The Coming Carbon Capture Explosion and Other Stories

Once again, a packed schedule delayed last week’s E/lectrify post — and gave me a little more time to work on it. I will be catching up with a second post later this week.

According to the 2026 “Sustainable Energy in America Factbook,” by 2035 the United States will be capturing and storing 140 million metric tons of carbon dioxide per year – a sevenfold increase from the just-over 20 million MT per year we capture today (see chart above).

(One metric ton equals 2,204.62 pounds, so 140 million MT pencils out to more than 308.6 billion lbs.; so, yes we’re talking about enough CO2 to sink a small armada of battleships.)

The coming explosion in carbon capture and storage is one of the lesser-told stories in the SEAF, published annually by the Business Council for Sustainable Energy and BloombergNEF, to track the money and politics shaping the U.S. clean energy transition. 

The report and its dozens of charts are rolled out each year with press and industry briefings, which tend to highlight the headline-grabbing, more easily digested stuff. For example, these two eye-popping charts show existing data centers gobbling up 41 gigawatts of power and a project pipeline of more than 120 GW of new data center demand at various stages of development.

While this is not exactly new information, the chart on the right — specifically, the gap between projects under construction and in early development — nails the uncertainty surrounding the potential increase in demand on the immediate horizon. Developers are still shopping around for the best locations; so, speculation is still very much in the mix. 

 Now why I am telling you all this is because the SEAF is full of cool and interesting stories – if you take the time to look beyond the topline charts and dig into the report page by page. What follows are some of the charts — and the under-the-radar subtext and stories — that grabbed my attention in this year’s report, beginning with the CCS predictions.  

I have been telling folks for a couple years now that – like it or not – CCS is a thing. Too many people with too much money are determined to make it work and make it affordable. As the SEAF points out, the Inflation Reduction Act’s 45Q tax credits for carbon capture were among the few clean tech incentives that were not cut in 2025’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act.

So, the growth of CCS — and major amounts of new fossil-fueled generation — could be on the horizon. Just check out the factbook’s map (below) detailing the CO2 pipelines and underground storage projects in development — all those little yellow triangles.

Thus, while most of the carbon we’ve been capturing to date has come from natural gas processing, with smaller amounts from hydrogen, ammonia and ethanol production, by 2035, BNEF predicts that power generation will be the top use for CCS.

If that is the case, it is worth asking whether the cost of any new power plants with CCS will end up on consumers’ electric bills? 

The range of uses also suggests ongoing fossil fuel-dependence, hedged with offsets, across various industries. “Unaccounted hub activity” — the bright pink stripe — is a particularly worrisome example, defined as emission-producing activities or events not documented in official records.

The Environmental Protection Agency’s repeal of a number of regulations aimed at monitoring and limiting emissions from coal-fired power plants or heavy industry could mean we’ll see a whole lot more pink in future reports. 

A couple other key data points:

Keeping an eye on carbon capture is important, but the good news is that CCS is barely visible in the record $378 billion invested in the U.S. energy transition in 2025 (see below). 

Following the money is essential — and BNEF does it really well — because investment is at least one indicator of a nation’s commitment to innovation, growth and global competitiveness, both near- and long-term, 

The SEAF charts tell a mixed story. It is no secret that both China and the European Union are outspending the U.S. in clean energy investment. Our $378 billion (1.2% of our 2025 gross domestic product) is less than half of China’s $800 billion (4.1% of the country’s estimated GDP), and about 16% of the record $2.3 trillion invested globally.

(Unavoidable jargon: GDP is the economic value of all the goods and services produced within a country.)

U.S. investment inched up in 2025, from $366 billion in 2024, a sign of the industry’s resilience despite Trump’s clawback of hundreds of billions in clean tech incentives. But what’s super cool is the strength of investments in renewables, electrified transportation and the grid — trends that have been consistent and mostly growing for the past three years (although renewables were down 2.9% as a result of Trump’s funding cancellations).

The story here is that people and businesses want clean energy and clean transportation. They also understand that grid modernization and expansion — however expensive and controversial at the local level — are absolutely necessary. 

And at least some of them are willing to put their money where their goals and values are.

While not exactly under the radar, affordability and demand growth are, at this point, inextricably linked and impossible to avoid, and the SEAF hits them from a couple of insightful, if somewhat wonky angles.

