Environmental groups are scheming to block carbon capture projects despite the technology’s ability to combat climate change.
The fight is on in Louisiana to stop new Class VI injection wells across the state, and it is led by groups that support curbing greenhouse gas emissions.
Class VI wells are used to inject carbon dioxide into deep rock formations for long-term underground storage, which is known as geologic sequestration.
The World Economic Forum declared carbon capture and storage, known as CCS, a key technology for achieving net-zero emissions.
The United States leads the world in carbon capture and storage with more than 15 CCS facilities that have the capacity to capture 0.4% of the nation’s total carbon dioxide emissions, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Another 121 facilities in development, when completed, will create the capacity to capture 3% of annual carbon dioxide emissions.
Environmental groups, citing cost, efficacy and safety issues, are mounting significant opposition to ongoing CCS projects.
Critics say these groups want to block CCS technology because it will extend the extraction and use of fossil fuels in the U.S.
Advocates of CCS projects say environmental groups are stealthily building opposition to new wells and pipelines under the guise of ending carbon emissions when their goal is to eliminate the oil, gas and hydrogen industries.
Groups such as the Sierra Club that oppose fossil fuels are coordinating with local opponents of CCS. The Sierra Club considers CCS an ineffective and environmentally dangerous way to cut carbon emissions.
The organization has rallied against CCS projects and advocates for the total elimination of burning fossil fuels, which they say is “overheating” the planet and causing natural disasters.
“If the oil and gas industry invented a magic wand that eliminated CO2 from the atmosphere and allowed them to continue to produce and for us to use oil and gas, they’d be opposed to that. It’s that simple. It’s just a reflexive ideological opposition to oil and gas production, period,” said Thomas Pyle, president of the Institute for Energy Research and its advocacy arm, the American Energy Alliance, which advocates for fossil fuel production.
Earthworks, one of the environmental groups leading the charge against CCS technology, recently celebrated blocking a Louisiana carbon capture and storage project by harnessing “the growing resistance from communities to CCS technologies and fossil fuel expansion under the guise of climate action.”
Earthworks declined to comment for this report.
Louisiana has become ground zero in the fight over CCS technology.
The state is prime territory for these projects because of its existing oil and gas pipeline infrastructure and a robust energy and manufacturing sector. The state’s geology also favors CCS technology because of the Gulf Coast’s porous rock formations, which advocates say can safely hold captured carbon dioxide underground for thousands of years.
The state has offered incentives for the projects, and the Legislature has provided limited authorization for companies to seize private land for pipelines and storage projects.
It has caused a backlash, spurred in part by environmental nonprofit organizations.
A group of Louisiana landowners, backed by the anti-CCS group Save My Louisiana, is seeking to block the development of Class VI wells, which are designed to store carbon dioxide underground for the long term at depths up to 5,000 feet.
Save My Louisiana activists are warning residents that a state law could require landowners to allow private CCS companies to build pipelines and storage facilities on their property.
“Now they have the authority to show up on your land and say, ‘Hey, I want to put some carbon down in your ground, are you good with that?’ You can either sign it and get some money, or they’re going to take your land away because they can,” retired Air Force Col. Mark Guillory, an activist with Save My Louisiana, recently told residents at a community meeting in Baton Rouge.
Save My Louisiana wants to do more than protect homeowners. The organization warned that the CCS projects threaten the environment.
The group plans to try to block CapturePoint’s CCS project, which would store industrial carbon emissions beneath the 600,000-acre Kisatchie National Forest in Louisiana.
“They want to pump this stuff into Kisatchie National Forest,” Mr. Guillory told Baton Rouge residents. “They haven’t done an environmental study to say whether that’s a good idea or not. But we’re going to sue the Forestry Service over that fact.”
Amid growing opposition from landowners and environmental groups, Gov. Jeff Landry, a Republican, last year imposed an indefinite moratorium on Class VI wells in Louisiana.
“Local governments and citizens, through their local government, have a right to be heard to ensure safety, transparency and local input,” Mr. Landry wrote in an October executive order.
Protests by environmental groups and local residents have blocked CCS projects in Iowa and South Dakota.
Dakota Rural Action, which supports ending fossil fuels in favor of wind, solar and other renewables, has led the fight against CCS projects in South Dakota.
The group calls CCS and the pipelines that transport captured carbon dioxide “a dangerous and failed technology,” and warns that system failures can lead to ruptures that leach toxic metals from rocks and seep into water supplies.
Dakota Rural Action points to a 2020 pipeline rupture in Satartia, Mississippi, that required evacuating the community and hospitalizing 45 people. Residents suffered from severe coughing, nausea, vomiting, dizziness and headaches from a green cloud of gases that hung in the air for hours. An investigation determined that heavy rainfall and a landslide contributed to the pipeline failure and subsequent explosion.
Both the Biden and Trump administrations have championed CCS technology.
President Biden and the Democratic-led Congress provided generous tax benefits, up to $85 per metric ton of captured carbon dioxide, and appropriated $8.2 billion to develop and test CCS technology.
Nearly $3.7 billion in Biden-era grants for CCS development were canceled when Mr. Trump took office, but the president has signaled ongoing support of the technology.
He backed the expansion of CCS tax credits for oil production in his signature law, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. Through swifter permitting processes at the Environmental Protection Agency, his administration enabled faster deployment of CCS projects.
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