Southern Louisiana is oil-and-gas country. Some of the biggest gas refineries in the country are located along the Mississippi River in the southeastern part of the state, while a massive new liquefied natural gas export hub is under consideration for Cameron Parish, further to the west.
There’s another type of fuel that may soon be produced in southern Louisiana, too: so-called blue hydrogen, a marketer’s name for hydrogen that’s not quite green.
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Instead of being produced without carbon emissions, the huge amount of CO2 generated by processing natural gas into hydrogen is captured and pumped under for long-term storage. If nearly all of the carbon can be trapped and if it can be safely kept underground indefinitely, then you have yourself a carbon-neutral fuel.
That’s something that the oil and gas industry would love to be able to say they have, but experts doubt the carbon capture and storage side of the equation — i.e., the part that would make the carbon “blue,” something approaching eco-friendly green. But that hasn’t stopped the industry from planning blue hydrogen projects, and in southeastern Louisiana the chemical company Air Products wants to pump 5 million tons of carbon dioxide a mile underneath Lake Maurepas, which is just west of Lake Pontchartrain.
And thanks to a new decision from the Environmental Protection Agency, it will now be the state of Louisiana, not the EPA, that will decide whether or not to approve carbon-capture wells like the ones proposed by Lake Maurepas.
Excess pollution ‘will be born most heavily by Black and Brown communities who already face disproportionate environmental risks.’
Clara Potter, Tulane Environmental Law Clinic
Louisiana is just the third state that the EPA has granted carbon-capture permitting rights to. And while the idea of local approval for projects that cut down on greenhouse gas emissions may sound like it could be a good thing, just consider the responses to the news: the oil and gas industry is in favor of the decisions, as are many of Louisiana’s Republican lawmakers.
But environmental groups and local climate justice organizations are less than thrilled. Carbon-capture projects are used “as an excuse for permitting new and expanded polluting operations,” attorney Clara Potter of the Tulane Environmental Law Clinic said in a statement, noting that the excess pollution “will be born most heavily by Black and Brown communities who already face disproportionate environmental risks.”
And that’s the thing about what’s shaping up to be a rush of carbon-capture projects in Louisiana (about 30 are currently under consideration, the most of any state): while there’s significant public opposition, mostly from white residents, to the Lake Maurepas project because of the estuary’s wildlife and recreation value, it’s expected to be an outlier.
Maps of proposed carbon sequestration sites published last summer show a dense concentration between New Orleans and Baton Rouge — the infamous Cancer Alley, where there is already a high concentration of refineries and other chemical plants set cheek-and-jowl with communities that are often majority Black.
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And while storing CO2 underground is certainly better than releasing it into the atmosphere (though it is not better than never producing it in the first place), there are risks associated with carbon storage.
In Louisiana, in particular, there are uncapped oil wells that dot the landscape, and environmental groups have expressed concern that carbon dioxide pumped into the ground for storage could seep right back up through nearby wells. The CO2 often has to be transported from where it is produced and captured to the injection well site, and like other types of pipelines, ones carrying carbon dioxide can and do leak. In Mississippi, dozens of people were poisoned when a carbon dioxide pipeline ruptured in 2021.
According to the Associated Press, “the EPA said it secured commitments from Louisiana to have a robust public participation process and to consider how new wells might harm communities near polluting sites and possibly reduce harm.”
But the state doesn’t exactly have the best track record in that department when it comes to either engaging with communities or reducing possible harm — and residents don’t seem to expect that that will suddenly change.