In this week’s podcast episode, reporter Molly Taft digs into multiple new reports on fossil fuel funding of university research, and talks to experts Geoffrey Supran and Craig Callender about the impact this funding is having on climate policy. 

 Welcome Molly Taft, our senior reporter, editor extraordinaire. You have been looking into fossil fuel funding in universities in lots of different ways, but there's some news recently on this front.

 Yeah, so there's been a lot of movement on a conversation that I feel like has been going on both officially and unofficially for, for several years. You know, One of the more interesting things that happened this month is a team of researchers released a literature review, which sounds kind of boring, but basically what they did is they said to themselves, okay, you know, in order to move forward in researching fossil fuel funding in universities, we need to figure out what we know first, right? So they basically did what's called an academia literature review, which is you look at all the literature on a topic and you kind of come to some conclusions about it. And what's interesting about this literature review is that you know, even though activists and folks in, in universities, folks concerned about the climate have been talking about fossil fuel funding in academia for a really long time.

The researchers found that there's actually not that many peer reviewed articles about it. There's not that much peer reviewed research about what all of this oil money is doing to academic research. Yeah. Which is kind of crazy. Cause like, Uh, the parallels here that they drew were conflict of interest, uh studies on bias in research are really prevalent when it comes to other industries like tobacco, pharmaceuticals, you can find hundreds of peer reviewed articles on this topic, like what happens when an industry funds research and those discussions have been going on for decades, but there's, there's just not a lot with fossil fuel, Funding and a lot of it is really recent.

They found seven peer reviewed articles in their search and only a few of them were before 2012. So, you know, there's a real dearth of peer reviewed research on this topic. So to complete their literature review, what they did was they use what they call gray literature, which is reports from NGOs, reports from journalists, you know, articles about what fossil fuel funding is doing and moving through universities and, and reports from students too, which are a really valuable part of this conversation.

And they use that to kind of bulk out the literature review, And found that there's a lot of really valuable work going on to understand how this industry is shaping policy at the top levels of university. But there's also like still a lot more that especially folks involved in academia can do. Academia needs to kind of turn the mirror towards itself in a sense, and really take a much closer look at how this industry is, is shaping what's going on inside of it.

 Yes, exactly. I think It just sort of helps to have this report as like a official accounting of where this stuff is at now. As we're looking towards getting more information and figuring out more.

Speaking of which I know there are also student reports coming out.

 So yeah, there's a batch of new research that's coming on this stuff.

 Yeah. So one actually, and that sort of ties into the literature review. So I was talking to one of the researchers, Geoffrey Supran, and, you know, he really emphasized that, again, a lot of their literature review came from students on campus noticing stuff about how their university takes fossil fuel money.

And You know, there's no replaceable way of doing research on a campus that's quite like being on the campus and being in the campus culture and understanding the way a school works, whether you work there, or you're a student there, or you're an alum. Those are really the front lines of understanding this kind of stuff.

And so, there's been a push from a group called the Campus Climate Network. They have gathered students on a couple of different universities across the U S and some international groups as well. And the first batch of their reports on how fossil fuel money Is is working throughout their specific universities were also released in September. And, these students put a lot of really interesting numbers on a problem that doesn't have a lot of numbers right now. I think the last real accounting, was data for progress estimated back in 2023 that five fossil fuel companies had donated, I think, 700 million To a group of us universities over the past decade and they said that was almost certainly an undercount and really turns out it was. So one number that really shocked me was, students at Columbia really buckled down and combed their university's public facing documents, like stuff they could obtain publicly. This isn't any sort of, peek into the inner workings of Columbia.

They just sat down and they did the work. They expanded the reach a little bit to not just five major fossil fuel companies, but a variety of different fossil fuel influences. And by their calculations, Columbia has taken, I think more than 37 million since 2005 in fossil fuel funding which includes an environmental health professorship endowed by, uh, a descendant of, of HES, uh, the guy who started HES.

So there is an environmental health field of study that is being funded by like the HES foundation, which I found particularly ironic. But. Yeah, it really goes to show and I think in the, the data for progress report, the number they put on Columbia was 5 million and you know, it really goes to show like when you are familiar with how your school works and, and where to look for these things, it can be insanely beneficial in, in figuring out where the money is coming from and what it's going towards.

 Totally, which is the perfect segue into the other thing that we're going to, we're going to talk about in

 which is like, I know, beautiful, smooth transition, but but like the students are amazing because they know where to look for things and they also like catch wiffs of things on campus that they're kind of like, wait a minute, that seems weird.

And the other great place to look for information on this stuff, because again, A lot of these schools do not disclose all of their funding, and with the private schools in particular, you can't get, get at it through public records requests, you have to talk to people and figure it out.

And one of the best sources on that stuff is actually other professors at those schools too, because in a lot of cases. People who are working at these campuses and are working on climate stuff, for example, are not super happy about the fact that other people are taking fossil fuel money. Like actually I had an interesting conversation with Mark Jacobson at Stanford about this and how much some of his colleagues there have been Ponying up to the fossil fuel money trough.

 there's a lot of fossil fuel funding and institutes like at our university, we have these institutes that are funded largely by Fossil fuels. We have even in our new school of sustainability. What's the number one flagship research project that they're promoting?

besides Stanford, Princeton and MIT are culprits in pushing carbon capture, direct air capture, blue hydrogen, electro fuel. So therefore, these four technologies are really pushed by the fossil fuel industry, and the fossil fuel industry is funding universities

 And you had an interesting conversation with Craig Callender, who's a professor at UC San Diego. Both about what he's seen there, but also they passed some interesting new policies recently.

