In the 1970s, the oil & gas industry in the United States began to develop and expand carbon capture utilization technology in order to enable Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR) – a method utilizing the captured carbon to increase pressure in wells, “squeezing” more oil to the surface. To this day, most carbon capture is used for EOR.

• EOR is a major misleading component to this technology – there is no benefit to the climate by mining carbon to pump it into the ground for further oil extraction.

In the early 2000s, carbon capture began to gain major traction as a combatant to climate change within the United States, with notable developments including university research at MIT and the beginning of the Carbon Capture Project Phase 1, app collective of many leading energy companies.

• The stage was now set for a new technology that could provide an excuse to continue on traditional coal & carbon burning paths – leading to many energy companies and oil & gas industry representatives to jump on board.

Beginning in 2005, the American Petroleum Institute (API) funded a large campaign in to renew public and investor interest in CCS after these oil companies began to realize how difficult it was to sequester/store carbon in the previous few years of exploration. Shell even rebranded and attempted to put CCS in the spotlight in their 2005 sustainability report, a sign of greenwashing to come for the next two decades.

In 2008, the United States Congress passed the first rendition of a tax credit known as 45Q, in which companies could get incentives off of each metric ton of carbon they capture. This launched a spike of activity among the oil & gas industry for the next few years, with a renewed surge of marketing falsely categorizing the technology as efficient and cost-effective.

• Some of the most notable failures with carbon capture attempts at include the Petra Nova and Boundary Dam facilities, both requiring a parasitic load to run the CCS technology. Petra Nova was eventually closed in 2020.

For the last 15 years, lawsuits have shaped the ability and authority of the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to regulate carbon emissions – defining cases from states such as Massachusetts in 2007 and West Virginia in 2022 have eventually left the EPA unable to set emission caps for carbon dioxide on the state level. The agency is also unable to make decisions about national power generation, leaving this power to Congress.

• Since the federal government is unable to regulate carbon emissions, states are unwilling to set their own regulations, leading to completely unregulated CCS wells and pipelines.

From 2020 to 2025, the state of CCS has maintained unfortunate relevancy as the API continued funding campaigns in favor of the technology despite countless failures and underperforming projects.

• The 45Q tax credit was kept in relevance during the Biden administration and eventually expanded under Trump after the passing of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) in July of 2025, allowing for higher returns on each metric ton of carbon and expanding these credits to EOR operations as well, giving incentive to harmful operations and the pollutant-heavy side of the industry.
• The future of CCS and EOR is unclear under the Trump: while his administration runs on extremely harmful issues like energy dominance and the false idea of clean coal, there has been over 3.7 billion dollars of federal grant money cancelled that was aimed at funding CCS projects. This convolutes the stance of the Trump administration on CCS and makes the future of this wasteful technology unclear.