms in these particular cases, but that would, I think, require some further study and some investigation. And, if they are different on those bases, then having a different payment might make sense, or having an equal payment might not make sense.

The thing that's, I think, biggest, and maybe the one that a lot of folks have missed, is whether any oil production that you get from this injection of carbon dioxide is actually additional. So, if it's not expanding global oil production, then parity seems reasonable to me. I hate to go out on a limb here, because I like to see studies that look at this, but if new oil produced using enhanced oil recovery by injecting carbon dioxide in the United States simply displaces a barrel of oil that would've been produced elsewhere by not storing carbon dioxide, then I see these approaches as fundamentally equivalent to injecting carbon dioxide for deep storage purposes without the enhanced oil recovery.

But again, I think that needs some further study. And I think a lot of folks that are critical of making these payments equal are very focused on this idea that it's going to increase oil production. It's possible, in the long run, that it could do that if US production is a large enough share of global production and this subsidy makes a big enough difference that we get more production than we would otherwise have done, or at a lower price, or both. But I don't think anyone can answer the question of whether that's true or not. And so, until we can, I don't think we can confidently say whether this change under the OBBBA really makes sense from an economic perspective.

Daniel Raimi: Yeah, really interesting. I feel like that's a good study that our colleague Brian Prest might be able to run with some of his oil and gas modeling.

Sheila Olmstead: Yes.

Daniel Raimi: One quick follow up to that: I was talking with Jen Wilcox from the University of Pennsylvania about this, and one thing that she pointed out to me (which, I'm curious to hear if this changes your thinking at all) is that the expansion of the 45Q credit wasn't just for enhanced oil recovery—it was actually for any use of the captured carbon dioxide.

Sheila Olmstead: Yeah.

Daniel Raimi: So, she was a little bit more positive about it, because she was excited that maybe the carbon was going to get used in new advanced materials or for other applications that don't involve extracting fossil fuels. Does that change how you think about it at all?

Sheila Olmstead: It also contributes. This is an area where I think we're in much earlier days than we are with pure storage, in a geologic sense. I would say two things.

One, I agree 100 percent that if this stimulates more research into how to embody carbon dioxide within concrete or cement or other materials that have seemed to have some significant prospects in that direction, I think that's a great thing that could be very useful. The only caveat to that is, for utilization purposes and given the scale of carbon dioxide storage that people talk about, if you look at models of what's necessary to meet either national or global decarbonization goals and avoid, say, two degrees of sea warming, the scale of that amount of storage is just enormous, and I don't think we're ever going to be in a position where demand for things like carbon dioxide for cement or other materials is going to eat up enough of that necessary storage to make a huge dent in the problem.

But, I do think we need an all-of-the-above energy strategy, and I think this is exactly the kind of technology that's nascent and really needs support before it could be deployed at any scale. It would make a lot of sense to subsidize that work.

Daniel Raimi: Yeah, really interesting. Let's get back to the analysis that you ran with your colleagues. So, one of the key points that you make is that, unlike renewable energy projects like wind or solar—which are expensive to build, but very cheap to operate—CCS is expensive to build, and it's expensive to operate. Why does that matter in a policy context?

Sheila Olmstead: I'm so glad you asked this because, again, I think it's something that we haven't necessarily thought through very well when we think about carbon capture.

I think, if you look at the package of subsidies that the United States has had, and certainly which were enriched under the IRA, we think about them as all roughly equivalent. There's either subsidizing some capital, such as the construction of new stuff, or they're subsidizing production of climate-friendly stuff. Some are big, and some are small, and they're going to induce some carbon dioxide emissions reductions, hopefully. CCS is completely different from something like subsidizing the production of electricity from wind turbines or solar panels. To capture carbon from a coal-fired power plant is a very different endeavor.

Why is it different? It's different because the cost of generating electricity from the sun or the wind will come down over time. And what are we producing with those technologies? We’re just making electrons, or sending electrons through a transmission system, and that's eventually being used as electricity in homes and businesses. So, the cost of that comes down over time, and it competes with other ways of generating electricity in the marketplace, including coal and gas. And that's true in the United States and many other places with abundant renewable resources. New onshore wind or solar photovoltaic both compete with the cost of a new natural gas power plant, even without subsidies, in many parts of the country.

