Most professionals in clean energy finance focus on doing deals. Cynthia Taylor has done plenty of that, but she has also taken the additional step of writing about the field. Her published research on carbon capture and storage has appeared in both an industry journal and a leading legal review, and the work draws on her own experience underwriting energy transition investments at the federal level.
Taylor's first widely circulated piece of public scholarship was published in Carbon Capture Journal, an international publication that covers technical and policy developments in carbon capture, transport, and storage. The article appeared in the journal's March and April 2023 issue, Issue 92, under the title The Texas Solution to Net-Zero. Taylor wrote it as a doctoral candidate at Southern Methodist University, drawing on her ongoing research into the conditions needed to deliver clean energy on the Texas grid.
The argument in the piece is straightforward. Texas has often been viewed as a fossil fuel state, but Taylor lays out a case that it is in fact uniquely positioned to lead the country's energy transition. The Texas Gulf region holds one of the largest concentrations of carbon emissions in the United States, with a heavy footprint of fossil fuel and petrochemical operations. That same region also sits on top of significant geologic storage capacity in the form of saline formations and depleted oil and gas reservoirs, and it has decades of pipeline infrastructure already built. Combined, these features make the region a natural fit for carbon capture and storage at scale.
Taylor goes on to walk through the policy levers that make this transition financially achievable. She covers the Inflation Reduction Act's expansion of the Section 45Q tax credit, which raised the credit for permanently stored carbon from fifty dollars per ton to eighty five dollars per ton in saline formations, and the credit for carbon used in enhanced oil recovery from thirty five to sixty dollars per ton. She examines the role of securitization funding, modeled on the bonds Texas issued after winter storm Uri, as a way to flatten the cost of decarbonization for ratepayers. And she points to state policy precedents like Wyoming's HB 200, which allows utilities to recover the cost of carbon capture retrofits from ratepayers, as a template that could accelerate Texas investment.
The piece is grounded in concrete numbers. Two coal power plants and twenty four gas power plants in the region, emitting fifteen million and thirty one point two million tons of carbon per year respectively, are identified as candidates for retrofit over the next ten to fifteen years. ERCOT data on the Texas grid mix is also cited. The article draws as well on a Great Plains Institute atlas of carbon and hydrogen hubs and a Rhodium Group analysis of the Inflation Reduction Act.
The second piece of public scholarship is a co-authored law review article. Drake Law Review, the flagship journal of Drake University Law School in Iowa, has listed in its forthcoming Volume 72, Number 3, 2025 issue an article by Cynthia L. Taylor and James W. Coleman titled Carbon Capture and Storage: The Key to a Net-Zero Economy. Drake Law Review has published since 1951 and is among the more frequently cited legal periodicals in the country. Its forthcoming issue places the Taylor and Coleman piece alongside articles by other established scholars writing on evidence law and family law.
The pairing of authors is itself notable. James W. Coleman is a recognized energy law scholar whose work on energy infrastructure, pipeline regulation, and cross-border energy issues has appeared in major law reviews. A co-authored piece on carbon capture and storage with him places Taylor's work in the broader academic conversation about how the United States gets to a net-zero economy through legal and regulatory tools alongside private investment.
The combination of an industry journal article and a law review article gives Taylor's research footprint range. Carbon Capture Journal reaches a readership of energy company executives, government officials, engineering firms, consultants, and investors. Drake Law Review reaches legal scholars, judges, practitioners, and policy advisors. Between them, the audiences cover most of the people who will end up shaping how carbon capture and storage gets deployed in the United States.
Beyond the publications themselves, the research connects clearly to her professional work. Her time as a Senior Investment Officer at the Department of Energy's Loan Programs Office Carbon Management team gave her a front row seat to the kinds of deals her articles describe. Her current role at TAE Technologies, working on the financing of fusion energy, sits in the same broader question her scholarship addresses, which is how to finance the technologies that get us to a net-zero economy. The writing and the work are clearly part of the same project.
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