While cutting solar and wind, Senate GOP plans rewards for oil drillers

[Zorro]

The budget plan carves out new and expanded subsidies for fossil fuel companies as GOP lawmakers say the nation can’t afford clean energy.

Senate Republicans have added tax breaks and other subsidies for oil drillers to the GOP tax bill making its way through Congress, including a provision that would reward companies for using an emerging greenhouse-gas-fighting technology — capturing carbon from the atmosphere — to boost production of oil by billions of barrels a year.

The massive bill eliminates large swaths of federal funding for wind, solar and other green energy initiatives, reversing many of the Biden-era initiatives aimed at developing clean sources of fuel. At the same time, lobbying efforts by petroleum companies to win benefits from the oil-friendly administration and its allies appear to have paid off.

Several firms, including Occidental Petroleum, which is completing a large carbon-capture plant in the West Texas oil fields, sought expanded subsidies for using captured carbon dioxide to pressurize wells and draw more oil from the ground. The carbon-capture subsidy would push up the tax legislation’s price tag by what experts forecast will be billions of dollars.

It emerged after Occidental’s CEO said she personally lobbied President Donald Trump.

“President Trump knows the business case for this,” Occidental CEO Vicki Hollub told investors in February. “I’ve had several conversations with him.” She said subsidizing the technology will enable oil companies to pull 50 billion to 70 billion additional barrels of oil out of the ground that they would not otherwise be able to get at.

https://wapo.st/4n8Tshj

[surfered]

1. The Texas Senate has passed a bill with disincentives for additional renewable electricity generation

This comes at a time of increasing demand. They only want oil & gas.