Here’s why:
While expensive technology does exist to capture CO2 (albeit using an additional 20-30% more energy to do so), there is no approved place to store the massive amounts of compressed CO2 that would be generated. Nor is there the pipeline infrastructure to transport the CO2.
Even where CO2 is used for enhanced oil recovery (e.g., Texas), there is no assurance that the CO2 even stays underground — i.e., CO2 injected underground could easily leak to the atmosphere or into groundwater (which would be acidified).
For more on the financial, physical and political impossibility of carbon capture and storage read this.
Now here’s the kicker: EPA is throwing the CCS bone to the coal industry because it knows CCS will never happen. Part of the financial-physical-political impossibilities of CCS is that the enviers will NIMBY it to death. if you think the Keystone XL pipeline is a circus, wait until CCS pipelines and underground storage areas are mapped out.
Norway has just cancelled it’s CCS project after spending around 2Bn USD over 6 years and still no progress. What does the EPA think is out there that can do this?
I’d think that CO2 used for resource extraction would wind up back in the atmosphere, which is a good place for it. CO2 cycling is part of the planet’s energy cycle for life.
CO2 becomes toxic at levels far exceeding anything humans can influence. Its warming effect is negligible among the much stronger forcings in the climate(s)/weather systems. [Gamecock, the climate(s) bit is for you.]
Mankind’s use of fossil fuels simply releases the very diffuse sunlight energy converted by plants, that has been concentrated and stored by earlier geologic processes over many millions of years back into the biosphere. And its release now is to the benefit of all plant life.
This means that Carbon Capture and Storage, CCS, is a physically difficult and very costly way to try to throw away comparatively miniscule quantities of useful plant food.