The rise of artificial intelligence could boost a long-hyped but slow-growing industry aimed at countering humanity’s warming of the Earth.
Tech companies need cheap, reliable, fast power to fuel their data centers and train AI models, as Carlos Anchondo and I report today. Utilities have used that to justify extending the life of fossil fuel plants or building new ones.
But turning to fossil fuels — the main drivers of climate change — doesn’t jibe with big tech companies’ pledges to zero out their carbon emissions.
Enter carbon capture and storage.
This technology seeks to eradicate fossil fuel plants’ impact on the climate by capturing their carbon pollution and storing it out of harm’s way. Its biggest backers include fossil fuel companies, which see CCS as a way to convince tech giants to hook up to natural gas plants for their power needs.
Exxon Mobil last year announced plans to build a 1.5-gigawatt gas plant powering a data center, projecting that CCS would trap an estimated 90 percent of the facility’s carbon dioxide emissions. CEO Darren Woods said during an earnings call that the company has talked about “low carbon data centers” as an “enabler to … carbon capture and storage.”
The power company Entergy Louisiana has said the three gas turbines it plans to build to support a massive Meta data center could incorporate CCS “through future upgrades.” And the energy company Tallgrass is partnering with data center developer Crusoe to build a 1.8-gigawatt facility in Wyoming that will include a gas generator with CCS and access to Tallgrass’ nearby carbon dioxide pipeline.
Pairing CCS with data centers “creates transformative opportunities to balance the power requirements of technical innovation with the desires of local communities and customers for emissions stewardship,” Tallgrass spokesperson John Brown told me and Carlos.
Likewise, some tech companies include carbon capture as an option in their sustainability plans.
A new energy landscape
CCS hasn’t yet been deployed at commercial scale on a natural gas power plant, and the technology remains prohibitively expensive. Green groups are quick to point out that wind, solar and batteries are cheaper and easier to build and produce no greenhouse gas pollution.
But the renewed interest in CCS is another sign of how the data center boom — and the Trump administration’s antipathy to wind and solar — is changing the energy technology landscape.
Data centers’ astronomical power needs have prompted investments in advanced nuclear energy, geothermal and even fusion power. Major tech and venture capital firms launched a coalition this week to support those kinds of emerging clean energy technologies.
In the near term, coal and gas plants are available and have political backing from the Trump administration. Notably, the Republican budget megalaw that axed federal tax incentives for wind and solar expanded tax breaks for CCS. That, combined with tech firms’ deep pockets, improves the outlook for carbon capture, said Andrew Logan, a senior director at sustainability nonprofit Ceres.
“If carbon capture is ever going to work, this is the environment in which it would work,” Logan said.
