[Vision2020] 11-6-23 DeSmog Blog "The Carbon Capture Sector’s Community-Involvement Rhetoric Doesn’t Match Reality"

[Ted Moffett]

An excerpt of this article is copied below.
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Vision2020 Post: Ted Moffett

https://www.desmog.com/2023/11/06/global-ccs-institute-community-engagement-carbon-180-mcfarland-california-air-products-iowa-louisiana-navigtor-co2-ventures/

ByDana Drugmand <https://www.desmog.com/user/dana-drugmand/>
onNov 6, 2023 @ 03:00 PST

Yet amid mounting concerns over health and safety risks of carbon capture
operations, and fears that CCS serves as a lifeline to the fossil fuel
industry, DeSmog finds that communities in California, Iowa and Louisiana
where CCS projects are proposed have limited to no meaningful engagement
with developers or government officials. When residents express adamant
opposition to these projects, developers continue to push their plans
forward, in some cases resorting to legal action to counter public
resistance.

“What we see with a lot of these CCS projects that are currently in
development and where communities are engaging,” is residents telling the
developers ‘no’, Salgado told DeSmog. If Oglesby’s statement about
communities having a real choice were true, he said, “then what we should
see is that developers won’t pursue these projects in these areas.”

Instead, project developers are forging ahead, eager to capitalize on
billions of dollars in government subsidies supporting CCS deployment,
despite the technology’s poor track record of underperforming
<https://www.desmog.com/2023/09/25/fossil-fuel-companies-made-bold-promises-to-capture-carbon-heres-what-actually-happened/>
and
the significant regulatory gaps around CO2 pipelines
<https://www.desmog.com/2023/03/07/ohio-derailment-phmsa-pipeline-transport-hazardous-material-carbon-dioxide/>,
among other issues.

“I do feel that it’s a mad dash to push this forward. It’s not reliable,”
Salgado said. “None of this feels as if it’s being done in an
environmentally just way. It feels like we’re having this stuff just shoved
down our throats.”

Carbon capture and storage (CCS) and the related carbon capture,
utilization, and storage (CCUS) technologies trap some of the carbon
pollution emitted from industrial facilities; after chemically separating
the carbon dioxide (CO2), the gas is compressed and transported, typically
by pipeline, to another location where it is either used for other
applications, in the case of CCUS, or injected deep underground for
storage. The vast majority of currently operating projects in the U.S. use
the captured carbon to drill for more oil in a process called enhanced oil
recovery
<https://www.desmog.com/2023/09/25/how-carbon-capture-and-storage-projects-are-driving-new-oil-and-gas-extraction-globally/>.
Major oil and gas companies are some of the biggest backers of carbon
capture technologies, and the worldwide advocacy group promoting them – the
Global CCS Institute – counts oil majors like Chevron, ExxonMobil, BP,
Shell, and TotalEnergies among its members.

While big polluters publicly tout CCS as a viable climate solution, internally
they acknowledge
<https://www.desmog.com/2023/02/13/exxon-shell-bp-api-concerns-carbon-capture/>
that
it perpetuates their extractive operations and is costly and inefficient.
Many climate and environmental justice advocates say that CCS is an
expensive boondoggle
<https://www.foodandwaterwatch.org/the-carbon-capture-scam/> that entails
risks at every stage of operation, from capture to transport to injection
for supposedly permanent storage. At each of these stages, communities are
battling against CCS companies to voice their opposition to becoming
neighbors to these potentially dangerous operations.
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