Regardless of its Merits, Carbon Capture Faces Several Challenges

A theme I have struck multiple times in this column is the reality that energy policy designed to eliminate atmospheric carbon as quickly as possible must—to be genuinely sustainable through political cycles and reliability challenges—recognize that natural gas will be here and play an important role in our energy mix for a very long time to come. Even the Biden Administration, with its stated objective of phasing out all fossil fuels, has recognized this reality, through the projections of its own U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA). In the 2023 Annual Energy Outlook prepared by EIA, one of its cases in assessing the future energy mix includes one in which non-hydro resources, primarily solar and wind, become low-cost enough to be competitive leaders in the marketplace. Figure 1 depicts EIA’s projection, which does see renewables surpassing natural gas in market share by the late 2040s but still leaves natural gas with a 25 percent share of domestic energy consumption, down only 8 percent from current levels. Of course, when exports of liquefied natural gas (LNG) are added to this, as the largest exporter of LNG in the world, the natural gas line is much flatter.