 Craig's doing some really interesting work and under his and other folks on his committee's leadership, they're kind of pioneering the next step forward in, Talking about this kind of stuff. He teaches the philosophy of science.

So this is like, kind of right up his alley. And you know, he got on the academic Senate committee and, and they started wrestling with this question of like, okay, what do we do about fossil fuel , money in our university, in the UC system in general. What are the best policies to kind of start tackling this.

And so. You know, uh, back in the early two thousands, lots of schools joined on this bandwagon to ban tobacco money for specifically medical or health research. And a lot of these schools still have those policies in place. Surprisingly that policy actually failed at UC. But they did put on this other policy where you would need a special review of tobacco money by the chancellor.

And so they said, okay, what if we do that? for fossil fuel money. And, that was basically, he said, they told me that was kind of dead on arrival. There's all sorts of concerns about academic freedom. , I think latent in this conversation sometimes is when you bring this up, it's, you know, I think people who are working at research centers and universities think that you're accusing them of like knowingly conspiring with oil and gas companies, which is absolutely like that's far and away. Not the case, but there is research showing that when you take money from an industrial funder or corporate funder that does, like, set the tone of your research, whether you sort of realize it or not, you know., it doesn't mean that you're emailing BP every day to update them on your progress in destroying the climate, but it does mean that if BP is paying for something, then they want that research done for a specific reason, right?

 that piece was so good and really highlights you know, and he being at Columbia is also really interesting, especially given this new student report tallying up some of the money involved. But anyway, so Craig and the committee sort of regrouped and they were like, all right, so if we're not going to get a special review from the chancellor, why don't we just like beef up?

Transparency disclosures around this. And I think a lot of people I've talked to and Amy, I'm, I'm sure you had this experience too. Like people you talk to about this are like shocked that that's not required, but like, they're really, there's so few disclosure requirements for this stuff. It is mind blowing.

There's no federal policy, state policies, nothing in the state, you know, most universities. have some sorts of ethics stuff, but like, a lot of them don't require you to talk about where you take money from.

 they don't. And there's this really interesting thing. So like the, the the last time I wrote about this stuff was around the, the data for progress report. And the only school that gave me like a full accounting of their funding from fossil fuel companies was Berkeley. And when I asked them about, what they thought of this push to try to ban fossil fuel funding of research , they were like, well, I don't think we could do that without getting sued.

And I said, but what about, you know, which is the thing people always say is like, well, we did it with the tobacco industry. And they were like, yeah, but that was pre citizens United. So that's super interesting how that stuff dovetails with this idea that like, it's part of academic freedom to allow people to take money from wherever.

And something Craig said to me, and I'm sure repeated to you as well, is that like, even when they talk about transparency and disclosure, people will argue that it could impact or have like a chilling effect on academic freedom. If. People have to disclose where their funding is coming from. And I'm kind of like, I, I kind of feel okay with that chill.

Like if, you know what I mean? It's like, if someone is like, Ooh, I like this money is going to make me look bad or it's like, you know, they're worried that they will be criticized for taking money from somewhere. I don't know. To me, I'm kind of like, I don't know. It just seems like where there's smoke, there's fire on that one.

 totally. But it's also, you know, and, and yeah, he, we talked about, you know, he was like, a lot of the standards that you think of this stuff come from conversations around pharmaceutical products and like ethics around disclosure in the pharmaceutical industry. And those conversations were like really heated a couple of decades ago.

And people were defending, writing an op ed in favor of a drug while being paid for the company that manufactures that drug and saying that's academic freedom. So our conversations around, yeah, it's not great. Yeah. Like, no, that was, that was a hot button issue back in, I think he said the eighties.

So I think that one thing I took away from him is that our definition of academic freedom, both culturally and in universities is subject to debate. I think most people now would say that it's, it's important to disclose if you're getting paid by a drug company to promote a drug.

But there's also this issue, not, it's not just Citizens United, but like increasingly universities and research have been just so privatized over the past couple of decades.

 That's a really important point. Like I, I know I looked at this a while ago and it's probably, I think it's probably only gotten worse, but the proportion of research funding that comes from the private sector has just been growing exponentially

 couple decades. So you have corporate donors, then you have high net worth individuals donating and they have specific agendas oftentimes to and then, you know, donor advised funds have become a major donor. To universities as well, which is where you get a lot of like the Koch money, but also lots of other hidden industry interests as well. So it's definitely,

 Yeah. There's a lot going on, so What Craig and his, uh, fellow faculty members on the Senate committees formed is this policy that says, look, you can take money from fossil fuel industries. That's fine. You just have to disclose it. Like, you have to be really clear about what, where it's from and what it's going towards.

 passed by 91 percent in May 91 percent of the vote. So, clearly, you know, I think these conversations are, are perhaps for folks on campuses, , difficult to have with your peers who might, be taking money from a corporation and doing what probably is, like, valuable research. But, you know, having the conversations around, just how low of a bar disclosure is and how much good actually just being forthcoming about where the money is coming from can help address some of the issues and, and honestly, also just open up a dialogue about, like, what's the purpose of taking this money?

So that measure is with the chancellor right now. So like, we still don't know if it's going to pass in the meantime, UCSD all of their students are being required to take, like, climate change courses. It's a new as of this semester, a new uh, curriculum requirement for everyone there, which is really cool.

But , I think just having people on campuses who are starting these conversations, , is going to be some of the most important steps forward in even just like learning more about this stuff and figuring out where we're at with regards to, to fossil fuel money in universities.

