Publications

While some see carbon capture, utilization, and storage (CCUS) as crucial for cost-effective decarbonization, it faces opposition based on air pollution and equity concerns. To understand this cost–air pollution trade-off, we simulate the potential impacts of allowing CCUS deployment in the U.S. power sector under plausible climate policies. We show that the existence of this trade-off critically depends on the underlying policy, which affects the type of generation CCUS could displace, and that allowing CCUS can yield energy-cost savings, particularly benefiting lower-income communities.

Many analysts project that large-scale, widespread carbon dioxide removal (CDR) will be necessary to reach net-zero greenhouse gas emissions, and thereby stop exacerbating climate change before United Nations temperature limits are exceeded this century. However, concerns about costs, technological constraints, safety, environmental justice impacts, moral hazard, and other issues contribute to tremendous uncertainty about the future of CDR. Expert elicitation—the process of formally eliciting the views of relevant subject matter experts to gain insight on complex or uncertain topics—can theoretically help clarify consensus on CDR-related issues. We conducted an expert elicitation on issues related to CDR, surveying an interdisciplinary group of 699 researchers who had published at least one article on CDR in a leading academic journal.

In this paper, available on SSRN, we develop a model of a wholesale electricity market with energy and capacity market components to examine the economic relationship between costs and reliability. We investigate the importance of efficient resource accreditation—the amount by which to compensate resources for their contribution to system reliability. We show that "marginal effective load carrying capability," an accreditation method increasingly adopted by system operators, is theoretically optimal.

What's the function of oil and gas permitting agencies? Despite broad statutory grants to federal agencies, oil and gas companies increasingly argue that the role of those agencies is to promote development regardless of whether it is socially desirable. But this “Narrow Reinterpretation,” in addition to lacking textual support, is at odds with longstanding practice. What changed? Not the governing statutes, at least not in pertinent part. But the energy sector has: renewable sources have replaced coal as the primary competitors to oil and gas. 

In December 2023, EPA finalized updated values for the social cost of greenhouse gases (SC-GHG), following public comment and expert peer review. The agency derived these estimates using the best available science and economics, and the estimates represent a significant step forward in our ability to properly value climate effects. The brief is intended to introduce policymakers and practitioners to the SC-GHG, break down EPA's updated values, and explain why they represent a powerful tool that can streamline decisionmaking and policy analysis.