What Biden’s Infrastructure Act means for emerging technologies

The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act is a positive sign for emerging technologies in the United States. This note focuses on the law’s significance for emerging technologies: Carbon Capture Utilization and Storage, including Direct Air Capture, low-carbon hydrogen, and small modularized nuclear reactors (SMRs). The act lays important foundations for scaling these early-stage technologies. It includes a clear strategy for how these technologies fit in to wider US decarbonisation goals, flexibility on domestic content rules, and billions of dollars in federal funding, most of it going towards facilitating private sector investment. Those are all positive signs, but these technologies still have a way to go before they can make a material difference to US emissions. Further support has been proposed as part of the Build Back Better Act, which is still being debated in Congress.