Carbon capture use and storage is at the center of the national climate policy debate, promoted by the oil and gas industry, the private sector, and even some environmental organizations as a solution to the climate crisis.
The federal infrastructure package that President Biden recently signed into law appropriates more than $10.3 billion for the nationwide buildout of carbon capture infrastructure. Preliminary deals on the Build Back Better Act also contain expansions of the primary federal tax credit incentivizing carbon capture (45Q Tax Credit). The fossil fuel industry is targeting Louisiana as an emerging hub for carbon capture, mainly because of the large concentration of industrial facilities that emit carbon dioxide in the stretch of land between New Orleans and Baton Rouge.
While Louisiana must move quickly and aggressively in pursuit of climate change solutions, deploying carbon capture to reach net-zero emissions is not the answer. As the authors of a new Center for Progressive Reform policy brief note, it is an unproven climate strategy, delays the green transition, and foists environmental burdens on historically disadvantaged communities.
Carbon capture is an energy-intensive, cost-prohibitive, and risk-laden process that involves capturing carbon dioxide from industrial smokestacks, compressing it, and sending it through pressurized pipelines to injection wells, where it is sent underground either for long-term storage (carbon capture and storage, or CCS) or, more commonly, for use (carbon capture and use, or CCU) in an extractive process called enhanced oil recovery.
Putting aside the climate costs associated with using captured carbon dioxide to extract oil in depleted fields, carbon capture equipment has only been able to capture a small fraction of overall carbon dioxide emissions. The world's largest post-combustion carbon capture project, the Petra Nova project in southeast Texas, approximated it would have captured as much as 90 percent of the plant's overall carbon dioxide emissions; in actuality, it only captured 7 percent, all of which was used for enhanced oil recovery.
Claims of "permanent" storage of injected carbon dioxide from CCU or CCS are also unfounded. A recent report from the National Energy Technology Laboratory estimates that between 30 and 40 percent of the carbon dioxide used for enhanced oil recovery remains underground after each injection cycle. With CCS, stored carbon dioxide must be adequately contained and regulated for thousands of years to come — and too many risks and uncertainties are associated with this relatively new technology.
Louisiana's Department of Natural Resources estimates the state has more than 4,000 abandoned or orphaned oil and gas wells. These wells create even more pathways by which carbon dioxide can leak back into the atmosphere.
Carbon capture will not help contain global heating to 1.5 degrees Celsius, the goal of the Glasgow Climate Pact from the 26th United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26) and the United Nations Paris Agreement on Climate Change. An investment in carbon capture will result in the expansion of the fossil fuel industries and will prolong the state's dependence on fossil fuels by enabling the largest sources of air pollution to continue polluting indefinitely while simultaneously requiring those sources to use more fossil fuels in the process.
Investing in carbon capture rather than carbon-free energy sources, like geothermal, solar, and wind power, will increase total social costs, including continued fossil fuel use, more air pollution and oil mining, and continued carbon dioxide emissions (both in the short and long term). The White House Environmental Justice Advisory Committee recently concluded that carbon capture won't benefit marginalized communities.
Exacerbating climate injustice
Deploying carbon capture in Louisiana would, in fact, exacerbate climate injustice by foisting the risks and burdens of this technology on low-income communities of color.
The industrial corridor in Louisiana targeted for carbon capture is home to more than 200 oil and gas refineries, petrochemical plants, and other industrial chemical facilities that release significant quantities of carbon dioxide and other harmful pollutants. Formerly known as "Plantation Country" because it held more than 500 sugarcane plantations, the corridor is known today as "Cancer Alley" because decades of poor air and water quality from industrial pollution have heightened cancer rates and other health ailments in the region.
The predominantly Black, Latino, and low-income communities in Cancer Alley and the Indigenous and Asian American communities near the coast bear the brunt of these poor health outcomes. Cancer risks from air toxics in Cancer Alley disproportionately affect historically marginalized communities, with more significant impacts skewing toward the poorest communities and those with the highest percentage of Black people, one study found.
Forensic Architecture, a research agency based at Goldsmiths, University of London, aptly points out that in Cancer Alley, "environmental degradation and cancer risk manifest as the byproducts of colonialism and slavery." Now, these same communities stand to face continued degradation from carbon capture and its associated pipeline infrastructure. They are being asked to do the unthinkable: Trust a set of industries that have historically polluted their air, land, and water, so much so that it has made them sick and shortened their lives.
Toward true climate solutions
True climate solutions don't further endanger environmental justice communities.
