It was a muggy morning in late April when a handful of local residents and grassroots organizers huddled in a church parking lot to strategize, before knocking on doors with information about the latest environmental threat facing St Rose, a predominantly Black community in Louisiana’s “Cancer Alley”.
It was not the first time Kimbrelle Eugene Kyereh had campaigned for better regulation of the choking sprawl of fossil fuel and petrochemical facilities that surround St Rose – and countless other communities up and down the Mississippi River.
But this marked the first time residents have grappled with a toxic chemical facility that its operators claim to be a clean energy innovator and that stands to benefit from taxpayer subsidies and unprecedented tax credits supposedly designed to tackle the climate emergency.
Kyereh informed neighbors that international investors want to build a “blue” ammonia and “clean” hydrogen plant across the fence line – on the same site as a crude oil storage and export terminal which residents say spews noxious fumes that make it hard to breathe.
Ammonia is a toxic substance made by stripping hydrogen from fossil gas and nitrogen from air, and is mostly used for synthetic fertilizer. The St Charles Clean Fuels (SCCF) project claims it will capture and sequester the carbon dioxide (CO2), the planet-warming greenhouse gas generated as a byproduct, making its ammonia cleaner or “blue”.
In theory, the waste CO2 will be compressed, transported in special pipelines and injected deep into underground rock formations for storage, ostensibly forever, for which the company would qualify for federal tax credits for each ton of carbon stored. The SCCF project says that the ammonia will be sold for fertilizer feedstock or so-called “blue” hydrogen – promoted as a “clean” fuel by the fossil fuel industry, which also earns tax credits for it.
“The SCCF low carbon approach is expected to reduce CO2 equivalent emissions by more than 90% compared to traditional ammonia production … Financing and building infrastructure that deploys cleaner solutions like blue ammonia is essential to fighting climate change,” said a spokesperson for the SCCF project, which is majority-owned by a Danish investment company.
But industry claims about the climate credentials of “blue” hydrogen and ammonia have been debunked by scientists without fossil fuel ties. The process depends on fossil gas, a major driver of global heating, as a raw material and energy source – which both emits CO2 and leads to substantial upstream emissions of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas.
“‘Blue’ hydrogen is a marketing scam, pure and simple. The facts do not back up industry hype,” said Robert Howarth, professor of ecology and environmental biology at Cornell University, and co-author of a seminal study discrediting industry claims about hydrogen.
“The best any plant has done for net CO2 capture is 25% to 30%, and that’s before the very potent methane [leaks]. The 90% capture rate the industry claims is pure nonsense,” Howarth added.
In addition, ammonia production generates air pollutants such as nitrogen oxide, particulate matter and volatile organic compounds – a toxic mix already choking residents in Cancer Alley. CO2, itself an asphyxiant and intoxicant, also poses a threat as leaks can cause injury or death by replacing oxygen in the air – which makes St Rose residents Randy and Dedra Dorsey fear for the safety of their grandchildren.
Out canvassing, some locals were dismayed by prospects of another polluting facility while others hoped it would bring jobs. At one house, a retired teacher with a heart condition was anxious that the air quality could get even worse and signed the petition, promising to attend the forthcoming community meetings. Kyereh did her best to stay positive and moved on to the next house, but the 54-year-old was worried.
“It feels doomful, like we’re going in the wrong direction. They are claiming to save the planet but at our expense. If the ammonia or CO2 leaks, we will be sitting ducks. We are the sacrifice zone and we feel it,” she said.
The St Rose ammonia plant is among at least 141 carbon capture and storage (CCS) projects currently proposed by the oil, gas and petrochemical industries across the US, according to the Oil and Gas Watch tracker. (Additional CCS projects associated with coal and ethanol plants aren’t included.)
Experts warn that the CCS and the “clean” hydrogen boom amount to a costly climate gamble unleashed by unprecedented federal spending and tax breaks in the Biden administration’s landmark climate and infrastructure legislation – which will almost certainly prolong the use of fossil fuels.
