On Friday, the Office of Inspector General at the Department of Energy (DOE) released an unusually urgent report underscoring a number of problems with a “clean coal” project in Texas and calling on Department officials to cut its funding before a looming May deadline. The OIG’s report about Summit Power’s Texas Clean Energy Project is an illustrative example of the pitfalls of continuing to invest in Carbon Capture and Sequestration (CCS). To save taxpayers money, as OIG urges, DOE should learn from its past mistakes, heed the report’s warnings, and withdraw all future funding for Texas Clean Energy Project.

The DOE has been investing in carbon capture technology since at least 1997 when it began funneling money into research and development. DOE created the Clean Coal Power Initiative in 2002 to subsidize the construction of “major” demonstration projects in the hope of blazing a trail that the private market would follow. In February 2010, as part of CCPI’s third round of funding, DOE decided to award the Texas Project $350 million, which later increased to $450 million. Since then, as the report chronicles, the project has failed on almost all accounts.

The original plan for the Texas Project consisted of four separate phases: Phase 1 was developing the project design, schedule, etc. to secure enough construction financing by December 2010. With the necessary funds in hand, it was supposed to progress to Phase 2, which was completing the project design and beginning construction. But that never happened. Instead, as the report notes, “…as of February 2016, more than 5 years later, the necessary financing had not been secured.”

In the interim, the total project cost spiked from about $1.9 billion to $3.9 billion. As a “risk mitigation measure,” DOE had originally set limits on how much it would provide for each phase. The limit for Phase 1 was $15 million. In the face of the project’s failure to launch, DOE decided to ignore their self-imposed limits and shift a sizeable portion of the award to Phase 1. To date, DOE has spent $116 million on the Texas Clean Energy Project.

That drew sharp criticism from the Inspector General: “…the Department has taken actions that increased its financial risk without the assurances that the Project would succeed.” After five years, as prospects for the project have certainly diminished, the report concludes that it is time to cut off funding. The next extension for more funding expires on May 13, which is why the Inspector General urgently released this interim report while it continues its investigation.

DOE has clearly made a number of mistakes and been a terrible steward of taxpayer money, but it can salvage some measure of responsibility by moving forward on the recommendations in the Inspector General report, preventing $240 million more from being wasted on this failed project.