• Thank you. And good afternoon, everyone.
• My name is Brad Crabtree, and I am the Assistant Secretary for the Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management at DOE. I’m honored to join you today.
• I’m also honored to follow on Secretary Granholm’s remarks from this morning with a deeper focus on what the Department of Energy is doing in the area of CCS technology and its deployment.
• I’d like first to congratulate Jarad Daniels on his relatively new role as CEO of the Global CCS Institute. 
• I worked with Jarad when he was at the Department of Energy, and I was in the non-profit world working with GCCSI to advance carbon capture. 

Now the roles are reversed – I am at DOE and he’s in the non-profit world working at GCCSI to advance CCS.

• So, Jarad, congratulations. It is great to be working with you again.
• I too, am relatively new to this position, having come on board as Assistant Secretary for FECM last month.
• Before then, I’d spent more than two decades engaging with industry and working to build bridges between companies, NGOs, unions, and state and federal officials to advance carbon management policy and technology.
• We’re meeting at a time of major challenges in the world; there is an ongoing pandemic recovery, major global supply chain concerns, and geopolitical hardships now made acute by Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine.
• We have a narrow and closing window of opportunity to avert the worst impacts of climate change.
• To do so, we must ensure our nation’s energy security, build sustainable supply chains, and significantly accelerate reductions in carbon emissions—all at the same time.  
• Here in the U.S., CCS will be required to achieve decarbonization and to help meet the ambitious climate goals set by President Biden.
• These goals include a 50 percent reduction in emissions by 2030; a CO₂ emissions-free power sector by 2035; and net-zero emissions economywide by no later than 2050. 

The Challenge:

• Achieving the President’s goals will require an economy-wide approach. This is important not only here in the U.S., but also to meet global climate targets. 
• And as the recent IPCC report published in April underscored, we cannot do this without CCS deployment on a global scale.
• We know that at the heart of this challenge is the need to transform and decarbonize our energy sector at the same time.
• This is a very hard task, and I don’t have to tell this audience that up until now, the progress has not been fast enough.
• In 2021 the International Energy Agency published a report saying that installed capacity globally for CCS would need to increase 100-fold and receive at least $1 trillion in capital investment to approach net-zero by 2050.
• In the past five years, the Department of Energy invested roughly one billion dollars in CCS technologies, including point source capture, carbon transport and storage, and carbon dioxide conversion. That’s an investment rate of about $200 million a year.
• And this rate has increased since the Biden Administration entered office.
• Over the past 17 months, since January 2021, FECM has invested more than $210 million in 45 research and development projects to advance carbon management.
• While this investment has been important and welcomed, the investment trend was not enough to move the ball forward in terms of stopping the worst environmental and human tragedies from taking place.
• At this point last year, let’s say in June of 2021, it would have been very difficult to argue that we were investing enough in CCS technology to reach net-zero in time.
• But in November, something big happened, something that can give us more than just hope.
• That month, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law was passed, and it provided more than $12 billion in funding for carbon capture, direct air capture, industrial emission reductions, and the construction of regional hubs.
• Thanks to the Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill, we plan to make available over $2 billion to expand on the geologic characterization and site development work we’ve been supporting through our existing CarbonSAFE program.
• This funding will help address the feasibility, siting, permitting, and construction stages for CCS projects that prioritize saline geologic storage sites with at least 50 million tons of capacity.
• And not to be outdone, DOE announced a $3.25 billion award to capture and store carbon dioxide directly from the air.
• This funding will support four large-scale, regional direct air capture hubs. This is the single largest federal investment ever made in direct air capture research.
• And another one billion dollars will be spent on large pilot projects with no restriction on the type of CCS facility being tested.
• To help build many of these demonstration projects, DOE has created a new Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations.  The department is also hiring almost 1,000 new employees to permanent positions that will be part of a new “Clean Energy Corps.”
• And all this equates to unparalleled support by the federal government to transition our energy systems by mid-century.
• I don’t think it’s hyperbole to say this funding may be viewed in the future as coming just in the nick of time.
• Because we’re going to need gigatons of carbon capture and storage to meet our goals.
• We’re going to need a major infrastructure build-out to transport all of this CO2 to regional storage sites.
• And we’re going to need a transportation system that includes not just a very large pipeline network, as is the case with America’s current natural gas infrastructure, but also railroads, ships, barges and trucks.
• Of course, natural gas transport infrastructure developed organically over the past seven decades.
• But the urgency of climate change means that we don’t have that luxury. We don’t have the rest of this century to solve the problem. That is why the infrastructure funding component is so important.
• Thankfully, our lawmakers thought of this and included in the infrastructure bill more than $2 billion for a Carbon Dioxide Transportation Infrastructure Finance and Innovation Program – or CIFIA for short.
• This program will provide low-interest loans and grants to develop large capacity, common-carrier infrastructure to transport CO2.
• FECM is working closely with the Department’s Loan Program Office on the implementation of CIFIA, and we look to begin the application process later this year.