The history of CCS has largely been one of “underperformance” and “unmet expectations”, the International Energy Agency said in 2023.
Climate scientists agree that the only way to curtail further catastrophic global heating is to radically cut greenhouse gas emissions by transitioning off fossil fuels, yet CCS depends on fossil fuels, emits greenhouse gases and can be used to extract more oil.
Three-quarters of the carbon currently captured in the US is used to extract hard-to-reach reserves, known as “enhanced oil recovery”. Data on carbon storage – which must be permanent to be effective – is entirely self-reported by corporations, with no independent oversight in place to check for leaks or verify company claims, according to research by the Environmental Integrity Project (EIP).
“Every dollar invested in CCS rather than renewable energy is a wasted dollar … It’s a scam,” said Charles Harvey, professor of environmental engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Harvey co-founded the first private CCS startup 15 years ago but has since said that he was wrong – that CCS technology is inefficient and cannot deliver.
Louisiana is at the center of the decarbonization boom, accounting for more than a third of the proposed projects, which include 11 hydrogen or ammonia plants, three liquified natural gas (LNG) terminals and three gas processing plants, according to Oil and Gas Watch figures.
Advocates say the proposed new projects will lead to more air pollution – and more greenhouse gases – in a region with some of the worst air quality and cancer rates in the country, and which is already suffering mounting climate impacts including extreme heat, increasingly intense hurricanes, sea level rise and drought.
“It’s a scam that will enrich the oil and gas and petrochemical industries further, prolonging their ability to destroy livelihoods and community health, poison fenceline communities and perpetuate climate change – while environmental justice communities are left to jump through loopholes for funding to minimize the harms,” said Eloise Reid, coordinator of the Louisiana Against False Solutions Coalition.
Yet the Biden administration – and the Louisiana state government – is betting on CCS and hydrogen to meet its climate goals, despite evidence that the technology is inefficient and unproven as a reliable climate solution.
Over the past couple of years, the fossil fuel and petrochemical industries have flooded the state legislature with lobbyists, executives and friendly experts to thwart community and environmental group efforts from properly regulating CCS.
Louisiana’s part-time lawmakers, who earn $16,000 a year and have only one staffer each, rely heavily on lobbyists for policymaking, according to Jackson Voss, the climate policy coordinator for the Alliance for Affordable Energy (AAE).
Earlier this year, state senator Michael “Big Mike” Fesi proposed legislation to exclude gas pipelines from the “right to know” law, which requires companies to share information about leaks of hazardous materials. Fesi is the owner of a major pipeline construction and maintenance contractor.
In 2022, the Louisiana legislature passed a law exempting state employees hired to perform geoscientific work – which is key to safe carbon injection and storage – from requiring board certification. (Florists and hair braiders are legally required to pass a written exam and obtain a state license.) Studies have shown that CCS risks causing earthquakes, and Louisiana has several fault lines, with more than a hundred earthquakes registered since 1990.
A taskforce set up to ostensibly address mounting public concerns about CCS and report back to the state senate by February 2024 was composed of five oil and gas attorneys and an academic with industry ties. Its report has not been published.
The vast majority of bills which could have made the proposed build-out safer and more environmentally just have been thrown out, ignored or watered down.
“It’s like the fox watching the hen house,” said former oil worker Justin Solet, a member of the United Houma Nation and organizing fellow with Healthy Gulf, an environmental justice organization.
In arguably the biggest victory so far for CCS proponents, in December the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) handed over regulatory oversight – or primacy – for CO2 injection wells to the Louisiana department of energy and natural resources (LDENR), an under-resourced agency which has been criticized for failing to enforce existing regulations meant to protect the environment and people from oil and gas wells.
Louisiana is a Republican-dominated state. But the application for primacy, which is being legally challenged by environmental groups, was made by the former Democratic governor, who put CCS at the heart of the state’s climate action plan. John Bel Edwards also led a delegation to the 2021 UN climate summit in Scotland, to promote the state as open for CCS business.
