Carbon capture’s offer of climate-change benefit would make Valley a dumping ground
The last thing Central Valley communities want for the New Year is another environmental hazard near our homes.
That’s why it’s frustrating to read Vanessa Suarez’s recent opinion piece claiming that biomass energy paired with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) presents a promising vision for the Valley.
Unfortunately, such schemes are distractions that prop up the same fossil fuel industry that’s created air pollution, health and environmental problems here for generations.
To clean up our air and prevent more extreme heat, fire conditions and drought, the solution is clear: Using a just transition, California must rapidly phase out fossil fuel extraction and use, as well as end deforestation.
Despite Ms. Suarez’s call for “safeguards,” burning anything for electricity is a surefire way to lock in harmful air and climate pollution. Biomass power plants are dirty, inefficient and expensive. They emit large quantities of air pollutants and more carbon pollution per megawatt-hour than coal plants.
Contrary to their lofty promises, carbon capture plants have repeatedly proven that they do not successfully corral these harmful emissions.
Chevron, the company behind proposals for multiple BECCS power plants in the state, operated a carbon capture and storage (CCS) plant in Australia that was called “a shocking failure.” Why should we put the health of Valley residents — especially communities of color and low-income communities — in the hands of an oil company that has only failed with this technology before?
And while Ms. Suarez says underground carbon storage has existed for decades, this ignores a few key concerns.
First, the kinds of carbon storage wells being considered in California are new and have only been permitted a few times around the country — and never in this state.
Second, compressed carbon must be transported and/or injected via pipelines. Compressed carbon is extremely dangerous. In February 2020 a carbon pipeline ruptured in Yazoo County, Mississippi, requiring hundreds to be evacuated and dozens hospitalized with symptoms including extreme disorientation, unconsciousness and seizures.
People here in Mendota, where one of these projects is proposed, are mostly farm workers, many of them uninsured. It would be unconscionable to inflict such additional dangers on communities already burdened with some of the nation’s worst air, in combination with the safety hazards posed by carbon pipelines.
Finally, carbon storage isn’t a real climate solution. In addition to the failed promises of companies like Chevron, the United Nations’ climate body called out the “risk of carbon dioxide leakage from geological storage” and pipelines. California has a terrible track record of capping and monitoring abandoned traditional oil and gas wells, which has led to mass amounts of underreported methane leakage. New infrastructure for CCS would present similar risks.
In July more than 500 national and international organizations sent a letter to lawmakers calling CCS a “dangerous distraction” that “delays the needed transition away from fossil fuels and other combustible energy sources, and poses significant new environmental, health, and safety risks, particularly to Black, Brown, and Indigenous communities already overburdened by industrial pollution, dispossession, and the impacts of climate change.”
Allowing carbon storage in the Valley would be another example of environmental racism, where profits of companies like Chevron would be considered more important than the residents’ health and well-being.
As Ms. Suarez states, “we need a bottom-up approach championed by front-line communities.” Front-line groups like ours don’t want false solutions that make them the dumping ground for carbon waste and more dirty industry.