The levelized cost of energy — LCOE in industry-speak — is not directly related to your electric bill, but it is an affordability benchmark for the industry, tracking the lifetime costs of all the different ways of generating electricity

The chart above categorizes the different LCOEs for variable, dispatchable (24-7) and flexible (peak demand) power sources – that is, respectively, renewables; fossil fuels, hydro and nuclear; and storage and simple natural gas turbines. 

(LCOE is measured in dollars per megawatt-hour; so in consumer terms, solar’s bottom-line LCOE of $47/MWh translates to 4.7 cents per kilowatt-hour.)   

Again, no surprises here — Trump’s efforts to frame fossil fuels as critical for affordability are, in most cases, not supported by the facts and figures. Renewables — with the notable exception of offshore wind — and renewables with storage have the lowest LCOEs in their categories, and hydropower almost undercuts natural gas as a 24-7 power source.

Whether natural gas is competitive with renewables or ruinously expensive depends on the technology used. Combined cycle gas turbines (CCGT on the chart) capture waste heat and are therefore more efficient and less expensive, versus open cycle plants (OCGT) that don’t capture heat and cost more than any other form of power. 

Now the overlay here is how long it takes to build the different technologies — what the chart below calls lead times — compared regionally across the nation’s regional grid operators.

Solar, wind and storage can in most cases get online faster, while the gray bars for natural gas all come in higher. Regional differences matter here. PJM Interconnection’s backed-up pipeline of projects means it can take more than five years to get a new natural gas plant built there. while California gets new utility-scale solar online in 14 to 24 months.

PJM is the grid operator serving 13 Midwestern and Mid-Atlantic states and Washington, D.C., a region where demand and utility rates are booming due primarily to the heavy concentration of data centers in Northern Virginia, known as Data Center Alley.

So, yes, politics are involved here. PJM, MISO and SPP have all allowed natural gas and nuclear projects to jump ahead of renewables as part of fast-track approval programs aimed at  meeting growing demand — despite the higher costs and longer lead times involved. 

Also noteworthy — and political — the Southeast does not have a regional grid operator, and its big corporate utilities are notoriously unfriendly to distributed solar, such as rooftop installations on homes, schools or local businesses, which can take anywhere from 6 months to 2 ½ years to get online.

Energy efficiency is both the bottom and front line on electricity affordability. The standard line in the utility business is that the cheapest kilowatt-hour is the one you don’t use.

The SEAF charts track some of the core efficiency indicators, beginning with building codes. Energy-efficient buildings simply use less electricity, so any state, county or city that is serious about cutting bills for its residents has to commit to adopting the most recent and most efficient building codes.

California may have high electric rates, but for the past 50 years it has had one of the lowest and flattest rates of per capita energy use in the country because of its rigorous energy efficiency standards, which are updated every three years. 

Residential energy codes, set by the International Energy Conservation Code, are also updated every three years, as are commercial codes set by the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers.

But as you can see by the map and chart above, only a handful of states routinely update their building codes to keep up with the latest standards, which means across the country, even brand new houses may come with higher electric bills built in. 

Other efficiency indicators include whether a state has an energy efficiency standard, requiring utilities to steadily cut electricity consumption by small percentages each year and how much those utilities invest in efficiency programs to hit those numbers

As per the chart above, we again have a mixed record. Efficiency standards are on the books in 27 states and the District of Columbia, although Arizona is in the process of repealing and revising its code. Utility investments in efficiency are miniscule compared to the massive amounts they pour into building the new power plants and poles and wires that their customers pay for through rate increases. 

In an October 2025 report, the Edison Electric Institute, the trade association for corporate, investor-owned utilities, estimated that its members would be investing $1.1 trillion in building new generation and transmission over the next five years. Their yearly investments in efficiency top out at $8.4 billion, or less than 1% of the EEI forecast. 

Affordability is now a major political issue and will almost certainly be a flashpoint for candidates in the upcoming midterms. Free to download off the BCSE website, the SEAF is a virtual primer for voters who want to go to townhall meetings and candidate forums armed with facts, figures and cool charts.

What might happen if voters across the country stood up and asked candidates point-blank whether they will commit to rigorous building and energy efficiency codes and increased private and public funding for energy efficiency, especially for low-income households?

I have tried to give a taste here, but the SEAF has more stories and hot issues waiting to be uncovered and used to make policymakers, regulators and utility executives seriously uncomfortable.

 Dig in!