The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (Recovery Act; P.L. 111-5 , enacted February 17, 2009) provided $3.4 billion for carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) projects and activities at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). The large and rapid influx of funding for industrial-scale CCS projects was intended to accelerate development and demonstration of CCS in the United States. Recovery Act funding represented the lion's share of CCS support at DOE in the six-year period from FY2010 through FY2015. By comparison, DOE separately allotted a total of approximately $2.3 billion over the same time period to CCS-related activities from annual appropriations—not Recovery Act funding—under its coal program activities within the Office of Fossil Energy. Authority to spend Recovery Act funds expired on September 30, 2015. Of the $3.4 billion allocated for CCS activities, approximately $1.4 billion went unspent as of the 2015 spending deadline. The largest portion of the unspent funds, $795 million, was intended for DOE's flagship CCS project, FutureGen, which DOE suspended in February 2015. However, several other large CCS demonstration projects were canceled, suspended, or failed to spend all of their Recovery Act funding before the deadline. This report provides a preliminary assessment of Recovery Act-funded CCS projects and discusses possible factors that led to project delay, suspension, or cancellation within the context of DOE's broader CCS effort. Recovery Act funding was intended, in part, to help DOE achieve its research, development, and demonstration (RD&D) goals as outlined in the department's 2010 Carbon Dioxide Capture and Storage RD&D Roadmap . DOE states that the mission for the DOE Office of Fossil Energy is "to ensure the availability of ultra-clean (near-zero emissions), abundant, low-cost domestic energy from coal to fuel economic prosperity, strengthen energy security, and enhance environmental quality." Over the past several years, the DOE Fossil Energy Research and Development Program increasingly shifted activities performed under its coal program toward emphasizing CCS as the main focus. For example, the coal program represented between 60% and 70% of total Fossil Energy Research and Development appropriations from FY2010 to FY2015—even without Recovery Act funding—indicating that CCS has come to dominate coal RD&D at DOE. This development reflects DOE's view that "there is a growing consensus that steps must be taken to significantly reduce [greenhouse gas] emissions from energy use throughout the world at a pace consistent to stabilize atmospheric concentrations of [carbon dioxide], and that CCS is a promising option for addressing this challenge." Congress has long been interested in the future of CCS as a mitigation strategy for lowering global emissions of carbon dioxide (CO 2 ). Since FY2008, it has appropriated more than $7 billion for CCS activities at DOE. Several bills introduced in the 114 th Congress address CCS directly or indirectly (e.g., S. 601 , S. 1283 , H.R. 3392 , and others). The Obama Administration has promulgated rules on CO 2 emissions from current and future fossil fuel-burning power plants and entered into a global agreement to limit CO 2 emissions. Congress remains divided over those executive branch decisions. DOE, however, has continued to embrace CCS as part of the Administration's strategy to reduce CO 2 emissions from power plants: Roughly one-third of U.S. carbon emissions come from power plants and other large point sources. DOE is committed to enabling the safe and permanent storage and utilization of CO 2 captured from these sources. Building on available first generation technologies, next generation carbon capture and storage (CCS) technologies or carbon dioxide utilization technologies, expected to become commercially available in the mid-2020s, will help put us on a path to a clean energy option for a world currently dependent on fossil fuels for 80% of its energy. The Recovery Act provided a de facto doubling of appropriations for CCS RD&D from enactment until the end of FY2015. A preliminary assessment of Recovery Act-funded CCS projects might help to inform lawmakers about factors that affect the rate of progress of developing and demonstrating CCS technology. Understanding these factors also might help to clarify the potential for CCS as a greenhouse-gas (GHG) mitigation strategy as Congress debates whether and how to reduce CO 2 emissions from large, stationary sources. