WSJ: The Oil Tycoon and the Philosopher Threatening Big Oil’s Carbon Capture Plans

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Exxon Mobil, Occidental Petroleum and other oil giants are expected to receive billions of dollars of incentives to collect and bury carbon emissions. Texas oil billionaire Ben “Bud” Brigham and pro-fossil-fuels activist Alex Epstein want to turn off the tap.

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 the subsidies for carbon capture that Republicans are planning to expand in the tax bill moving through Congress.

“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 and don’t accept the scientific consensus on climate change, Big Oil is only giving into climate hysteria—and raising the cost of producing fossil fuels.

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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.

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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.

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While pressure is mounting on the Senate to eliminate the credits, Republicans have yet to relent. Meanwhile, carbon capture faces headwinds at the federal level, too.

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.

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