What those promoting carbon capture and sequestration cannot either understand or admit to is, even if they can make claims about safety and economic development, that the overall cost to society of subsidizing their efforts exceeds benefits conveyed to society, justifying local populations in rejecting their entreaties.
Increasingly, Louisianans express alarm at the idea of sequestering carbon near or under their back yards. The latest flashpoint comes in Ascension Parish, where unusual bedfellows find themselves moving together to oppose a CCS project called River Parish Sequestration. It is a subsidiary of a firm called Blue Sky Infrastructure managed by Blackstone, a private investment firm comprised of hedge funds.
Part of the opposition comes from the usual leftist suspects who decry any industrial expansion as forfeiting “environmental justice.” But this anti-intellectual screed is joined by the growing conservative opposition in many parts of the state objecting to CCS over issues of safety and property rights, both real and pecuniary.
Setting aside the deficient leftist arguments against the larger industrialization that would come from a CCS project that invites carbon pipeline transport into a facility then converting back from liquid into gas and injecting this underground – disparately negative environmental impact to the demonstrably lower-income areas of the parish’s west bank of the Mississippi River allegedly for racist and classist reasons – RPS tries to argue against the conservative opposition’s positions by claiming a record of safety for this and economic development will flow from it. It’s not wrong, but disingenuously presents its side out of context and incompletely.
All in all, the CCS industry for all of capture, transport, and injection does have a near-spotless record to date, with only a very few bad and fatal accidents (perhaps the worst involved rail, not pipeline, transport). However, the scale of a facility like this is much larger that what was typical until even recently, magnifying risk and the impact of any mistakes.
While the industry will point to this history about getting and keeping carbon underground, keep in mind as well that until recently the “S” in CCS was extremely small, accidental in a sense, and needed almost no transport. That’s because CCS use was almost exclusive to the enhanced oil recovery business. Small amounts can be injected into wells to retrieve hard-to-dislodge deposits, where it then would sit. Until now, the idea of storage of vast quantities of carbon for storage’s sake almost was unknown. There’s little history of the effects of long-term storage of huge quantities, as RPS plans to do.
So, RPS can make a decent argument that, given past history although not scaled similarly to what is on the drawing board, CCS is pretty safe although it might be downplaying the risk somewhat. But what it doesn’t tell people, reviewing the matter holistically, is that even a low level of risk imposes expected costs that exceed benefits that society might derive from this CCS project.
That’s because the whole enterprise begins with RPS and its like trying to grift taxpayers, and it ends with RPS and its like trying to grift taxpayers. The fact is, CCS is an enormously expensive enterprise with costs far in excess of anticipated market-based revenues, demonstrated right from the start in that in building the facility RPS depends upon an 80 percent subsidy of costs from the federal government, courtesy of a green-obsessed, ideologically driven programmatic leftover of the Democrat Pres. Joe Biden era. If completed, it will cost taxpayers $32 million.
And then the operating costs, without government intervention, have prohibitively negative returns on capital. By the end of the year the federal government tax credit program known as 45Q will pay $93 a ton for captured carbon (it’s indexed to inflation starting this year), which RPS won’t avail itself of. But it must buy the captured carbon and arrange from transport and thus absorb costs from collectors, who for most of their captured amount will spend more per ton than this figure. This particularly is the case because much of the low-hanging fruit among cheaper collection sources such as from ammonia, ethanol, and natural gas already has been hooked into EOR activities. Disproportionately, capture will have to come from higher-cost (and much more prevalent by volume) sources such as power generation, hydrogen production, and iron, steel, and cement making. That will boost costs to RPS.
Without the subsidies, little CCS would be forthcoming due to its unprofitable nature, but the tax credit remains in effect for the next few years and thus RPS can argue that economic development by wealth redistribution to it directly in the form of the grant and indirectly from the tax credits that will create business for it will spill over into the parish, even on the poorer west bank side. And, likely from a purely economic standpoint individually it would be cost beneficial, since parish taxpayers only pay a miniscule fraction of the tax credit, although after construction it likely will produce few jobs and not a lot of its revenues would stay in the parish. RPS does say it will kick some money back to the community and the local community college for job training.
But if adding principled worldview to the calculation – that $5 billion will go out the door over the next few years in forgone revenues at the federal level – then there’s plenty of reason to object since this would be a waste of money, with the people allowing large amounts of their money to go into the hands of few for absolutely no good reason. And there is no good reason despite the CCS industry bleating about how its activities would “save” the planet from catastrophic anthropogenic global warming.
For one thing, CCS even under the most optimistic scenario might grab, with its enormous costs attached, a twenty-fifth of all emitted carbon. This barely would make a dent, and there would be far more cost efficient and effective means by which to reduce atmospheric carbon with that $5 billion if it doesn’t stay in people’s pocketbooks.
Yet dwarfing this consideration is that there’s absolutely no imperative to employing this. If in fact CAGW existed, you might build a case that any costs necessary expended on things like CCS to avoid that outcome would be worth it. However, the science never has, and does not now, validate the CAGW myth.
This also obviates any economic advantage derived from the collective hysteria of the CAGW faith that has overtaken leftist politicians in Europe. A final attempt that RPS uses to try to justify project approval is that it can claim carbon market credits with its stored carbon that it then can sell to overseas interests.
The European Union, until late last year, had been on a path to ever-tightening permission for carbon emissions. In 2024, in a move that would discourage the use of such credits, it issued a directive that companies could not call their products “green” or similar appellations if they used carbon credits rather than direct emission reduction in the process.
Since then, the democratic facets of elections and accountability that reinforce the place of reality over ideology have stung the governments behind this. With their publics increasingly restive over CAGW-based policies, slowly they have been walking back deadlines and targets for decarbonization.
Although, as it is, in one sense that trend buttresses the RPS argument. The EU now permits less homegrown carbon reduction and greater use of credits from abroad – but it only dropped that amount from 90 to 85 percent. And, this argument is relevant only if forces of climate realism don’t continue to ascend in influence and push out deadlines and reduce targets even further, resulting in a reduction in credit demand more than compensating for any gains in loosened credit application policy.
In the final analysis, with CCS so economically infeasible, with no guarantee that tax credit supply and carbon credit demand won’t fall and dramatically, and with much uncertainty of the environmental impact and safety of CCS at such large scale nor of any meaningful economic development in Ascension Parish, citizens around the transport and injection points and who live above and drink the water from below and around the storage sites have every reason to consider the costs of the project as exceeding its benefits and to instruct the local and state policy-makers involved to reject the RPS project.
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