 Yeah, yeah. And, where feels comfortable to draw the lines because I feel like you and I were talking about this before that like, there's a certain amount of this stuff that does seem kind of innocuous, you know, it's sort of like, oh, they funded a scholarship here or they funded, uh, you know, whatever, but then I also am like, Oh, yeah. Well, maybe I've just had that stuff normalized so much that it seems fine, but there's influence there too. And I get, you know, like just really like talking, like just figuring out as a society, okay, how, cause honestly, I mean, oil companies were amongst the first to actually be major private donors to universities and they did cotton on really quickly.

Like there was, I found a speech that, uh, standard oil New Jersey guy gave in the fifties. Which is like, there was a huge influx of private money into universities because they changed the tax code in the U S and they made it a write off, right. Which it wasn't before. So like, uh, the companies were starting to do more donations because it was like, Oh, great.

It's a tax write off. But this guy who was at Standard Oil, I was like, no, you guys are missing the much bigger value, which is that like, this is going to help us shape how people view the economy and public policy and it's going to be the thing that's going to help us push back against statism.

 So like they were really, really early and I feel like I don't know that there's been enough of a larger cultural conversation about how much it's grown and how we

 I don't, like when I was at school, I remember there was a huge push around public private partnerships and commercializing the research that was coming out of universities.

And like, it was kind of all upside, right? It's like, Oh, well, like researchers, You know, don't just want their stuff sitting in a lab somewhere. Companies are looking for new ideas. It's a win win, you know? And there just hasn't necessarily been enough about like, okay, but what are the downsides, you know?

 Yeah. Yeah. And I think it's gonna get even murkier, you know, as Oil companies shift from you know, they're not doing explicit to not, no one's doing explicit denial anymore. Like no one is denying that this problem is here, but. They are adopting different tactics to make sure that they stay in business, which is a different conversation.

Right. And so what, where is the, I find this topic really endlessly fascinating because I think that a lot of, uh, disinformation reporting has a hard ethical line, right? Which is like this company is spreading disinformation, but like now it's like, okay, so BP wants to stay in business. And one of the things they're doing is like funding Research at universities that will help them stay in business and what do we do about that? , it's an interesting ethical question. Or, you know, I think, uh, Doug Almond in that paper, that 2022 paper, there's a bunch of recommendations that he has, which include, like, when someone from a research center that is funded by oil and gas money testifies in front of lawmakers, they should disclose the funding to their research center.

Which seems really simple, but I can imagine a lot of people would be extremely upset to have to do that. And so, you know, like, where, where are these ethical lines? Like, what are we going to start accepting when it comes to money in research and, and what, what is going to be onerous to

 Totally. Totally. I've had so many conversations with people who either run or work at centers that are heavily fossil fuel funded or even exclusively fossil fuel funded at universities and their, Line of thinking. And I think this, this is pretty common across a lot of these campuses is this idea that, but we're taking it to research solutions, so it's fine.

We're not taking it to fund a petroleum engineering department. Like that would be bad, but what we're doing is actually taking their money to look into solutions. But you know, I, I had a conversation with a guy at one place who, you know, it was kind of like, what's like, what's the problem with that? If it's for not.

fossil fuel development or whatever. And I was like, well, I mean, what are you researching at your center? And he's like, Oh, like mostly, mostly hydrogen, but like good hydrogen, green hydrogen and carbon capture. And I was like, okay, well like, would, would those be the research focuses of your center absent the fossil fuel funding? And he was like, I don't know. And I'm like, that's, that is where the big question lies.

 Yes. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's a great, that's a great question. And like, yeah, I think, I think that's something that, you know, I'm glad that like people on campuses are starting to, talk about this. And honestly, it's

 And just talk about it. Cause yeah, honestly, I'm like, I don't know, maybe they would be, maybe we do need more money in those things. And , the other thing too, is that like the, the, the thing I always think about is like, Cause people will be like, well, where else is the money going to come from?

Right. It's not like there's some big pot of, you know, no strings attached money just waiting to fund research. And when I've asked students about that, they're kind of like, well, a, I'm okay with less research if it means less bias in the research. And I'm like, okay, good. You know, interesting to think about.

Yes. But also and I, I mean, I think about this with, you know, with respect to the fossil fuel industry all the time in general, why do they have to be in charge of how that money gets spent? That's the piece where I'm like, okay, well, what if they can donate, but they can't have any Influence, which for the most part is not a thing that they are interested in doing almost every like thing I've ever seen or talked to someone about or whatever there are strings attached.

It's like, well, we only want to fund research on X, Y, Z, or we want to have a say in the research projects that are chosen, or we want to have a person who works at that center. Or, you know, it's like, there's, there are a lot of ways that, that they end up having influence if they spend the money and like, you know, they don't really make big donations without that.

 Yeah. Without the strings attached. Yeah. Craig, Craig compared, compared this to like, you know, everyone's doing it, but no one wants to show their hand in poker. Like, no one wants to be the guy who goes first. And I do think like, You know, if, if that is a condition for accepting money, then like, defend it, you know, like, make sure, like, make sure you have the guardrails in place so that it's like, we are taking money for this specific project.

And we think this is actually a good thing. And we're gonna like, put your say it with your whole chest is kind of where I'm at with this, you know,

 yeah, like, if you think it's, if you think having An oil executive sit on the board of a center that is doing this kind of research is a good thing, then why don't you publicize the guardrails you're, you're putting in place to make sure that the research is you know, not biased?

Why don't you, like, I hate to be like a investigative reporter stereotype, but like sunlight is the best disinfectant. Just put it out there, make sure everything is really public, which is the opposite of what's happening right now. Yeah.

 yeah. Totally. Awesome. Alright, coming up Molly talks to Jeffrey Supran and Craig Callender, and we get into a lot more details on this stuff.

