The Senate finally passed the $700 billion bailout package today after significant modifications were made to the original 3-page proposal submitted by Henry Paulson (the final version is 451 pages long). The bill has large sections devoted to providing tax credits for companies investing in carbon capture and sequestration technologies. A local PDF copy of the bill is available here. I definitely do not consider myself capable of understanding Federal regulatory material and will wait for the experts to analyze the document line by line. But from what I could understand, section 45Q of the document provides a tax credit of US$20 per ton of carbon dioxide that is stored in geological formations and US$10 per ton of carbon dioxide buried for EOR purposes. These figures are to be compared with the IPCC estimates of US$30-71 per ton of CO₂ for pulverized coal plants and US$14-53 per ton of CO₂ for plants using Integrated Gasification Combined Cycle technologies (source: Table TS.10 of the IPCC Special Report on Carbon Capture and Sequestration).

Gov. Kathleen Sebelius of Kansas has signed the T. Boone Pickens Energy Independence Pledge which calls for the enactment of an Energy Independence Plan by the next president of the United States in the first 100 days of their administration. The so-called Pickens Plan proposes to tap into the wind and natural gas resources in the United States to reduce the dependence on foreign oil. While the Pickens plan itself has been subject to much criticism (and Gov. Sebelius notes that there are aspects of the plan she has concerns with), demanding an aggressive push towards energy independence is definitely a step in the forward direction. The official press release is on the Governor’s website.