Written by Karen Feridun
Posted by Michael Sauers
August 29, 2024
A last minute scramble to pass a controversial bill introduced by Sen. Gene Yaw epitomizes the old saying, “There are two things you don’t want to see being made-laws and sausages.” According to Yaw, the bill, the Carbon Dioxide Geologic Sequestration Primacy Act, was introduced as a “proactive step to secure Pennsylvania’s future as a hub” for carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology that is being touted as a climate solution.
Minutes before the late-night budget vote in July, the House Appropriations Committee called a meeting just to vote on Yaw’s bill. The committee voted by consensus. No discussion. No debate. The Consumer Protection, Technology, and Utilities Committee had made quick work of it as well. After it returned to the floor after the Appropriations vote, several legislators from both sides of the aisle spoke eloquently in opposition to the bill, but it passed easily.
With the vote for final passage, an extremely consequential bill about an unproven technology at the center of a greenwashed energy initiative that will let fossil fuel businesses do business as usual for the foreseeable future was sent to the governor’s desk with no discussion, no debate.
Opponents of the bill made the same arguements many environmental advocates and others have been making since major investments in CCS began during the Obama administration. The most basic of them is that CCS doesn’t work.
The idea of CCS is that CO2 emissions can be captured from industrial processes and moved to sites where it can be injected deep below the surface, so far down that it’s trapped in tiny pores found below a large impermeable rock called a cap rock. Presumably, the CO2 will stay put forever.
The fact is, little is known about how, or if it’s even possible, to store CO2 forever. Carbon capture has been around for decades. Sometimes CCS is referred to as CCUS, the U standing for utilization. Until recently, captured carbon was used in a process called enhanced oil recovery, also known as more fossil fuel extraction.
As Stephen Rassenfoss wrote in the Journal of Petroleum Engineering, “While a lot has been learned from EOR (enhanced oil recovery), there may well be significant differences between cycling just enough gas through a reservoir to increase production and injecting as much as possible for permanent storage, often in unfamiliar sorts of formations.”
Selecting sites where CO2 is most likely to stay put is no small task anywhere that CCS is being considered. Siting of CO2 injection wells is a particularly difficult problem in Pennsylvania where the cap rock is the Marcellus. The state’s Department of Conservation and Natural Resources stated, “The Marcellus Shale would likely be an appropriate cap rock, but continued exploration and potential development in this unit for natural gas production could potentially compromise the integrity of this formation as a viable cap rock in areas of natural gas production.”
The DCNR report was written after the fracking boom began, but conventional, or vertical, drilling has turned portions of the state into a veritable Swiss cheese of abandoned wells that are leaking climate-killing methane. The DCNR also told us that putting CO2 wells near unplugged or poorly plugged wells “invites leakage.”
Rep. Martin Causer, Republican co-chair of the House Environmental Resources and Energy Committee is one of the legislators who spoke in opposition to Yaw’s bill. He said the bill was not ready for prime time. He was right.
The bill’s provisions deserved scrutiny they did not receive. Declaring an unproven technology to be in the public interest should have been questioned. Creating a sort of subsurface eminent domain that strips people of their right to say no to CO2 storage under their properties if enough of their neighbors say yes should have been challenged. Shifting liability from the industry to the government should have been debated.
CCS is not even remotely in the public interest. In fact, we stand to lose much more than we gain if CO2 wells start going into the ground. Our government was wrong to pass Yaw’s bill. Now it must put the brakes on CCS.
Karen Feridun is the co-founder of the Better Path Coalition and one of the organizers of the Pennsylvania Climate Convergence.