That's all coming up after this quick break. I'm Amy Westervelt, and this is Drilled.

 Let's start at the beginning. So the first piece of research you guys have is 2003, right? It's, the new economics foundation report.

And like, I gotta tell you, like, I looked it up and I was pretty. Not surprised, but it sounded like something that could have been written yesterday, right? And like a lot of the tenants of what, you know, um, people who study this stuff, they were right there and you do the math and there are like kids in college now who were born after that report came out.

Right. So yeah. Can you talk me through you know, this stuff has been out there for a while, but how has the research around it grown and changed and, is it the nature of academia to sort of sit on topics for a while until someone kind of lights a fire under someone's ass or is it the circular nature of this kind of discussion or like what kind of prevented this from catching on quicker in the literature, do you think?

 I mean, so, so I think the, this, our findings are a bit of a, uh, an interesting needle to thread in terms of communicating them. Because on the one hand, what we found is that, um, uh, civil society, right? Like non academic researchers have been warning about this for quite some time, right? Since, as you said, the early two thousands.

So part of the story is that there has been quite a significant delay, like on the order of a decade or more in terms of an uptake on this topic by academics who are doing more scholarly peer reviewed research. Um, so on the one hand, this is a story about sort of an intransigence and the, and the delayed.

 Serious, you know, attention being paid on it. But, but on the other hand, I think what we find is that there has already been enough research, both the gray literature and the peer-reviewed literature Mm-Hmm. to substantiate that there already is an emerging consensus around the idea that this is a, a big, uh, threatening problem that that should be taken more seriously.

But yeah, I guess like specifically on this question of how it's evolved and why it hasn't evolved quicker academically, I think you could ask almost the same question about why supply side climate research very broadly, uh, has only taken off in the last few years, and, and, for anyone listening who isn't very familiar, supply side academic literature basically refers to putting fossil fuel production and supply front and center, rather than just You can look at about 20 minutes.

Uh, the, the other question is, you mentioned that, uh, this is a really interesting topic I wouldn't be surprised if this answer may not be the first answer, but is it something consumer demand and the associated greenhouse gas emission. So it's about looking at the, the, the, the top end of the pipeline rather than the bottom end, um, to use like an oil industry metaphor.

 Um, I mean, your carbon footprint versus the people who are actually like selling the shoes kind of.

 Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And, and, and, and, and it's really, um, by some kind of fortune, I suppose over almost exactly the span of, of my academic. Career on this topic that that transition has happened and I've actually I think written a few articles about and Definitely some Twitter threads like about why this has happened and I think it's a confluence of multiple factors perhaps foremostly activism that has really, you know, especially I'm thinking of the fossil fuel divestment movement, uh, the blockadier campaigns, things that really put front and center fossil fuels and fossil fuel producers and their political, complicity as much as anything through lobbying and disinformation and so on.

And I think going along with that has been things like the economics, the warnings of carbon bubbles and stranded fossil fuel assets. Um, uh, increasing public health research about the direct public health harms of fossil fuels. Um, And frankly, the economics of renewables that has increasingly made fossil fuels economically, more expensive, and so I think it's a number of those factors that have all come together.

I would say also, it's about courage. Um, like I wrote a piece back in like, I don't know, 2016, 17 or so in Huffington Post saying like higher education needs to be braver when it comes to addressing the climate crisis. And part of that was about, um, a campaign we were running to try to get the American Geophysical Union, which is the world's largest earth science organization to reject funding from ExxonMobil.

And, at the same time we were campaigning for fossil fuel divestment at MIT and students were doing this around the world. And we were very conscious that the very universities we were asking to take climate action were also taking hundreds of millions of dollars from David Koch and other fossil fuel interests.

And so I think that there's just been this, um, I don't know, just so many things, like a generational shift too, in terms of like, no longer feeling like. We have time to waste in terms of, you know, I'm going to get tenure and be really safe before I start to address this topic, although actually coincidentally, that is what has happened to me.

[Podcast] New Research Is Clear: Fossil Fuel-Funded University Research Is Warping Policy

It's carbon capture. Besides Stanford, Princeton and MIT are culprits in pushing carbon capture, direct air capture, blue hydrogen, electro fuel. So therefore, these four technologies are really pushed by the fossil fuel industry, and the fossil fuel industry is funding universities

Um, but, but, but, but that is purely kind of coincidence because, you know, like I've been, I've been writing publicly, but. In a non academic way about this since like 2016, 17, but it's just taken a long while to like get our ducks in a row because academics are like, you know, it's like herding cats. But yeah, I mean, I think it's just taken a moment for, for the sort of the realization that this is a big deal.

Like when I testified in the Senate, like very recently, and I think perhaps the most interesting documents that came out of that joint house Senate investigation were the revelations, these internal oil industry memos showing how strategic and intentional their infiltration of academia and their weaponization of those relationships has been.

And a lot of people were coming up to me afterwards and being like, Oh, this whole like academia thing actually seems kind of important. And I was like, yeah, like, this is what we've been saying for a while. Um, so I dunno, it's just a. I guess it's just the way things happen that sometimes things take a moment for people to to cotton on to them.

 Yeah, I mean, actually, now that you're saying it, it's like a lot of people I know who were doing activism in 2009, 2010, like, you know, they, they grew up and like furthered in their careers. And it does seem like academia is more rife with people who came from a different perspective on this and who might have actually had experience.

It's on the front lines of activism versus just coming at this from like an academic perspective. You know?

 Yeah, exactly. I think, and that's kind of the general trend that we observed that essentially activists and advocates and civil society in general has been on the leading edge of, of addressing this and recognizing this problem.

