Carbon Capture Coalition Responds to Department of Energy’s proposed Responsible Carbon Management Initiative 

In August, DOE’s Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management (FECM) announced its intent to launch a Responsible Carbon Management Initiative. The initiative aims to encourage and recognize project developers and others in industry by having them publicly pledge to abide by a set of principles in the buildout of their projects to ensure that these projects deliver environmental and societal benefit. These principles are divided into eleven categories: Community Engagement; Workforce Development and Quality Jobs; Tribal Consultation; Environmental Justice; Environmental Responsibility; Air and Water Quality; Regulatory Requirements; Health and Safety; Emergency Response; Transparency; and Long-Term Stewardship. Upon announcing its intent to move forward with the initiative, DoE also issued a Request for Information (RFI) from stakeholders and the public to gain better insight into related challenges and opportunities they may have otherwise overlooked. On September 29, Carbon Capture Coalition responded to that RFI. 

The Coalition is pleased to see DOE launch the initiative as it reflects many of our collective priorities as outlined in the Coalition’s 2023 Federal Policy Blueprint, a roadmap for effective carbon management. The Coalition’s comments provided feedback on how to make the principles more impactful and targeted towards ultimately achieving the Biden Administration’s net-zero and midcentury climate goals.  

Specifically, the Coalition commended DOE taking this important first step to create a larger and wholistic outline of best practices for responsible carbon management deployment. With that said, there are several ways to build upon the initiative, including: 1) outlining where and how the initiative and its principles are consistent with requirements already outlined in various funding opportunity announcements under the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law ; 2) providing specific and clear definitions for terms used in the principles, especially those with statutory definitions; and 3) ensuring consistency across government agencies by coordinating deployment of the initiative with agencies that may have overlapping guidance or authority. 

The initiative is being proposed at a time when the available supportive policy framework in the United States has spurred an unprecedented number of carbon management project announcements. As such, it serves as a useful outline for identifying best practices and encouraging early adoption of those practices. The Coalition supports the goal of creating a shared understanding of responsible deployment of carbon management technologies and looks forward to reviewing and providing further feedback to FECM on future phases of the initiative. 

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Convened by the Great Plains Institute, the Carbon Capture Coalition is a nonpartisan collaboration of more than 100 companies, unions, conservation and environmental policy organizations, building federal policy support to enable economywide, commercial scale deployment of carbon management technologies. This includes carbon capture, removal, transport, utilization, and storage from industrial facilities, power plants, and ambient air.