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA's) final rule for reducing CO 2 emissions from new fossil fuel power plants, part of the Administration's Clean Power Plan (CPP), found newly constructed power plants incorporating partial CCS to be the Best System of Emission Reduction (BSER). EPA determined that the BSER is technically feasible and available at reasonable cost. EPA based its claim, in part, on an example of demonstrated, full-scale operations in the electricity-generating industry, as well as on other smaller projects that are reasonably predictive of results at full scale. In a separate rule, also part of the CPP, EPA found that CCS was not the BSER for existing power plants. Several of the projects cited by EPA in the final rule received Recovery Act funding and are discussed below. The project cited in most detail to support EPA's final rule, however, was Boundary Dam, a Canadian venture that is the world's only full-scale, fully integrated, and currently operating power plant with CCS. The Boundary Dam project received about $240 million from the Canadian federal government; the overall cost was about $1.3 billion, according to one source. None of the Recovery Act-supported power plant demonstration projects discussed in this report are currently operating; however, EPA asserts in its final rule that the projects support the conclusion that CCS is technically feasible. Technical feasibility is just one factor of many that determine whether a CCS demonstration project successfully reaches its goal of producing electricity and capturing CO 2 at commercial scale. Some of the Recovery Act-supported projects cited in the final rule did not meet their original schedules and were not able to expend their full Recovery Act awards prior to the spending deadline, although they still may become operational. One project cited in the final rule, the AEP Mountaineer project, was canceled in 2011, well before the scheduled operation date of 2015. FutureGen, arguably DOE's flagship CCS demonstration project, was not cited in EPA's final rule as an example demonstrating technical feasibility for CCS. FutureGen was canceled in 2015 after spending only 20% of a nearly $1 billion Recovery Act award. In its final rule, EPA states that implementing partial CCS as the BSER is likely to boost future research and development in CCS technologies. Further, the boost would make CCS implementation even more efficacious and cost-effective. That may be the case; however, this report touches on some of the other issues that affected a number of large, Recovery Act-supported CCS demonstration projects. These issues, as well as the outcomes from promulgation of EPA's final rule, will likely continue to shape the outlook for CCS commercialization and deployment. Table 1 shows the DOE Office of Fossil Energy spending from FY2010 through FY2016, including the amounts provided by the Recovery Act. In the table, Recovery Act programs are organized under the CCS Demonstrations category. CCS-related programs funded by annual appropriations apart from the Recovery Act are organized under the Coal CCS and Power Systems category. The remainder of Fossil Energy spending is organized under Other Fossil Energy R&D. DOE changed the program structure for coal after FY2010, renaming and consolidating program areas. In Table 1 , the Coal CCS and Power Systems bottom line total is provided for FY2010, but the amounts for individual programs are not provided for that year because of the reorganization. Recovery Act funding supported four main categories of activities: (1) FutureGen; (2) the Clean Coal Power Initiative (CCPI); (3) Industrial Carbon Capture and Storage (ICCS); and (4) Site Characterization, Training, and Program Direction. FutureGen, CCPI, and ICCS garnered the bulk of Recovery Act funds for CCS ($3.32 billion, or 98%). Funding was made available as a one-time appropriation, but DOE had authority to spend Recovery Act funds through FY2015. Accordingly, Table 1 shows the Recovery Act funding amounts in one column for 2009, but those funds were available through FY2015. Zeroes in the columns for FY2010 through FY2015 indicate that no new Recovery Act funds were made available during those years. However, DOE continued to fund other CCS programs and activities with regular appropriations in each of those years, as shown by the rows in the table below Recovery Act programs. Under the 2010 DOE CCS Roadmap , and with the large infusion of funding from the Recovery Act, DOE's goal has been to develop the technologies that will allow for commercial-scale demonstration in both new and retrofitted power plants and industrial facilities by 2020. The DOE 2011 strategic plan set a more specific target: to bring at least five commercial-scale CCS demonstration projects online by 2016. The DOE 2014-2018 strategic plan is less specific, stating that next-generation CCS technologies, available sometime in the 2020s, would put the United States on a path toward a clean-energy option for the world. In its FY2016 budget justification, DOE stated that the CCS and Power Systems research and development (R&D) program "supports secure, affordable, and environmentally acceptable near-zero emissions fossil energy technologies through research, development, and demonstration (RD&D) to improve the performance of advanced CCS technologies."