For audio of the press conference, click here, and for reporter questions, click here.
NEW ORLEANS – A new report from the Environmental Integrity Project (EIP) reveals that companies have proposed at least 65 carbon capture and storage projects in Louisiana, the most of any state, plus eleven pipelines to carry carbon dioxide to waste disposal or drilling sites.
The highest concentration of these projects is in southwestern Louisiana, in Cameron Parish, where 11 projects are planned, many to collect and inject underground the carbon dioxide from a cluster of liquefied natural gas (LNG) export terminals that are being built and expanded, according to EIP’s report.
The next most intensely targeted part of the state is Ascension Parish, along the Mississippi River between Baton Rouge and New Orleans, where 10 carbon capture projects are proposed, including near Donaldsonville for the CF Industries ammonia manufacturing plant and an injection well proposed by a Houston startup company, Blue Sky Infrastructure. A public hearing two weeks ago about the Blue Sky project drew intense local protest.
Statewide opposition to carbon capture and sequestration projects is intensifying, with varied communities uniting under the Louisiana CO2 Alliance.
“Residents in these parishes have good reason to be wary – because carbon capture is an untested technology with significant safety risks that has been used mostly to pump billions of dollars in taxpayer subsidies to the oil and gas industry,” said Abel Russ, Director of EIP’s Center for Applied Environmental Science. “Because Louisiana is perforated with thousands of old oil and gas wells, it raises questions about potential leakage when companies inject their pollution underground.”
Renee Savant, President of the Louisiana CO2 Alliance, said: “Louisiana families are being cornered by a carbon capture agenda dressed up as ‘progress’—while landowners are pressured, permits are rushed, and the public is kept in the dark. The Louisiana CO2 Alliance is the platform uniting grassroots across our parishes—not by party, but by principle—to demand transparency, property rights, and real accountability before Louisiana is locked into decades of risk.”
Ashley Gaignard, President and Founder, Rural Roots Louisiana, said: “Industry is holding Ascension Parish hostage – calling poison “progress” and threatening abandonment if we refuse a dangerous carbon capture takeover. This isn’t economic growth; it’s extortion at the expense of our health, land, and lives.”
Robyn Thigpen, Executive Director of Fishermen Involved In Sustaining Our Heritage (FISH) in southwest Louisiana, said: “Fishermen and the people of Cameron Parish are already fighting to survive an onslaught of LNG buildout and regulatory failures that have put industry over people. Carbon capture is just the next scheme to pile more risk onto communities that have already given everything with nothing in return. FISH will not stand down while our waters are sacrificed, our voices are ignored, and our way of life is traded away behind closed doors.”
In October, Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry declared a moratorium on new applications for carbon capture projects in the state because of a growing chorus of protest from local landowners and farmers, concerned about pipelines being built through their properties, and potential leaks, explosions, and health risks. The moratorium, however, does not address the significant number of projects that have already been approved in the state.
Background:
Under the Biden Administration in 2022, the federal government provided billions of dollars in additional taxpayer subsidies for the practice of carbon capture and storage – intended as a method of reducing climate-warming greenhouse gas pollution. These funds inspired more than 270 proposed carbon capture projects across the U.S. After Louisiana, Texas has seen the second most proposals, with at least 48 carbon capture projects proposed.
So far, only about 22 of these projects have been built nationally – two in Louisiana, one in Texas – with most of them at industrial plants that process natural gas or produce ethanol for fuel or ammonia for fertilizer. With the additional federal subsidies provided in 2022, a coal-fired power plant southwest of Houston also re-started an experimental carbon capture system in 2023, after shutting it down for more than three years because it was losing money.
In the Trump Administration’s “One Big Beautiful Bill,” passed last July, Congressional Republicans increased subsidies by 42 percent (to $85 per metric ton) for the most popular form of carbon capture: taking carbon dioxide pollution from industry and pumping it underground to force out more oil and gas.
This process is called “enhanced oil recovery” and it creates more greenhouse gas pollution by pushing out more oil and gas that will be burned or used to manufacture plastics and chemicals, releasing yet more carbon dioxide. Between 80 percent and 90 percent of the carbon capture projects approved for taxpayer subsidies so far have been for “enhanced oil recovery.”
Of the two carbon capture projects operating in Louisiana today, one of them – the Donaldsonville Nitrogen Complex in Ascension Parish – is using the captured carbon dioxide for enhanced oil recovery.
Carbon capture is also a largely untested technology with an uncertain long-term success rate for keeping pollutants safely sealed underground and with risks to public safety.
For example, a carbon pipeline in Sataria, Mississippi burst in February 2023, releasing carbon dioxide that clung low to the ground in an invisible cloud, killing the engines of vehicles and asphyxiating dozens of people. More than 200 people were forced to evacuate and 45 required hospital treatment.
The disposal of carbon dioxide in underground formations in Louisiana is also potentially problematic because the state has had so many oil and gas wells drilled over the decades – some abandoned and in unknown locations – that buried carbon could potentially leak out through the holes, according to research by EIP’s Center for Applied Environmental Science or CAES.
A 2023 report by CAES found that there are about 190,000 abandoned wells in Louisiana, about 23,000 of which were dug before 1953, often with inferior construction. About 13,000 of these old wells lie over rock formations that could potentially be used for carbon sequestration, raising questions about whether buried carbon dioxide could escape out of them.
CAES created this online map of Louisiana to show the locations of the potential carbon capture burial wells in Louisiana and how close they are to the thousands of orphaned and abandoned oil and gas wells.
For a copy of the new report on carbon capture in Louisiana, click here.
Media contact:
Tom Pelton, Environmental Integrity Project (443) 510-2574
The Environmental Integrity Project is America’s environmental watchdog. We hold polluters and governments accountable to protect public health and the environment
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