In contrast, the government payment per ton of carbon dioxide is the market for CCS. There is no other market, though there are some small exceptions in the United States: California has a cap and trade, and there's the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative cap-and-trade program for carbon dioxide emissions from power plants in the Mid-Atlantic and Northeastern United States. So, there are some places where there are carbon prices, and those provide, at this time, a fairly small incentive. I haven't looked at those prices recently, but my guess would be less than $30 per ton, maybe $40 per ton. CCS costs a lot more than that for most applications. So, without the federal subsidy, there is no carbon capture.

The government subsidy has to be enough to cover the whole cost of this, and it has to continue in perpetuity. This has really important implications materially for both climate change, and fiscally for the United States.

For climate change, climate-tech subsidies come and go. We see this historically in the United States. Even the stuff that's pretty popular is sometimes not. Sometimes it's big; sometimes it's small. Unfortunately, CCS firms have no incentive to run a carbon capture facility without that payment, and they will never have an incentive to do that. So, any coal or gas power plant, or industrial facility that's built with CCS, is only going to capture carbon when the payment is sufficient to support it.

As just one example of that, the only coal-fired power plant in the United States—at least that I know of that currently has a carbon capture unit—is the Petra Nova project, which is on one of the generating units at the W. A. Parish Generating Station coal-fired power plant near Houston. And that project was heavily subsidized by the US Department of Energy and the federal government, and received payments under section 45Q—the subsidy for carbon capture. For a couple of years, when the price of oil dropped during the pandemic, it shut off the capture unit because it was not profitable to run that unit. The reason the price of oil made a difference was because the use of that carbon dioxide is for enhanced oil recovery.

So, the firm is getting a payment from the federal government to capture the carbon, and then it's also getting a payment for that carbon dioxide to be used in nearby oil fields for enhanced oil recovery. The EOR incentive was just not enough to keep that unit running. It really needed the government payment and a high oil price.

They have since restarted, but I would anticipate that if we see additional deployment of CCS in the power and industrial sector in the United States, exactly that kind of pattern will emerge, and they will say, “Hey, wait, when the subsidy is high enough, I'm going to run this thing. When it's not, I'm going to shut it off.”

For climate, this makes a big difference. If I incentivize a bunch of deployment and get a whole bunch of, say, power plants that stay in the industry and generate electricity that might have exited either without the subsidy or with a carbon tax or some other policy approach that might've achieved the same level of emissions change, then I have to keep paying those guys, or they're going to shut off the capture unit, and that is a real problem for the climate.

But it's also, as you can imagine, a problem fiscally. Currently, the subsidy expires after 12 years. And so, if we don't want all those capture units, and if we induce a bunch of deployment, and we don't want them shut off after 12 years, then the government is hostage to that. They have to keep making those payments in the absence of any kind of additional policy that might replace it, like a mandate or a carbon price or something like that. So, both for the sake of emissions and climate change, and for the fiscal situation of the federal government, I think CCS is very different from the other technologies that we're subsidizing. And it's very important.

If we can say one thing that comes away from this podcast, I hope people will keep that in mind: that these are not comparable subsidies.

Daniel Raimi: Right. Totally. And, just for context, I looked up the price in the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative in California, and it's on the order of $25 a ton right now. So, significantly less than the carbon capture subsidy that we're talking about.

Okay, so another point that you make in your piece is that providing a per-ton subsidy for CCS will actually encourage some of the most polluting plants to keep running so that they can take advantage of the fact that they have the most carbon dioxide that's available to capture and monetize. What's the implication of that for the deployment of other clean energy technologies and the competition between coal with CCS or gas with CCS and other nonpolluting sources?

Sheila Olmstead: Yes, it has pretty significant implications, I think. Again, I'm not a modeler. If you look at models suggesting the amount of deployment we might expect and so on, CCS is still a fairly small slice of the picture. But, as you know, Daniel, imagine we keep in the power-generation industry a small number of the dirtiest coal-fired power plants—those that have the highest emissions intensity. We could do that by paying $85 per ton for carbon dioxide stored. If we're doing that, then you have to ask, What would've happened without the subsidy? Would those coal-fired power plants have been displaced by either new gas generation or by new wind and solar? And really, in either of those cases, we might be better off for the climate with the counterfactual—without the subsidy being there for those plants. And so that's, I think, a pretty important point that may have been missed by a lot of other folks.

