by Catherine Fraser, climate program manager at Data for Progress.
Even before President Donald Trump took office for his second term and began slashing U.S. climate and clean energy policies, the world was not on track to meet global climate goals. In fact, experts now agree that we not only need to decarbonize and cut emissions as fast as possible, but also remove past emissions to limit warming to 1.5 or 2 degrees Celsius via carbon dioxide removal (CDR) technologies.
CDR includes a range of technologies, from direct air capture (DAC) and enhanced rock weathering, to biomass carbon removal and storage and ocean alkalinity enhancement. During the Biden administration, these technologies — particularly DAC — got a huge boost. The administration launched a $3.5 billion program to build four DAC hubs across the country and invested in grants, loans, tax credits, and other incentives to encourage companies to capture carbon and store it permanently underground.
In anticipation of these investments, Data for Progress published a Progressive Platform for Carbon Removal in 2021, in which we laid out a framework for the development and deployment of anti-fossil fuel, equitable CDR. In short, we warned against the potential for the fossil fuel industry’s capture and coopting of CDR, especially DAC, given the inherent moral hazard: Allowing the fossil fuel sector to control the development pathway of CDR and dominate the market for its use would enable the continued extraction and burning of fossil fuels, and obstruct urgent and necessary emissions reductions.
Essentially, it would be like letting a fox into a henhouse.
What’s more, some fossil fuel companies were proposing to use DAC for enhanced oil recovery. With enhanced oil recovery (EOR), carbon dioxide is first captured, then injected back underground, where it enables the extraction of hard-to-reach oil and gas.
At its most basic, EOR leverages carbon emissions from the very fossil fuels driving today’s climate crisis to extract and burn more fossil fuels. To be fair, proponents of EOR highlight that it actually removes more carbon dioxide in the process of extracting fossil fuels, and thus offsets any ensuing emissions from burning the fossil fuels extracted by EOR. Some also point out that EOR can maximize production at existing wells, thus limiting the environmental impacts of drilling new wells and providing fossil fuels at a lower cost to the climate.
Though EOR has been around for decades, it has gained prominence by riding the coattails of the growing consensus that CDR will be necessary to meet global climate goals.
At Data for Progress, we remain skeptical of fossil fuel influence over carbon removal; after all, the fossil fuel industry’s climate denial campaigns and stymieing of climate action have necessitated CDR in the first place.
Just ask fossil fuel executives. Occidental Petroleum’s Vicki Hollub has said: “We believe that our direct capture technology is going to be the technology that helps to preserve our industry over time. This gives our industry a license to continue to operate for the 60, 70, 80 years that I think it’s going to be very much needed.” And ExxonMobil CEO Darren Woods has called DAC “the holy grail” for achieving net-zero emissions, without cutting the company’s production of oil and gas.
Relevant: Over 100 Western Officials Demand End To 45Q Carbon Capture Credit
During the height of Biden-era investments in DAC, DAC was already flirting with fossil fuel capture: The Department of Energy awarded Occidental Petroleum’s subsidiary 1PointFive up to $500 million to build its South Texas DAC hub to capture carbon dioxide and use a portion of it for EOR. And Occidental made moves to dominate and consolidate the burgeoning DAC industry, acquiring Carbon Engineering and Holocene.
Fast forward to July 2025, and Occidental and the fossil fuel wing of the CDR industry got another boost when Trump signed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) into law. Though OBBBA is largely a story of congressional Republicans and Trump taking an ax to the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), they did more than just cut and undermine clean energy incentives — they incentivized fossil fuel development, and specifically EOR. Occidental and other companies will now be able to earn more for each ton of carbon they capture, opening the door for EOR in more places.
Given the dwindling public funding for CDR, Trump’s threats to kill the Biden-era DAC hubs, and the tremendous shortcomings and limitations of the voluntary carbon market, EOR may emerge as the only bankable means for DAC.
Who benefits most from this change? According to reporting from E&E News, Occidental Petroleum.
Relevant: Occidental’s Stratos DAC Hub To Launch Operations By The End Of 2025
As far and away the U.S.’s largest player in EOR, Occidental operates over 3,000 carbon dioxide injection wells, almost four times more than its closest competitor. And as a leader in both EOR and DAC, Occidental is on pace to dominate DAC in the U.S., offering a lifeline and a license to the fossil fuel industry at a time when we desperately need to phase out fossil fuels in addition to scaling up carbon removal.
This is a five-alarm fire. The U.S. is hurtling toward the fossil fuel industry’s total capture of DAC and carbon removal as a whole.
Moving forward, we need to see EOR for what it is: a golden ticket for continued oil extraction, fossil exploitation, and climate chaos. And the next opportunity we get, we need to rein it in at the federal level.
A climate-positive future for CDR is still possible, but we must remain skeptical about involving the very fossil fuel companies that got us into this mess in the first place.
It’s ever-apparent that they will not get us out of this crisis.
