How Federal Funds Show Up on the Ground: CCS Project Deployment in California

In late 2025, I had the chance to visit something remarkably unremarkable: a carbon capture demonstration project outside San Francisco. Housed inside a very typical looking power generation facility was carbon capture technology, which is designed to capture CO₂ emissions from a point source (in this case, a natural gas power plant) to prevent those emissions from entering the atmosphere and contributing to climate change. 

Although I have worked on capture capture policy and advocacy for several years, this was the first time I had seen the technology up close. There were semipermanent trailers where the tour began, along with huge ducts, scaffolding stretching high into the sky, and a massive metal tower. It all looked like a standard industrial site. But the prospect of public-private partnerships in infrastructure projects to help in the fight against climate change is both noteworthy and important.

The Los Medanos Energy Center demonstration site, owned and run by the company Calpine, is testing and monitoring the success of Calpine’s carbon capture technology. Opportunities like this are important to scale up to commercial carbon capture—some of which will be necessary to meet our climate goals. 

NWF does not generally support carbon capture on power sector projects as there are better ways to decarbonize the power sector, primarily by expanding renewable energy and clean, firm power sources like next-generation geothermal. However, given the Trump administration’s hostility towards renewable energy and their preference for fossil-based projects, carbon capture may play a role in the power sector, especially with natural gas power plants, for the foreseeable future.

Calpine partnered with Ion Energy and the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) to help fund the $25 million project. If successful, the project will capture about 10 tons of CO₂ per day during the 18-month demonstration period. Long term, the plan is for CCS technology at this 678-megawatt power plant to capture as much as 95 percent of carbon emitted. For context, a typical passenger vehicle emits about 4.6 tons of CO₂per year. 

That means every day this facility could prevent over a year’s worth of CO₂ emissions from two cars from entering the atmosphere. This captured CO₂ would then be transported via pipeline to a nearby site where it will be stored in geologic formations deep underground.

In 2024, California included CCS as a strategy in their climate action plan to achieve carbon neutrality by 2045 and to cut emissions by 48 percent by 2030. CCS can help to reduce emissions from hard-to-abate sectors (like steel or cement) in the state and help reach carbon neutrality faster. That said, CCS projects are expensive to build and will require time to reach the scale where the technology is reliable and its impact is felt. This is one reason why federal funding for emerging climate technologies is important. Without the investment from the federal government, projects like this are much harder to get off the ground. 

The Trump administration has made dramatic cuts to federal agencies and grant programs that help invest in climate technologies like carbon capture. In May 2025 the administration canceled 24 clean energy and carbon capture projects worth $3.7 billion, projects that had already been approved by the DOE. The DOE office that awarded those projects has since been dissolved. 

Most recently, the Trump administration has taken funds from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the Inflation Reduction Act meant for carbon capture projects and redirected them to fund existing and formerly closed coal burning power plants. All these changes put the future deployment of carbon capture technologies at risk, and only add to the existing challenges that climate change presents. To meet the challenge of addressing climate change, we need to use every tool accessible to us, including carbon capture technology in hard-to-abate sectors. 

Projects like the one at Los Medanos show what is possible when the government and the private sector work together. Preventing these partnerships will only limit our ability to innovate and solve shared challenges, ultimately slowing our progress in the fight against climate change.