It's true that if I put carbon capture on a coal-fired power plant, I'm going to reduce a lot of carbon dioxide. The unit cost of removal is approximately constant between 80 and 95 percent removal, and 45Q requires 75 percent capture. So, those numbers are pretty high. It's good news that we are going to capture most carbon dioxide emissions.

But, again, the counterfactual is not, “What do we look like with the subsidy and capturing carbon dioxide from coal versus without the subsidy and not capturing carbon dioxide from coal?” It's, “What would otherwise have been there without the subsidy?” And for the climate, wind and solar would be better than even coal with, say, 85 percent or 90 percent removal. So, we really need to take that into account as we think about our modeling.

Another piece is that there's a dynamic to this, and I have touched on this a little bit. This subsidy alters these entry and exit incentives for power plants and industrial facilities in a way that favors carbon intensity over the long run. So, the richer that subsidy is, the more we might expect that we're shaping the fleet of power plants and industrial facilities in the United States in a direction that is exactly counter to what we would like to do as we decarbonize.

And so, those are both important points—both a static incentive, to be as dirty as possible and to increase your payments as much as you can, and the dynamic incentive that changes the nature of carbon intensity within the affected industries over time.

Daniel Raimi: Great. Got it. All right. So, you've already articulated a number of theoretical concerns with this policy design. In the paper, you articulate three specific flaws. What are those three specific concerns with 45Q?

Sheila Olmstead: The first two are related to what you just mentioned, that we could actually get, in a static sense, some increased emissions under 45Q, even with the high removal standard that the subsidy requires.

Think about this: if a coal-fired power plant has installed CCS, and it obtains this $85-per-ton tax credit, it would likely produce more electricity over the course of a year than it would without CCS, even during hours with low electricity prices, because the 45Q subsidy could make it profitable for the plant to generate even when it otherwise would not. So, again, it's not just, “Do I displace one plant with another? Do I have coal with CCS instead of wind and solar?” But, “How do those coal plants operate when they're receiving the subsidy?” They're likely to basically displace more generation by other resources, even in the short run, simply because it's profitable to run them more often when they have the subsidy than when they don't.

The second flaw is this dynamic problem of altering these entry and exit incentives. Polluting facilities that would have been unprofitable with a price on carbon or a mandate of some kind would actually earn a profit with an equivalent 45Q subsidy that's going to cover their carbon capture costs. And so, that could keep them in an industry that they would otherwise exit and likely be displaced by cleaner sources.

The third flaw is somewhat linked to these first two in that what we're doing when we pay $85 per ton for carbon dioxide storage is we're incentivizing more of the dirtiest production of whatever good or service we're talking about. And when we do that, a lot of that carbon dioxide is coming from the combustion of fossil fuels. This creates other emissions that we might worry a lot about, since they generate human health damages because of local air pollution.

There are a lot of good questions out there about how CCS is going to affect different pollutants. Some good news is that it will generally tend to reduce direct emissions of sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, and particulate matter. But some bad news is that, when facilities adopt this post-combustion carbon capture technology, ammonia emissions may rise. For the most common post-combustion carbon capture technologies, we tend to see an increase, and sometimes a big increase, in ammonia emissions, and the result is an uptick in the secondary formation of fine particulate matter.

Some work that I've done with Andrew Waxman would suggest that, at least in the Gulf region on net for industrial facilities and for natural gas power plants, those human health damages on average are net negative. They're quite significant. They're still outweighed by the climate benefits, but it does suggest that there's potentially important (both from a distributional perspective and from a political and feasibility perspective) trade-offs between local damages and global benefits. And again, that gets more and more steep the more of that dirtier generation we incentivize through the per-ton subsidy.

Daniel Raimi: Right. Andrew was on the show talking about that paper maybe a year ago or something like that. I think it just reinforces the concerns that a lot of environmental justice organizations have about the deployment of carbon capture, at least with the specific technologies that we're talking about that can lead to increased ammonia around the plants.

Okay, so you've articulated lots of flaws with the policy design, but let's get constructive now. What are some recommendations that you offer for how to do this better?

Sheila Olmstead: That's a great question. So, I'm trying to follow the rules. So, my boss when I was at the Council of Economic Advisers in the Obama administration was Jason Furman. He was the chair at the time of the council and he would always say, “You don't always want to be the economist in the room that says, ‘How about a carbon tax?’” Because it's not very constructive.