Transcription

Episode

Information Pollution

Denial to Delay

The Real Free Speech Threat

Petrostates

The Petra Nova CCS plant began operating in 2016 at a coal-fired power plant in Texas and shut down less than four years later due to a plunge in oil prices during the COVID-19 pandemic. It restarted on Sept. 5, 2022. (Credit: Elizabeth Conley, Houston Chronicle, via Getty Images).

This story was published in partnership with Vox and was supported by the

This spring, Democrats wrapped up a nearly three-year

 into the fossil fuel industry’s role in climate disinformation, and asked the Department of Justice to pick up where they left off. In House and Senate Democrats’

 and hearing, investigators concluded that major oil companies had not only misled the public on climate change for decades, but also were continuing to misinform them about the industry’s preferred climate “solutions”— particularly biofuels and carbon capture.

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) and Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD), who spearheaded the investigation, also accused oil companies of “obstructing”  it, submitting few documents, and redacting much of what they did send. One ExxonMobil employee who spoke with Drilled and Vox under condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation described what the company sent as “a truly random assortment of unimportant documents.”

But there was at least one notable exception: a report detailing the company’s projections for the future of carbon capture technology.

 read a New York Times newsletter recently

 on Politico’s website or heard it on one of its podcasts, or listened to

, you may have noticed the industry’s relentlessly positive marketing of carbon capture, which aims to collect and store CO2 emissions from power plants and industrial and fossil fuel extraction facilities, so they don’t add to global warming. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has said carbon capture might be necessary to reduce the emissions of certain “hard to abate” sectors like steel, concrete, and some chemical manufacturing, but noted that in the best-case scenario, with carbon capture technology working flawlessly and deployed at large scale, it could only account for a little

That hasn’t stopped major oil companies

 that carbon capture and storage “will be essential for helping society achieve net-zero emissions,” that they are delivering “carbon capture for American industry,” working on reducing emissions in their own businesses (also referred to as “carbon intensity”), and delivering

 “heavy industry with low emissions.”

 But internal documents obtained during the federal investigation, as well as information that industry whistleblowers shared with Drilled and Vox, reveal an industry that is decidedly more realistic about the emissions-reduction potential of carbon capture and storage technology, or CCS, than it presents publicly.

Companies touted the potential of CCS publicly, as they downplayed the technology internally.

In 2018, the oil and gas company Shell released an

, a forecast that served as a standard for the rest of the oil industry, in which it laid out what

 a “radical” new approach on climate. Beginning in 1965, Shell pioneered the now-common practice of “scenario planning” for oil companies: mapping out what the industry and the world are likely to look like in the future. Other oil companies will still often compare their scenarios to Shell’s.

 was included in the most recent batch of documents handed over to Senate and House investigators. In it, ExxonMobil compared its future projections with Shell’s rosiest forecast for the energy transition. Buried in a chart in that projection is ExxonMobil’s belief at the time about the global potential for CCS.

Even without the massive stamp (which marks this page as part of the set of documents obtained by Congressional subpoena), these graphs would be difficult to read. The one on the left compares the projected number of CCS units in Shell’s “Sky” scenario versus the number projected by ExxonMobil, while the graph on the right compares the two companies’ forecasts for future CO2 emissions.

But squinting at the numbers reveals some shocking takeaways about Exxon’s confidence in CCS. While Shell’s optimistic projection envisions 10,000 large-scale CCS facilities operational by 2070, with more than 2500 facilities by 2050, Exxon predicts somewhere between 250 and 500 facilities by 2050.

Exxon’s 2018 projections align with what critics of CCS have been saying for years. In its 

, the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA), a nonprofit, non-partisan think tank that produces market-based research on the energy transition, states: “It’s worth noting that not one single CCS project has ever reached its target CO2 capture rate.”

Stanford University researcher Mark Jacobson said that because it also requires energy and materials to function, CCS attached to a fossil-fueled power plant is worse for the climate than replacing fossil energy with renewables.

“They actually increase carbon dioxide emissions by doing this, in addition to increasing air pollution,” he said, referencing 

 that does the math on the lifecycle CO2 emissions of various carbon capture scenarios. Even when CCS is powered by wind, Jacobson said it’s not worth doing, from a climate perspective. “If you just used wind to replace coal in the first place, you’d get a higher reduction in CO2 emissions,” he said.

And oil giants themselves have been hedging on the technology for years, despite marketing its potential. When the Environmental Protection Agency proposed requiring that power plants install CCS in its rules for power plants, for example, both fossil fuel companies and

 expressed far less faith in the technology in their public comments on the rule than they have in their ads about carbon capture. In Exxon’s public comment, the company

 to reduce its requirements around capture efficiency from 95 percent to 75 percent, which is more in line with the actual performance of existing CCS projects.

The EPA rule “was going to mandate either using CCS on a power plant in order to reduce greenhouse gas emissions or to take some action that would be equivalent to adding CCS, and the response from industry was ‘hey the tech is really not proven,’” David Schlissel, director of resource planning analysis for IEEFA, said. “Many, many comments from oil companies and utilities, in response to both the initial EPA rule and the current one, were saying this tech really doesn’t work.” Even though the agency weakened its requirements around CCS, some of those same entities, alongside 25 attorneys general who are members of the Republican Attorneys General Association, have 

 the Supreme Court to issue an emergency stay on the power plant rules, again arguing that the technology isn’t ready for prime time.

Exxon’s low internal projections for CCS back in 2018 map to the company’s own challenges with the technology. To date, the only “successful” carbon capture project Exxon claims is its 

 in Wyoming. The Shute Creek facility is often referenced by the industry in general as a large and long-standing CCS project. On paper, it’s responsible for around 40 percent of the total carbon emissions ever captured in the world. But the details tell a more complicated story.

