I am a strong supporter of America’s oil and natural gas industry. But I oppose the climate agenda complex carbon capture. For decades, our producers have led the world in innovation, efficiency, and delivering the affordable energy that powers modern life. One of those innovations, using carbon dioxide to recover more oil from mature fields, has been a proven, privately funded success story since the 1960s. The problem is not the oil industry doing what it has always done well. The problem is the climate-industrial complex hijacking a proven oilfield technology and turning it into the next great taxpayer-funded boondoggle.

Let’s start with the facts everyone should know.

American oil companies first tested CO₂ injection in 1964 and launched the world’s first large-scale commercial project (SACROC in West Texas) in 1972, decades before anyone talked about climate subsidies or the Green New Deal. They did it with private capital, private pipelines, and private risk because, in the right reservoirs, CO₂ is simply the best tool available to increase oil production from a working well. Under reservoir conditions it becomes miscible with crude oil, swells it, slashes viscosity, and can recover an additional 10–20 percent or more of the oil left behind. No other gas comes close to that performance. That is why the industry has willingly paid $20–$40 per ton for delivered CO₂ for fifty years without a dime of government help.

If the 45Q tax credit disappeared tomorrow, oil companies would keep right on buying and injecting CO₂ wherever it makes economic sense. The existing CO₂-enhanced oil recovery business is not dependent on subsidies; it predates them by half a century.

So what has changed?

What has changed is the explosion of brand-new projects that have nothing to do with producing more American oil. These are pure “capture-and-store-forever” schemes, mostly at ethanol plants, fertilizer factories, and hydrogen facilities, whose entire economic justification is the inflated 45Q credit of $60 to $85 per ton. These projects do not recover a single extra barrel of oil. They exist only to bury CO₂ underground and collect the taxpayer check.

That is where the real trouble begins.

• These non-EOR projects require thousands of miles of new high-pressure CO₂ pipelines across the Midwest and Great Plains, pipelines that routinely rely on eminent domain to force their way across private farmland.
• These projects plan to inject billions of tons of CO₂ into saline aquifers that have never held oil or gas, in geologic formations we have far less experience with than the depleted reservoirs used for decades in EOR.
• These are the projects that carry the greatest long-term leakage risk, seismic risk, and potential for groundwater contamination, because they are not piggybacking on fifty years of proven oilfield practice.

The oil industry is not the villain here, nor the problem. For fifty years it has safely and profitably used CO₂ the way a craftsman uses the best tool for the job. The villain is the climate lobby that took a mature, self-sustaining oilfield technology and super-sized it into a subsidy-driven megaproject that seizes private property, exposes rural communities to new risks, and, according to the Inflation Reduction Act’s own estimates, could stick taxpayers with a $100 to $400 billion bill by 2035 for no measurable climate benefit.

Repeal the 45Q credit entirely, or at minimum restrict it solely to genuine enhanced oil recovery, the very activity the industry invented and paid for decades before Washington discovered “climate.” Let American oil companies keep using the best tool in the toolbox on their own dime. But stop using taxpayer billions and eminent-domain bulldozers to chase a Green New Deal mirage.

American energy dominance never needed a government crutch. And it still doesn’t.