To protect the health of the roughly 1.7 million individuals living in Cancer Alley, those in other communities overburdened by pollution, coastal areas, and other environmentally fragile zones in Louisiana:
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Katlyn Schmitt | December 1, 2021
Carbon capture use and storage is at the center of the national climate policy debate, promoted by the oil and gas industry, the private sector, and even some environmental organizations as a solution to the climate crisis. The federal infrastructure package that President Biden recently signed into law appropriates more than $10.3 billion for the nationwide buildout of carbon capture infrastructure. The fossil fuel industry is targeting Louisiana as an emerging hub for carbon capture, mainly because of the large concentration of industrial facilities that emit carbon dioxide in the stretch of land between New Orleans and Baton Rouge. While Louisiana must move quickly and aggressively in pursuit of climate change solutions, deploying carbon capture to reach net-zero emissions is not the answer. A new Center for Progressive Reform policy brief has more on the subject.
Robin Kundis Craig | November 23, 2021
Confirming expectations, the Supreme Court on Monday unanimously denied Mississippi’s claim that Tennessee is stealing its groundwater. If Mississippi wants to pursue its groundwater battle with Tennessee, it will have to file a new complaint with the court asking for an equitable apportionment of the Middle Claiborne Aquifer, which lies beneath Mississippi, Tennessee, and other states.
Robin Kundis Craig | November 23, 2021
Less than two months after oral argument, in its first interstate groundwater case, the Supreme Court unanimously decided that Mississippi must rely on a doctrine known as equitable apportionment if it wants to sue Tennessee over the shared Middle Claiborne Aquifer. In an opinion by Chief Justice John Roberts, the court squarely rejected Mississippi's claim that Tennessee is stealing Mississippi's groundwater, noting that it had "'consistently denied' the proposition that a State may exercise exclusive ownership or control of interstate waters." As expected, the court's opinion in Mississippi v. Tennessee is short -- 12 pages, half of which recount the long history of the case. Nevertheless, in this first opinion about states' rights to interstate aquifers, the court made three important decisions that are likely to guide future interstate disputes over natural resources.
Karen Sokol | November 22, 2021
During a historic hearing before the U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Reform on October 28, the executives of ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell, BP, and the American Petroleum Institute (API), refused to admit to their decades-long climate disinformation campaign that is now well-documented in publicly available documents uncovered by journalists and researchers. If that weren’t enough, the executives continued to deny climate science under oath, albeit with a slight twist from their previous disinformation campaign. Instead of denying the science establishing that fossil fuels are driving the climate crisis, they’re now denying the science establishing the urgent need for a rapid transition away from fossil fuels. In other words, they’re still lying -- a strategy that was on full display in this blockbuster hearing.
Catalina Gonzalez, Maggie Dewane | November 18, 2021
Despite President Biden’s bold climate commitments at home and COP26, his administration and Congress have much more work to address climate change and to make climate justice a reality.
Emily Ranson, Marcha Chaudry | November 16, 2021
Although vaccination rates continue to rise and coverage on COVID-19 is fading away from prominent news dashboards, our rates are still higher than in summer 2020. While we still adapt to living and working with COVID-19, we must prepare for future public health emergencies so we do not lose another year figuring out our response.
Daniel Farber | November 15, 2021
Our system of environmental regulation divides up regulation of a single substance based on each of its environmental impacts. Thus, the regulatory system sees the "trees," not the "forest." That muddies the waters when we are talking about regulatory priorities, strategies, and long-term goals. It can also lead to framing issues in ways that may weaken environmentalist arguments, since the various harms of a substance or activity get fragmented into different silos. Fossil fuels are a case in point.
Richard Pierce, Jr. | November 11, 2021
Effective climate change mitigation depends critically on the ability to substitute electricity for gasoline as the primary transportation fuel and to substitute carbon-free fuels for fossil fuels as the country’s primary source of electricity. But the nation’s electricity transmission grid is woefully inadequate to accomplish these important tasks, and the U.S. regulatory system renders it impossible for regulators and clean energy advocates to implement the necessary expansion of grid capacity. Most sources of carbon-free electricity are located a long distance away from the places where most people live and work. Studies indicate that the United States can provide carbon-free electricity to major population centers only by adding transmission lines to the grid.
Daniel Farber | November 8, 2021
Late Friday, the House passed President Biden's infrastructure bill, the Build Back Better law. As The Washington Post aptly observed, the bill is the biggest climate legislation to ever move through Congress. It also attracted key support from some Republicans, which was essential to passing it in both houses of Congress. Biden is pushing for an even bigger companion bill, but the infrastructure bill is a huge victory in its own right. One major area of spending is transportation. Some of that goes for roads and bridges. But as The Washington Post reports, there's a lot of money for rail and mass transit.