According to Exxon’s own disclosures and 

 conducted by IEEFA in 2022, only around 3 percent of the carbon captured in LaBarge (roughly 6 million tonnes) has been permanently sequestered underground. Of the rest of the 240 million tonnes of carbon emitted over the facility’s first 35 years in operation, half has been sold to various oilfield operators for enhanced oil recovery— a process by which oil companies inject carbon underground to get more oil out. Approximately 120 million tonnes, meanwhile, 

When asked to comment for this story about its 2018 scenario plan and overall record on CCS, ExxonMobil sent the following statement by email: “False narratives that downplay our CCS efforts deliberately fail to recognize the strides we’re making in our Low Carbon Solutions business. Referencing one possible scenario from over six years ago does not represent our business outlook. We continuously evaluate our business plan based on market conditions.”

 as its most current thinking on the potential of carbon capture. That report states: “Carbon capture is a proven and safe technology that reduces emissions from manufacturing and power generation.”

But in commenting on its scenario plan, Exxon’s spokesperson focused on “market conditions” and its shifting “business outlook,” not the technology itself. The business outlook and market conditions for CCS have changed because of the increased tax credit for CCS that oil majors, including Exxon, lobbied for—and, according to 

 subpoenaed by federal investigators, heavily influenced. Senator Joe Manchin 

 as part of the negotiations that saw the Biden Administration’s proposed “Build Back Better” legislation morph into the Inflation Reduction Act. The final IRA made major changes to the 45Q tax credit, which started out in 2008 paying $10 for every metric ton of carbon sequestered, then increased to $50 per metric ton in 2018; after the IRA, it now pays up to $85 per metric ton and up to $60 for carbon stored and used for enhanced oil recovery, or EOR. Suddenly, EOR, a technique for getting more oil out of the ground, is a “climate solution” called CCS and CCS is profitable.

What’s more, there’s little to no oversight in the legislation for companies getting taxpayer money for doing CCS. The IRA nominally requires companies to verify their claims to the credit, but aside from some 

 to ensure condensed CO2 doesn’t wind up in groundwater, the EPA is not verifying how much carbon is actually sequestered by these projects.

“There is no cap on 45Q and stored emissions are entirely self-reported,” Carolyn Raffensperger, executive director of the Science & Environmental Health Network, said.

When asked about verification of carbon stored under the 45Q tax credit, the EPA told Drilled and Vox that it “does not implement the Section 45Q tax credit program and is not privy to taxpayer data,” and that questions about how tax claims are verified should be directed to the IRS. The IRS confirmed that it ensures companies claiming the credit have filed paperwork outlining their claims, including a lifecycle analysis, but that it does not have the scientific or technical expertise to verify that the amount of carbon claimed is actually being permanently sequestered.

“What the IPCC actually said in its mitigation report was that carbon capture might be necessary for hard-to-abate industries, but that it’s one of the most expensive options and it only equates to small emissions reductions,” said Paul Blackburn, an environmental lawyer and advisor to the Bold Alliance, a nonprofit network of frontline communities focused on protecting land and water. “So we’re doing the most expensive, least applicable thing first rather than cheapest easiest things first at great expense to taxpayers and with no analysis of net climate benefit.”

“We’re doing the most expensive, least applicable thing first rather than cheapest easiest things first at great expense to taxpayers and with no analysis of net climate benefit.” — Paul Blackburn, environmental lawyer and advisor to the Bold Alliance

Even before the creation of a remarkably generous tax credit, and despite their own internal projections or challenges with the technology, oil majors painted a rosy picture of CCS starting in the later half of the 2010s. Emails obtained by federal investigators show that Shell pulled together an 

 to promote CCS, while BP worked with the Oil and Gas Climate Initiative to develop what it called 

Exxon, meanwhile, began promoting itself as a leader in carbon capture.

In the last five years, Exxon produced multiple pro-CCS 

comparing the carbon capture potential at industrial plants to the carbon sequestration of 

describes ExxonMobil as “the company that believes that carbon capture technologies are critical for lowering global CO2 emissions.”

The oil major even worked on a series of 

 from 2019, Exxon executives asked the creative team working on the kids’ series to steer away from the idea that carbon is bad or that carbon capture is difficult. “De-emphasize concept that catching carbon is difficult or hard,” the feedback reads.

Yet that is precisely the company’s experience with CCS, according to several current and former Exxon staffers who agreed to speak with Drilled and Vox on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation. Some of them were involved in the early days of researching CCS as a potential climate solution at Exxon, which they said only began in earnest in 2018, the same year that the 45Q tax credit first increased.

The company’s experience before then, the sources said, was entirely focused on enhanced oil recovery — the process of injecting CO2 into a separate well to increase enough pressure in a reservoir to push additional oil out of a production well. While enhanced oil recovery, or EOR, does sequester carbon — some of it stays underground after it's been injected —

 the process could release 40 percent of the CO2 back into the air, and the oil it helps to get out of the ground also generates CO2 emissions when it’s burned.

Exxon is not the only one that embraced EOR for years before repositioning it as a climate solution. The industry has known for decades that compressed carbon works really well to vacuum up any remaining oil from porous rock, but it’s expensive to store and transport carbon. The industry’s embrace of natural gas helped drive down costs a bit: gas often comes out of the ground bringing quite a bit of CO2 with it. That CO2 needs to be stripped out to make natural gas, a process called“gas sweetening,” leaving companies with excess CO2.