EJ Communities:

• Now, what has become clear in the past year is that these investments by the federal government are about more than meeting our climate obligations.
• They are also about improving peoples’ lives and improving the communities they live in.
• In keeping with President Biden’s commitment to environmental justice, we are working to make sure DOE invests in carbon management projects that deliver significant environmental benefits to disadvantaged communities that have been disproportionately impacted by carbon pollution. 
• We will promote job-preserving and job-creating investments for those who have worked so hard to supply our energy needs and sustain our nation’s industries.
• And we accept the responsibility to help these communities translate their skills into new clean energy jobs. 
• Finally, it’s worth paying attention to Capitol Hill, because there is still potentially more policy changes to come.
• A robust package of clean energy and industrial tax credits being considered in Congress could further leverage private capital investment in projects and boost the impact of the federal infrastructure law.
• This is especially important when it comes to enhancing the federal 45Q tax credit to spur not only CCS, but also direct air capture and carbon conversion projects. 
• The last time Congress updated the 45Q credit was in 2018. The carbon capture community, myself included, worked very hard for a decade to build the bipartisan coalition for this tax credit.
• As a result, 45Q has helped spur more than 80 publicly-announced carbon management projects now under development. 
• Now, Congress is considering increasing the value of that tax credit, providing direct payments at full credit value; and extending the credit up to 10 years. These improvements to 45Q would help close the remaining cost gaps for deployment and provide a much longer development and investment horizon for projects. 
• So, government action in the U.S. is helping enable private investment in CCS.
• But just as public-private partnerships are important, so too is international collaboration – like the partnerships represented here.

International Cooperation:

• The good news is that international efforts to advance CCS continue to grow – and we’re excited about efforts we’re seeing in the Middle East and in China. We’re also seeing important regional efforts, such as the Asia CCUS Network that was launched last year.
• For our part, the U.S. government – including the Department of Energy and my office – remain committed to engaging our global partners to commercialize these critical technologies.
• In fact, I’ll be travelling later this month to Norway to help oversee the Carbon Sequestration Leadership Forum meeting there.
• We will be meeting in Bergen for the first time in person since 2019, and the United States, through FECM, serves as the executive secretariat and the Chair of its Policy Group.
• You can imagine how excited we are to show the great work that the DOE has been doing on CCS and other clean technologies.
• And it is important to note that both Europe and Asia have been waiting for some time for the United States to truly use the resources at  disposal to make progress on the path to full commercialization of CCS.
• So let there be no doubt that we will continue to work with the global community – both public and private – to push for commercialization.
• And if you are not already aware of it, we are gearing up to host our Carbon Negative Shot Summit, to be held on July 20th.
• FECM has set a goal of capturing and storing carbon from the atmosphere and storing it at a gigaton scale for less than $100 per metric ton of C02-equivalent.
• This will be the federal government’s first official all-hands-on-deck call for innovation regarding carbon dioxide removal.
• So, we are encouraging everyone to attend the Summit: the public, industry stakeholders, and the media, to learn about these efforts.
• I’d also like to personally invite each of you to join us in September for the 13^th Clean Energy Ministerial and the 7^th Mission Innovation Ministerial Meeting in Pittsburgh, where the world’s largest and leading countries, companies and international experts will meet to focus on one mission – to accelerate the clean energy transition.
• So, at the end of the day, the Biden Administration is committed to CCS deployment and the U.S. government will remain a strong voice as we decarbonize.  And we will continue to work with the global community – public and private – as we commercialize. 
• We are fortunate that we’ve been able to work with partners like you who share this commitment. GCCSI has a critical role to play, and as we continue our engagement on CCS in the U.S. and globally with our bilateral and multilateral partners, we look forward to continuing our partnership with the Institute. 

Thank you.