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I'm assuming tax payers will be on the hook to give oil corporations billions of dollars in "carbon credits" for capturing the carbon that they would otherwise have otherwise polluted in the course of their petroleum profiteering.

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As they should. That's the whole point of carbon credits. If you produce energy without producing CO2, you should get credit for that.

No. Carbon credits are meant to create a market for the right to emit carbon dioxide, ideally where the total credits are fixed and reducing per year. What you're talking about are carbon offsets, which in turn increase the the total pool of credits per year. Ideally, these offsets permanently lock an equivalent amount of CO2 away in some form (permanent forests, etc.). But increasingly, they do nothing of the sort.

Your example of handling CO2 emissions from hydrogen reserves is a case in point.

If the CO2 emissions produce energy that funges against carbon intensive energy, it is a net benefit. The arithmetic here really isn't hard.

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