Still, the process of storing and transporting it remained expensive, so it didn’t always make financial sense to do EOR. Now, with investor-owned oil companies like Exxon, Chevron, BP, and Shell hurtling toward an inevitable decline in production rates — an inflection point referred to as “peak oil” — they need EOR more than ever. By rebranding it as a climate solution and tying it to a tax credit, they’ve not just made the process cheaper, they’ve created a new revenue stream — called Low Carbon Solutions at Exxon and Shell, Gas & Low Carbon Energy at BP, and Lower Carbon at Chevron.

The 45Q tax credit revenue will also make it feasible for these new business units to supply carbon capture where it might genuinely be needed, on facilities with hard-to-abate emissions, like concrete, steel, and ammonia plants. But the vast majority of carbon that US taxpayers are paying oil companies to capture will either be going toward generating more oil, or would have greater emissions reductions benefits had the companies opted not to drill for gas in the first place.

According to the International Energy Agency

, using “naturally occurring” carbon—the CO2 that comes up with methane as part of natural gas, for example—in EOR, as opposed to “anthropogenic CO2,” the emissions captured from a facility like a power plant or factory, “clearly provides no benefit in terms of emissions intensity.” Absent the drilling in the first place, there would be no CO2 or methane emissions in those cases.

In the United States, more than 70 percent of the CO2 injected underground as part of the EOR process is from natural sources. That’s true of the Exxon’s showcase facility—the Shute Creek facility in LaBarge, Wyoming—as well.The CO2 source there is the gas that’s being drilled. ExxonMobil calls this “anthropogenic CO2,” but when pressed, a spokesperson told Drilled it’s generated by the separation process. In other words, absent the gas drilling, there would be no CO2 to capture at the site in the first place.

Despite that, when ExxonMobil talks about itself in PR materials as the 

 and the fact that it has captured more CO2 than any other company in the world, it is

, which has been in operation since 1986.

 on CCS and other industry-friendly “climate solutions,” from 1986 to 2008, LaBarge reinjected about 400,000 tonnes of CO2 a year back into the reservoir from which it came, and vented 180 million cubic feet of CO2 per day from the facility’s smokestacks. In 2008, it was ordered by the state Oil and Gas Conservation Commission to reduce its vented CO2 emissions, which it did by building out a carbon capture system that redirected CO2 into pipelines for enhanced oil recovery.

 from the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA) found that LaBarge was selling half of its captured carbon for enhanced oil recovery and venting the rest. This means that millions of tonnes of carbon the company claimed to have “captured” were ultimately emitted into the atmosphere.

Climate scientists say CCS connected to fossil fuel use or production delivers little benefit when it comes to tackling climate change, period.

“It doesn’t  make sense to use CCS to prolong our use of fossil fuels, especially to produce electricity,” David Ho, professor at University of Hawaii and senior researcher at Columbia University, said. “The argument in favor of enhanced oil recovery is often that if they weren’t using this captured CO2 they’d be using some other CO2. But I don’t think you can call anything where you’re getting more oil out of the ground to burn a climate solution.”

Yet, so far, oil majors have struggled to deploy CCS technology in any other capacity. “When we talk about the failure of CCS, we generally talk about capturing not storage, but when you look at capacity and how much has actually been sequestered, it’s very little,” Ho said.

When CO2 is actually sequestered underground, there’s no guarantee it stays there. “CO2 has a way of moving through the air, of leaking through pipelines and because we have no cradle to grave tracking, we have no way of actually knowing how much is leaking, how much is really being collected, how much is hitting the wellhead, and how much is really staying underground,” Raffensperger said.

That’s not just concerning from a climate perspective, but from a public health perspective as well. Raffensperger noted that the pipelines built to transport condensed carbon from oil fields to storage facilities, or to other oil fields for EOR, are surrounded by 

“These are not your grandmother's pipelines,” Raffensperger said. “They could be lethal. We talk about the kill zone or a fatality zone around a CO2 pipeline. We don't talk about that with oil and gas pipelines. These are uniquely dangerous and underregulated.”

Following a 2020 CO2 leak and explosion in 

that abruptly stopped cars on roadways, caused widespread dizziness and nausea, and sent several residents to the hospital, the federal Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration began looking into rules for CO2 pipelines. They were set to finalize that rule this summer, pending review by the Office of Management and Budget and the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, but that deadline has been 

 to fall 2024. The lack of finalized safety regulations has not stopped the permitting of CO2 pipelines, though. The Summit pipeline, a massive project that would carry carbon across five states, just got the go ahead in June 2024 for the first step of its construction process in Iowa: 

through eminent domain to make way for the pipeline.

Carbon capture and storage is a fantasy—and taxpayers are footing the bill.

According to current and former Exxon employees, the company’s efforts to explore the “S” part of the CCS equation—storage, or sequestration—only began when it pulled together a team of technical experts to look for weaknesses in a 2018 

“They thought the USGS was overly optimistic [about the potential of CCS] and they wanted us to basically bring industry technical expertise in to tell them their projections were overblown,” one Exxon staffer said. The team brought together to study CCS was then tasked with running an experiment to see if it was even possible to permanently store captured carbon. When the study showed that it was indeed possible, current and former Exxon staffers told Drilled and Vox the company’s executives were “surprised.”

To truly sell CCS as a climate solution, Exxon had to show that storage at scale was feasible. Former employees told us that at the end of the last decade, executives came up with a prioritized list of the company’s export and import terminals and refineries where it might be relatively easy to attach CCS. As of this year, none of those projects have been built (though the company did 

 in late 2023 that it was working on a fuel-cell-powered carbon capture and hydrogen project at its Rotterdam refinery, one of the options on that list).

