September 27, 2026 - Litigation over the EPA’s rollback of Biden-era power plant emission rules will likely put the Trump administration in the position of poking holes in a technology it has, at other times, incentivized and promoted.

The dispute over carbon capture and sequestration could also rehash highly technical, often speculative financial arguments that have been tabled before — except this time with the government arguing the technology isn’t economically feasible, rather than that it is, as the Biden administration did.

The Environmental Protection Agency’s recent final rule unwinds a 2024 standard that required coal and new natural gas-fired power plants to dramatically cut their carbon emissions. Under the 2024 rule, the agency said carbon capture and sequestration — capturing and storing releases from burning coal rather than letting them escape into the air — was the best technology for plants to reduce emissions.

But carbon capture doesn’t meet the Clean Air Act’s definition of “best system of emissions reduction,” which requires that a technology be both effective at cutting emissions and available at a cost that doesn’t bring on extreme economic hardship, said Matthew Leopold, who served as EPA general counsel in the first Trump administration.

“The idea that every coal plant in America could bolt on CCS like you would a scrubber — that’s not the case,” Leopold, now a partner at Holland & Knight LLP, said in an interview. “So the Biden EPA’s version of the rule failed to comply with the legal standard, that there’s technology that exists that’s been adequately demonstrated and is cost effective.”

In her dissent in West Virginia v. EPA, in which the Supreme Court found the agency can’t compel a nationwide pivot away from fossil fuels, Justice Elena Kagan conceded that the Clean Air Act compels the agency to “take account of both costs and varied ‘nonair’ impacts (on health, the environment, and the supply of energy).”

Leopold’s view matches President Donald Trump’s EPA, which said in the new rule that a system that captures 90% of the carbon dioxide from a power plant — the level laid out by the Biden rule — hasn’t been adequately demonstrated, and its costs are “not reasonable.”

Moreover, a large network of pipelines and sequestration facilities would have to be built, and that’s unlikely to happen before the Jan. 1, 2032 compliance date established by the Biden rule, the EPA said.

Prior Support

But even as the EPA has queried the feasibility of carbon capture, the Trump administration has supported it.

Trump’s 2025 tax and spending law expanded the section 45Q tax credit, which offers subsidies of $85 to $180 per ton for companies that capture and store carbon dioxide.

Some states and Congressional lawmakers have said that move has been undermined by the EPA’s cancellation of the Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program, the mechanism the federal government uses to confirm that carbon is being stored.

The EPA has also tried to clear the backlog of applications for underground CO2 injection wells — the last stage of the carbon capture process — by allowing states like Texas and West Virginia to make permitting decisions.

“This administration first insisted that any power plant pollution rules could use only on-site pollution controls,” said Trevor Higgins, senior vice president of energy and environment at the Center for American Progress. “Now they insist that there are no on-site pollution controls that are worth the expense when ignoring the value of the human lives it would save.”

Despite its occasional support, the Trump administration’s decision to point to carbon capture as unfeasible in its justification for revoking the Biden rule is poised to be scrutinized.

The Natural Resources Defense Council and Clean Air Task Force on Sept. 17 asked the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit to review the Trump administration’s rule.

Both groups say the Trump rule uses flawed math and iffy assumptions to calculate costs, and even then still shows 90% carbon capture to be available at a reasonable cost, according to comments filed last year.

Flawed Math?

The EPA’s calculations include a capacity factor assumption that flies in the face of the evidence, an incorrect suggestion on whether tax credits should be included in cost analyses, the “complete disregard” of the benefits of addressing climate change, and an arbitrary comparison to previous findings about how reasonable the costs are, the groups wrote.

The Biden EPA amassed an extensive scientific and technical record supporting the feasibility of carbon capture, examining technology installed at plants across the world, Meredith Hankins, federal climate legal director at NRDC, said in an interview before her organization filed its petition for review.

That review included close scrutiny of the feasibility and affordability questions, Hankins said.

“It’s not like these rules were requiring every single power plant in the country to install CCS,” Hankins said. “They were actually quite reasonable; the standards for coal plants were designed around expected retirement dates. So if a plant was expected to retire before 2039, they didn’t have to install CCS.”

Some of the cost arguments that may arise in court rest on speculative financial forecasts about how power plant operators will behave in response to different incentives. The NRDC and Clean Air Task Force comments claim that once a plant goes to the expense of installing carbon capture, it will have a financial incentive to use it as much as possible.

“This situation may be an example of being careful what you ask for,” said Steve Solow, former chief of the Justice Department’s environmental crime section.

The Trump White House has supported the ending of Chevron deference when it disagrees with prior administrations’ interpretations of what the law requires, but by the same token, courts no longer have to give deference to the current EPA’s interpretation either, said Solow, now an environmental law professor at Pace University’s environmental law program.

“Instead, the administration will have to convince a judge that the administration’s view is the best reading of what the law requires, and not just a permissible one,” he said.