But the first thing I have to say (forgive me, Jason) is, How about a carbon tax? Okay, so I will just get that out of the way. Tax carbon dioxide. If we did that, we would have prompt deployment of carbon capture where it's cost-effective. It would probably happen in some hard-to-decarbonize industries, places where that makes a lot of sense without these counterproductive dynamic effects on industry composition and possibly on emissions. Not likely, as you know, to be politically feasible. So, in order not to be laughed out of the room, I'll offer some other, maybe marginal, changes that I think would be really helpful and viable given the design of other subsidies, even in the OBBBA.

The first thing I would recommend is to correct that most significant downside to 45Q, which is the fact that it is awarded on a per-ton-of-carbon-dioxide basis and rewards carbon-intensive production. So, the subsidy amounts to something like $100 per megawatt-hour for a coal-fired power plant and $40 for a natural gas–fired power plant. That really makes very little sense from a climate perspective. And I'm not sure, even from a stimulating-industry perspective, or whatever the other prompts behind 45Q are, I'm not sure it makes sense from that perspective, either, and I'm not sure it was on purpose per se.

I think you could pay it per unit of production and restrict it to firms that are meeting strict emissions standards—a megawatt-hour for fossil-fired power plants, or something like that, rather than per unit of captured emissions. And that's consistent with other tax credit designs that we've seen out there—the 45V hydrogen tax credit, for example, which determines subsidy eligibility based on life-cycle emissions. So that's one, I think, viable and important potential fix. I wish we had seen that in the OBBBA, since it's a slight tweak—a redesign of the subsidy.

You could also imagine hybrid approaches. We could adjust the structure so that it doesn't favor carbon-intensive production, but then also price uncaptured carbon dioxide emissions. You see how I snuck that in, pricing emissions again?

But the idea would be to provide some carrots to adopting facilities. And so, you're paying firms to continue to reduce carbon dioxide, but if you're basically taxing the residual emissions, they're still getting the payment so that they can afford to deploy the technology. Though we're creating marked technology, we for sure would reduce carbon dioxide emissions if we did that. But it's more expensive for sure than a carbon price alone, and it doesn't get us out of the fiscal jam of having to pay forever.

Another thing that I think would be very sensible—it might even make more sense at this stage of the technology's history and deployment—would be to reduce the level of the current per-ton incentive. You wouldn't have to drive it to zero, but you could reduce it from $85 per ton to soften these counterproductive effects and maybe better contain fiscal costs over the long run. Then, pair that with an investment tax credit that would reduce the cost of installing CCS, setting up the storage, and so on. That would enable projects to recoup more of their costs up front, which would also potentially be helpful in this era of uncertainty about how long these kinds of subsidies are going to be around and whether they're going to persist long enough for the stream of payments to make up for the up-front investment.

Again, at this fairly early stage, it's not unreasonable to think that this might be a better design and might both expose firms to less uncertainty about future policy risk and the federal budget to less uncertainty about future fiscal risk of making these really large payments in perpetuity.

And I would just add that, in order to fix this problem with local air pollution trade-offs, that would have to be directly addressed in a different way—to either require water washes or acid washes or another technology to reduce ammonia emissions, or just simply have some kind of a standard so that we don't get these unintended increases in local human health damages.

Daniel Raimi: Great. This has been a fascinating conversation. I feel like we're going to be talking about carbon capture for a long time into the future, so it's great to get these conversations going and really think hard about how the policies need to be designed.

I'd love to ask you now, Sheila, the same question we ask all of our guests at the end of each episode, which is to recommend something that you think is great and that you think our listeners would enjoy. So, what's at the top of your literal or metaphorical reading stack?

Sheila Olmstead: What is at the top of my stack? That’s a great question. It's terrible, but I'm trying to remember the book that's on the top of my stack. It's by Jayne Anne Phillips, and it's called Night Watch. It's a Civil War–era story, it's pretty dramatic, and it's really interesting. Thanks for asking.

Daniel Raimi: Sounds great. Okay, Sheila Olmstead, one more time from Cornell and RFF, thanks so much for coming on the show. Congratulations on the paper, and thanks for sharing it with our audience.

Sheila Olmstead: Thanks, Daniel. It’s always a pleasure to talk with you.

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