While it hasn’t managed to build commercial scale carbon storage itself, Exxon did 

acquire enhanced oil recovery company Denbury

 in 2023, which brought 1300 miles of CO2 pipelines and 15 onshore carbon storage sites under Exxon’s control. Again, this system is focused on enhanced oil recovery.

“CCS is a proven and safe technology that experts agree is pivotal to achieving net zero,” an ExxonMobil spokesperson said in response to a request for comment for this story. “We're making progress in our Low Carbon Solutions business, with current plans to capture and permanently store more CO2 than any other company.”

Fatih Birol, executive director of the International Energy Agency, 

 the industry’s plan to offset its emissions with carbon capture “fantasy.”

But the U.S. government is all in on that fantasy now.

“[The carbon capture tax credit] 45Q is not based on net climate benefit or net CO2 reductions, it's based on gross CO2 capture,” Blackburn said. “Why would you think making carbon a commodity would reduce CO2 emissions? It’s like the opposite of carbon tax, we’re actually paying them to produce more of it.”

Ugochi Oluigbo-Anyaka, Royce Kurmelovs, and Molly Taft also contributed reporting to this story.

Documents, Whistleblowers, and Public Comments Are Clear: Oil Companies Know Carbon Capture Is Not a Climate Solution

If you browse the Internet or watch TV you've probably heard of Project 2025, the blueprint for a second Trump presidency, mapped out by a coalition of 100 conservative think tanks, spearheaded (publicly at least) by the Heritage Foundation, which also had a hand in shaping and staffing the first Trump administration. Nothing written down in the Project 2025 manifesto is new, per se, nor is it new that they've written it down (Heritage put out a similar "Mandate for Leadership" in 2016, gearing up for the first Trump term. For that matter, they've been 

 updated, though, and it's handy to have it all written out, side by side, a clear window into what lies behind the door on the right.

One thing that’s important to note is that once again we see that those pushing against climate action are not just aligned with those attacking trans rights, racial justice, labor rights and reproductive rights, but are in the same organizations, being funded by the same universe of backers.

The complete Project 2025 manifesto is 900 pages (?!!), which might explain why it sometimes feels like we're hearing about this thing all the time yet don't know much about it. I haven't quite finished it yet, but I have managed to get to page 500, including Chapter 13, in which the plan for the Environmental Protection Agency is laid out.

The first thing I noticed is the chapter's author: Mandy Gunasekara. Today, Gunasekara is a visiting fellow in the Heritage Foundation’s Center for Energy, Climate, and Environment and senior policy analyst for the Independent Women's Forum, a conservative women's organization funded by the Bradley Foundation, Sarah Scaife Foundation, and the Koch-backed donor-advised fund Donors Trust. A lawyer by training, 

 been a member of the CO2 Coalition (you might recognize her as the Republican witness during Rep Jamie Raskin's 2019 Subcommittee on Civil Rights and Civil Liberties' 

 on "The Oil Industry's Efforts to Suppress the Truth about Climate Change"), worked for Trump's EPA (first as principal deputy assistant administrator at the EPA’s Office of Air and Radiation and then as chief of staff to EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler), where she claims to have been "the chief architect of the Paris Accord withdrawal and the repeal of the Clean Power Plan", and was famously the Senator James Inhofe staffer who handed him a snowball during a 2015 hearing in which he claimed the existence of snow meant global warming wasn't a problem. She was Majority Counsel for the U.S. Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works when Inhofe chaired it from 2015-2017, and led committee actions and policy development on Clean Air Act and climate change issues.

It would not be remotely surprising to see Gunasekara tapped as EPA chief in a second Trump administration. Following is a rundown of her key proposals. It's a long read, but not 32-pages long, so...you're welcome? 

First, the broad strokes. A Trump EPA would:

Cut any program focused on climate (including climate czars);

Limit the agency's ability to regulate under both the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act;

"Pause for review" (aka cut) anything that references "environmental justice" (because "reverse racism") and eliminate the stand-alone Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights;

 that didn't quite make it last time around, which specifically targets the long-term epidemiological studies that linked air pollution to shorter lives and were used to justify air-quality regulations;

Repeal or curtail the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), which incentivizes the energy transition
and has led to a renewable energy boom in the US.

Incorporate "a diversity of scientific viewpoints" in decision-making (including those with no real scientific basis, a la climate denial)

[Podcast] New Research Is Clear: Fossil Fuel-Funded University Research Is Warping Policy

Documents, Whistleblowers, and Public Comments Are Clear: Oil Companies Know Carbon Capture Is Not a Climate Solution

Newsletter: Everything You Need to Know About Project 2025's Plan for the EPA

Could Climate-Related Homicide Charges Be a Path to Accountability the Supreme Court Can’t Block?

“A Real First”: Following Devastating Floods, Vermont Passes Landmark Law Targeting Fossil Fuel Companies for Climate Costs

Information Pollution

Denial to Delay

The Real Free Speech Threat

Petrostates

Episode

We are a global team investigating the obstacles to action on climate change, all over the world

[Podcast] New Research Is Clear: Fossil Fuel-Funded University Research Is Warping Policy

Documents, Whistleblowers, and Public Comments Are Clear: Oil Companies Know Carbon Capture Is Not a Climate Solution

Newsletter: Everything You Need to Know About Project 2025's Plan for the EPA

Could Climate-Related Homicide Charges Be a Path to Accountability the Supreme Court Can’t Block?

“A Real First”: Following Devastating Floods, Vermont Passes Landmark Law Targeting Fossil Fuel Companies for Climate Costs

Information Pollution

Denial to Delay

The Real Free Speech Threat

Petrostates

Subscribe to Our Newsletter

Episode

We are a global team investigating the obstacles to action on climate change, all over the world