The oil tycoon and the philosopher threatening Big Oil’s carbon capture plans
Brigham, a serial entrepreneur and libertarian from Austin, is urging President Trump and the Republicans who are considering slashing a host of energy incentives to go further and nix tax credits for carbon capture. He says there is no climate disaster on the horizon, and that funneling public money into a nascent technology is a gift to oil behemoths.
Brigham has teamed up with Epstein, a philosopher popular with Republicans. He is helping fund a push by Epstein to persuade the GOP to ax virtually all of former President Joe Biden’s climate law, the Inflation Reduction Act—including subsidies for carbon capture.
“It’s just taxpayer dollars that are going to virtue-signaling and are not having any meaningful economic impact at all,” Brigham said in an interview.
The magnate is joining a motley coalition critical of carbon capture. From Iowa to the Dakotas and Colorado, representatives, landowners and environmentalists oppose the subsidies, citing concerns about carbon-dioxide pipelines, misuse of federal funds and the national debt.
Now, tensions are erupting inside the oil industry. Oil giants, under pressure to curb their emissions, hope that collecting and trapping their own releases will allow them to stay in business. But for some small producers that eschew public scrutiny, Big Oil is only giving into climate hysteria—and raising the cost of producing fossil fuels.
“Those big integrated oil-and-gas companies are betting on the future—that there’ll be life after Trump,” said Brigham McCown, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute think tank and a paid consultant for carbon-capture project developers in the past. “Whereas I think [for] the smaller producers, it’s about making money today.”
Defenders of the credits include Occidental Chief Executive Vicki Hollub, who is betting on a plan to suck massive amounts of CO2 from the air, and Oklahoma oil billionaire Harold Hamm, whose company has invested hundreds of millions of dollars in a carbon-capture project.
After Biden’s IRA boosted incentives to up to $180 a metric ton of CO2 sequestered, large oil firms stepped up their investments. The Treasury Department estimated last year that the credits will cost more than $25 billion between 2025 and 2034.
Many climate scientists say deploying the technology at a large scale is key to limiting climate change.
Brigham says he doubts carbon capture can be profitable without public funding and that it is a distraction from firms’ core mission of finding oil and gas. He says that the subsidies distort markets and encourage cronyism.
A geophysicist by training, Brigham made his fortune building and selling two oil companies for a total of about $7 billion. He is an Ayn Rand fan who has produced two movies based on the philosopher’s work. He was also a major backer of what is now the Civitas Institute, a conservative center that launched in 2022 at the University of Texas at Austin.
Brigham first met Epstein, another Rand fan, about a decade ago. The two men bonded over a common belief in the importance of free markets and fossil fuels. Epstein is the author of “The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels,” a book saying that the imperative to fuel societies flourishing with oil and gas outweighs climate-change risks. It has given Republicans ammunition to counter the left’s climate push, oil lobbyists say.
Epstein asked Republican senators during a recent lunch to end all incentives. He has also made his case to the White House.
In an interview, Epstein said subsidies, such as those for carbon capture and for wind and solar energy, prop up inefficient ways to crank out energy. Even if reducing CO2 releases mattered, he said, carbon capture would make a negligible dent in growing global emissions.
“If you do not terminate [subsidies] before the end of the Trump administration, then you have done nothing,” he said he has told Republican lawmakers.
His push is running into efforts by Occidental’s Hollub and Hamm, as well as the American Petroleum Institute, the industry’s biggest lobby, to not only keep the credits, but expand them.
API’s CEO Mike Sommers said the industry agrees on 99% of oil-and-gas-friendly provisions in Trump’s megabill. “This is an absolute home run for the oil-and-gas industry,” he said.
Vicki Hollub, chief executive officer of Occidental Petroleum, is betting on a plan to suck massive amounts of CO2 from the air.
Hollub has said climate change is a major crisis and that her company needs to reduce emissions if it wants to be allowed to operate in the coming decades. The company plans to inject captured CO2 into oil fields to recover more crude, which it says will allow it to produce zero-carbon crude—and extend the U.S.’s energy independence. Hollub has visited the White House since Trump’s election and personally made the case for the incentives to him.
Occidental declined to comment.
Hamm’s Continental Resources has invested $250 million in a multibillion-dollar plan to gather carbon emissions from dozens of ethanol plants every year. The CO2 would be piped through a 2,000-mile network to North Dakota, where it would be sequestered and potentially used to extract more crude from oil fields. The project could receive billions in subsidies.
At a December event organized by the Republican Study Committee, the largest conservative caucus in Congress, Hamm put on a forceful defense of carbon capture and sequestration as an environmental solution, according to attendees.
Continental didn’t respond to a request for comment.
While pressure is mounting on the Senate to eliminate the credits, Republicans plan to retain and expand carbon-capture subsidies.
Still, carbon-capture proponents face headwinds at the federal level.
Energy Secretary Chris Wright, a climate skeptic, has accused the Biden administration of spending billions of dollars without proper due diligence. Last month, he announced the termination of awards totaling more than $3.7 billion, including to carbon-capture projects.
Write to Benoît Morenne at benoit.morenne@wsj.com