Karen Feridun

May 24, 2024

Karen Feridun is the co-founder of Better Path Coalition and No False Solutions PA Coalition

In an op-ed published in the May 16, 2024 edition of the Observer-Reporter, State Senator Camera Bartolotto tries and fails to talk around the realities of carbon capture and storage, a technology that the fossil fuel industry is counting on to keep doing business as usual as the climate crisis accelerates.

Several important terms are missing from Bartolotta’s essay. She never mentions pore space when she writes euphemistically about a bill recently passed by the State Senate that would level the playing field for carbon capture and storage. Pore space is the collection of spaces in and around rocks deep below Earth’s surface where the industry would inject carbon dioxide in the hope that it might stay there. However, the carbon dioxide plume that forms takes an unpredictable path, so leveling the playing field means that there’s no guarantee the carbon dioxide will stay within the pore space of landowners who have signed leases.

The bill establishes the equivalent of forced pooling that deprives landowners of the ability to refuse to allow their pore space to be filled with carbon dioxide if the owners of 60% of the land around them sign agreements.

Landowners are justified in saying no to allowing compressed carbon dioxide to be stored under their homes. The Pennsylvania Department of Conservation and Natural Resources says the risks of carbon capture and storage include methane leaks, earthquakes, ground movement and the contamination of groundwater supplies.

The risk of leaks due to unplugged or improperly plugged wells should be a deal breaker for carbon capture and storage in a state that is dotted with hundreds of thousands of unplugged and poorly plugged wells. Bartolotta makes no mention of the risks involved.

Bartolotto never mentions that carbon capture and storage is the key to the Appalachian Regional Clean Hydrogen Hub. Carbon capture is bolted onto the production of dirty hydrogen made from methane to purportedly make it clean. Putting aside that carbon capture and storage has never worked, the hydrogen would still be produced from methane and that just means more drilling and fracking and more climate killing emissions. All of the investment and massive subsidies would be funded with your tax dollars. (editor’s note-corporate welfare)

We need climate solutions, not carbon capture and storage.