Carbon Capture, Utilization, and Storage: Emerging Legal Issues and Frameworks
Part 2: Property Rights in the Storage Reservoir
This session examines the property law issues central to CCUS development, focusing on pore-space ownership, subsurface conflicts, exploration rights, and liability for fluid or pressure migration.
Credit(s)
1.2
Duration
62 minutes
November 18, 2025
About this course
While the One Big Beautiful Bill Act restricted the availability of numerous production tax credits, it expanded the tax credit under Section 45Q of the Internal Revenue Code by creating parity for utilization and sequestration projects. Despite the withdrawal of the U.S. from the Paris Agreement and the proposed recission of rules that would have required carbon capture and sequestration at certain power generation facilities, enthusiasm for carbon capture, utilization, and storage (CCUS) appears to be increasing. CCUS is now part of many proposals for low carbon datacenter development, expansion of enhanced oil and gas recovery projects, and other industrial development—reflecting a shift from viewing CCUS solely as a decarbonization tool to recognizing its potential as a source of value for carbon-emitting industries.
Development of CCUS projects, however, raises complex legal and regulatory questions that span environmental and natural resources law, tax and financial regulation, real property rights, and evolving commercial standards. This three-part webinar series will examine the legal frameworks governing CCUS projects and provide analyses of current developments in regulation, government incentives, pore-space ownership, liability, contracting, and local government opposition. Building on The Foundation’s prior CCUS programming, the series will provide attendees with a deeper understanding of the legal structure of this rapidly advancing field.
Part 2 of the series will survey the property law issues involved in developing CCUS projects. These include determining which party owns the rights to conduct CCUS in each needed tract of land, the potential interactions with other subsurface activities and ways of managing potential conflicts, and the rights needed to conduct subsurface exploration. This part will also cover potential liability for subsurface trespass or nuisance resulting from the migration of pressure or fluids beyond the boundaries of a CCUS project and the contractual and regulatory avenues for managing that risk.