His Republican successor, Jeff Landry, who was elected in 2023 after a record low turnout, has expanded access to state tax breaks and appointed fossil fuel insiders to key roles. This includes Tyler Gray, an oil and gas attorney and former president of the Louisiana Mid-Continent Oil and Gas Association (Lmoga), the state’s most prominent industry trade group and a key CCS proponent, to lead the LDENR. As Lmoga president, in 2018 Gray helped draft a law criminalizing protests near oil and gas pipelines and construction sites.
“The fossil fuel and petrochemical industry has had a grip on our state for a very long time. The support for oil and gas, and now CCS and hydrogen, goes across party lines, with very little opposition despite community concerns,” said Jackson Voss of the AAE. “In terms of political capture, Louisiana is absolutely a petrostate.”
The Louisiana governor’s office, the LDENR and Lmoga did not respond to requests for comment.
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St Rose is an unincorporated town of 6,000 people in St Charles parish – which extends over both banks of the Mississippi River in the 85-mile-long (135km-long) heavy industrial stretch of land known as Cancer Alley.
St Rose was founded around 1880 by a group of formerly enslaved families as a free town called Elkinsville, creating a thriving, close-knit agrarian community surrounded by plantations which were later sold off to fossil fuel and petrochemical companies.
The SCCF plant would be located on the site of a former sugar plantation now owned by lnternational-Matex Tank Terminals (IMTT), which would store and handle the ammonia. Residents of the area closest to the proposed site have a higher risk of respiratory disease from pollution exposure than 96% of other Louisiana residents, according to recent EPA data. Hurricane Ida ripped through the community in 2021, and some homes are still covered by the temporary roofs installed in the aftermath of the category 4 storm.
“As plantations became petrochemical plants, small free towns like Elkinsville became fenceline communities most exposed to the toxic pollution. Now Biden’s signature climate legislation is exacerbating this racial inequality in toxic harm by subsidizing the CCS buildout,” said Michael Levien, a sociologist from Johns Hopkins University researching the social consequences of CCS in Louisiana.
“St Rose epitomizes this, but it’s the same pattern up and down the river.”
A staggering 90% of the proposed “blue” hydrogen plants nationwide are located in low-income disadvantaged communities, according to the Oil and Gas Watch tracker.
The SCCF project said the plant would bring “significant future opportunities” to the local economy, and represents a shift to “clean fuels and clean fertilizer production that benefits both the regional community and cleaner energy supply needs”.
IMTT’s CEO, Carlin Conner, said the company has committed to invest over $1.6m in environmental mitigation measures at its St Rose facility, and regularly meets with local residents to address their concerns.
According to its proponents, Louisiana’s geological formation and existing industry infrastructure make it ideal for the capture and storage of CO2 – whereas critics argue that this is precisely what makes Louisiana so risky.
Historically, Louisiana was one of the largest oil and gas producers in the country, with 180,000 known abandoned wells scattered across the state including more than 28,000 unplugged wells. Two-thirds of abandoned wells are located in rock formation areas where carbon could potentially be stored, according to EIP research.
Of most concern are the 13,000 oldest and leakiest wells, located in potential carbon sequestration hotspots. CO2 plumes could migrate directly via the abandoned wells, like methane does, contaminating surface water and displacing oxygen in the air – which can be fatal.
In a recent field experiment, the Guardian accompanied researchers from Healthy Gulf who detected methane leaking from an orphaned well (abandoned with no known owner) in a lake close to where carbon injection sites have been proposed in a separate project.
“Fishermen, not the LDENR [state agency], are managing these wells. Louisiana is not prepared for primacy [oversight]. We need two decades to clean up the existing oil and gas junk infrastructure before we even think about injecting CO2, it’s such a mess,” said Scott Eustice, community science director at Healthy Gulf. “Plugging leaking wells would be far more effective in mitigating climate change than CCS.”
Several proposed pipelines and injection sites across Louisiana could affect protected wetlands and other waterways, as well as burial sites and other historical locations for Indigenous and Black enslaved people.
