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’s led by some of the same groups who support curbing greenhouse gases.
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 in reaching the goal of net-zero emissions.
The United States leads the world in carbon capture storage with more than 15 CCS facilities that have the capacity to capture 0.4% of the nation’s total CO2 emissions, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Another 121 facilities are in development that, when completed, would create the capacity to capture 3 percent of annual CO2 emissions.
But environmental groups are mounting significant opposition to ongoing CCS projects.
They cite cost, efficacy and safety issues. But critics of opposing groups say they want to block CCS technology because it will extend the extraction and use of fossil fuels in the U.S.
Advocates for 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.
Anti-fossil fuel groups, including the Sierra Club, are coordinating with local CCS opposition. 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 believe 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 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 story.
Louisiana has become ground zero in the fight over CCS technology.
The state is prime territory for these projects thanks to its existing oil and gas pipeline infrastructure and a robust energy and manufacturing sector. The state’s geology also favors CCS technology thanks to the Gulf Coast’s porous rock formations that advocates say can hold captured CO2 safely underground for thousands of years.
The state has offered incentives for the projects, and the legislature provided limited authorization for companies to seize private land for pipelines and storage projects.
But it’s 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 provide longterm storage of CO2 up to 5,000 feet underground.
Save My Louisiana ctivists are warning residents that a state law can force 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 Colonel 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 spurred by landowners and environmental groups, Gov. Jeff Landry last year imposed an indefinite moratorium in Louisiana on Class VI wells.
“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 warn system failures can lead to ruptures that leach toxic metals out of rocks and seep into water supplies.
They point to a 2020 pipeline rupture in Sataria, Mississippi, that required evacuating the community and sent 45 people to the hospital. 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 rains 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 Democrat-led Congress provided generous tax benefits, up to $85 per metric ton of captured CO2, and also appropriated $8.2 billion to develop and test CCS technology.
Nearly $3.7 billion in Biden-era grants for CCS development were cancelled when Mr. Trump took office. But the president has signaled ongoing support for the technology.
He backed the expansion of CCS tax credits for oil production in his signature law, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. Through new, swifter permitting processes at the EPA, his administration enabled faster deployment of CCS projects.
