Fracture in GOP Support of Carbon Capture and Storage in Louisiana

quote:

---

A technology touted by the oil and gas industry as a way to keep drilling but with a lower carbon footprint is facing new opposition from Republican lawmakers in Louisiana, the U.S. epicenter of the push for carbon capture and sequestration.

Environmentalists have long questioned the cost, risks and effectiveness of CCS. But now their critique is being echoed by fossil-fuel friendly Republicans, who increasingly are pressed by homeowners around Louisiana’s Lake Maurepas and elsewhere to stop the roughly 30 CCS projects planned for the state.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis recently called CCS “a scam,” criticizing state GOP lawmakers for pushing the technology.

CCS aims to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by trapping carbon dioxide emissions from industry and injecting them deep underground— or underwater — for permanent storage.

The oil and gas industry also uses CO2 for so-called enhanced oil recovery, which entails injecting pressurized carbon dioxide into wells to free trapped oil, a technique that accounts for about 2% of the nation’s production.

This month, the Republican-controlled Louisiana Legislature will debate a bevy of bills to limit or kill CCS; one is a proposed yearlong moratorium and another is an outright ban.

---

quote:

---

Jackson Voss, climate policy coordinator for the New Orleans-based nonprofit Alliance for Affordable Energy, doesn’t think any of the anti-CCS bills stand a chance given the strong lobbying power of the oil and gas industry in Louisiana. And if they were to get traction this legislative session he believes Republican Gov. Jeff Landry would use his influence to block them from ever hitting his desk.

“The anti-CCS position remains an outlier among Republican office-holders, for now, nationally and otherwise,” he said.

As part of his crusade to eviscerate climate-friendly U.S. policies, President Donald Trump may be poised to claw back hundreds of millions of dollars in U.S. Department of Energy funding for a form of CCS called direct-air capture, which pulls carbon from the ambient air. Reuters reported in late March that two direct air capture hubs in Texas and Louisiana — promised over $1 billion in subsidies under the administration of former President Joe Biden — were on a kill list circulating within the DOE.

---

quote:

---

Mike Moncla, president of the Louisiana Oil and Gas Association, said Louisiana needs to push forward with its CCS projects if it wants to remain competitive with neighboring states like Texas, which is seeking primacy as well from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to permit the injection wells used for underground CO2 storage.

“They (Texas) will be happy to take on this industry, along with huge projects like Meta and Hyundai that have CCS pieces to their projects,” Moncla said, referring to a proposed multi-billion-dollar data center and an automotive plant both planned for Louisiana.

---

quote:

---

The IRA increased tax credits to permanently store carbon from $50 per ton to $85 per ton. The law also offers a $180-a-ton tax credit to developers of direct air capture projects. The fate of those and other clean-energy tax credits remains unclear.

---