Leaky wells aren’t the only threat. CO2 pipelines already pose a major safety concern with higher rates of safety incidents compared with other pipelines, according to Fractracker.
The current 5,000-mile (8,000km) network of CO2 pipelines could increase tenfold under the proposed boom, and safety experts fear that the rush to build out new infrastructure to qualify for the Inflation Reduction Act tax subsidies will compromise safety.
“Current regulations are insufficient to protect the public and the environment from the potential dangers of hydrogen and carbon dioxide pipelines,” said Erin Sutherland, the Pipeline Safety Trust policy and program director. “Many have been proposed near communities, placing them at risk in the event of failure.”
Recent CO2 pipeline leaks in Louisiana and Mississippi have exposed dangerous gaps in the regulatory system, which is undergoing a drawn-out overhaul. The regulator will not be able to apply new design, construction and inspection standards to completed pipelines.
“CCS is not going to mitigate the climate crisis; it will lead to further expansion of fossil fuels and more hazardous waste causing further harm to frontline communities and the planet,” said Monique Harden, director of law and public policy at the Deep South Center for Environmental Justice.
Back in St Rose, Kyereh is cognisant of the role racism has played in creating environmental justice communities in Louisiana, and fears the CCS and hydrogen expansion will lead to more of the same. “We need to get white and middle-class people involved, so it’s not just poor Black people complaining – or we won’t win,” she said.
But corporations are vying for a slice of the billions in grants earmarked for new CCS and “clean” hydrogen projects – with billions more up for grabs in tax credits. So no community is safe.
About 30 miles (50km) north-east of St Rose in a separate project, the chemical giant Air Products is looking to drill dozens of wells in Lake Maurepas, an iconic protected water body, and inject around 5m tons of carbon dioxide each year about a mile below the lakebed.
The CO2 would come from the vast new “blue” hydrogen energy and ammonia complex that Air Products wants to build in Ascension parish, a sprawling dusty landscape where more Black communities are already overburdened by industrial pollution, including from the world’s largest ammonia plant.
Air Products claims it will capture and permanently sequester more than 95% of the waste CO2 generated at the facility. The gas will travel about 35 miles (60km) east in newly constructed pipelines, before being injected into an “ideal geological pore space” – a process that environmentalists fear will threaten Lake Maurepas’s fragile swampy ecosystem. Millions of dollars have been invested in restoring the lake, which after generations of ecological destruction has become a popular destination for tourists and fishers.
The project, which was announced in 2021 before Biden’s key climate legislation, claims it will be the world’s largest CCS operation. Lakeside residents say they found out about the proposed wells when a crabber spotted engineers conducting seismic tests, and created the Lake Maurepas Preservation Society. Its members, who are predominantly climate change skeptics and pro-fossil fuel white Republicans, participated in House and Senate committee hearings and galvanized parish council members and state legislators to oppose the project.
“They’re trying to destroy the lake and ram this project down our throats,” said Bill Whittington, president of the Lake Maurepas Preservation Society and a former oil company worker.
Air Products pushed back by hiring 25 lobbyists in 2023, and sued Tangipahoa parish, overturning the local CCS moratorium that would have protected Lake Maurepas. Legislation to protect the lake and strengthen environmental protections at the state level has gone nowhere.
“The fight against Air Products has demonstrated the political capture on both sides of the aisle in the state legislature,” said Kim Coates, a Republican state legislator and former Tangipahoa parish council member.
Air Products said the facility would not be a major source of emissions and that the company will “fully comply” with all air quality permit requirements and other relevant standards. The company has invested in steps to protect and enhance the lake and “blue” hydrogen will help meet carbon reduction goals, a spokesperson said.
“A lot of people around here don’t believe in climate change and CO2, but even if you do, CCS will barely make a difference,” said Caleb Atwell, vice-president of the Lake Maurepas Preservation Society. “We did everything to save our lake, we gave it our best shot, but it’s over.”
