Welcome back to Drilled. I'm Amy Westervelt. We are still working on this series I mentioned before, Denial to Delay, focused on the false solutions that fossil fuel companies are proposing to the climate crisis. We've talked about LNG, We've talked about the role that management consultancies play in pushing false solutions like carbon capture or hydrogen. Today we're going
to talk about carbon capture. I've been working on a story about carbon capture for the last couple months that we are co publishing with Vox, and I gotta say it's kind of made my head explode. It's one of those things where I kept looking at it and thinking it can't possibly be as much of a scam as it seems like it is, and then every single expert I would talk to would make me feel like it
was even more of a scam. That's definitely true of the person, and you're going to hear from today Carolyn Raffensberger, who is an environmental lawyer and the executive director of
the Science and Environmental Health Network. Carolyn introduced me to a bunch of experts, but talking to her was a great way to kind of get overall context on how exactly we got to where we're at with carbon capture, Why it's been such a focus as a climate solution when even in the best case scenario, which is nowhere near our reality, it could only ever help with about two percent of global emissions, and yet we're dumping billions
and billions of taxpayer dollars into it. Why how did we get here and what role did oil companies play in all of it. One thing that has suddenly made fossil fuel companies very interested in carbon capture over the last few years is the forty five Q tax credit. This pays companies for capturing and storing two. It started out in two thousand and eight, paying ten dollars for
every metric ton of carbon sequestered. In twenty eighteen, that number increased to fifty dollars, and the Inflation Reduction Act passed in twenty twenty two bumped it up to eighty five dollars per metric ton. That increase was negotiated by Senator Joe Manchin. It was one of several very controversial suggestions he made when negotiating with the Biden administration over their Build Back Better Bill, the result of which became
the Inflation Reduction Act. There's no cap on the amount of tax credits a company can claim under forty five Q. The amount of stored and sequestered carbon is entirely self reported, and there's very little verification process. One expert I talked to is that it's like the opposite of a carbon tax. We're actually paying companies to produce more carbon. We've turned carbon into a commodity. We're going to get into all
of that and more after this quick break. I want to ask you about forty five Q in particular and your thoughts on how much it benefits the industry.
The fact of the matter is that CO two as the best solvent for tertiary extraction of oil. And if you've got an almost depleted well, there's still oil in the ground. You just can't get it out through the usual means. But you got that hole in the ground, and you've got a stranded asset knowing that it's there, and if you just had CO two you could get you could keep this well going for another X number of years, you know, another twenty years, another thirty years.
That's a lot of quarterly report money. And so they and knew that CO two was a good substance, a good solvent for tertiary extraction of oil, but they didn't have a supply, and along comes climate, and you know, so if you capture CO two, And they started doing carbon capture decades ago, a couple of decades ago and realized it didn't work very well and it's very expensive. But the CO two, if you've got you know, you can get a lot of CO two that would keep
that fossil fuel industry going a long time. So they cooked up the scheme to claim that it's a climate solution, but oh my gosh, it just happens to provide a steady supply of this incredible solvent that's expensive to collect and then you know, move around the globe. And so this is an ideal scheme where they can claim climate solution even though we know that it just adds more CO to to the environment and er is the absolute
worst idea if you're talking about climate. But they don't need it in a steady flow, so they're going to need it in kind of episodic quantities, and so we're better than to claim to store it underground. And if you can store it underground near old oil wells, how much the better. And if you can claim that you're storing it in the old oil wells and oh my gosh, you just happen to get more oil out of it. This is a win wind for the fossil fuel industry.
You get to keep polluting and drilling more, getting more oil, not drilling but extracting more oil, and you have the public pay for the CO two and then you get more money for the oil. This is an extraordinary thing you can do. You get to sell the say Sanol, at a higher price because it's quote carbon neutral or whatever else they're whatever they're else they're claiming about it. You can sell it to California under their low carbon fuel standard and get more money. You can create holding
markets for a sustainable aviation fuel. Is that this is just an unbelievable pot of gold at the end of the carbon capture rainbow.
I hadn't even thought about the sustainable aviation fuel connection, to which is exploding right now.
So look at what the Air Resources Board CARB is claiming in California and what they're going to do with the low carbon fuel standard. I had an LA times op ed two years ago. I think about California, what the low carbon fuel standard is going to do in conjunction with carbon capture and storage for ethanol in Iowa.
So that are we're going to increase corn production in Iowa, which means we're going to do everything from increase the water consumption remarkably, and we're going to do everything from increased the pesticide use, the fertilizer use, which means we're going to add to the dead zone in the Gulf. It goes on and on, and nobody's looking at all of the sequella. The consequences that they're going to claim are unintended and they're not going to consider in their
overall models and environmental impact statements. And anytime a scientist comes out with, wait a minute, you're increasing pesticides and fertilizers, which have their own greenhouse consequences, they're going to be challenged on every level. Well, the model used didn't use, Well, your numbers are wrong, your outcome, the output of that model is flawed. And so they're going to throw that out and use industries model for showing that this is actually a climate. And the other thing they do is.
They talk about what could be Yes, they do this with carbon Like I just was talking to Excellent about a carbon capture story, and all the language that they use is like we plan to support.
X number of emissions reductions or like we're aiming to achieve blah blah blah.
Sough.
Yeah, So every single claim you can go through and look at the number of jobs that Summit is claiming that they're going to have during construction, any of their claims, any single claim how much water they're going to use, which by the way, they don't know, and that will be variable. But any claim that they make it's going to be this much CO two, we won't need them, and it don't make whatever it is they are lying, and it's all these predictions which are no more valid than a fortune cookie.
They have not they're always completely hedged in a way that they can't be held accountable for lying or falsifying things.
But right it's still misleading.
And the new lawsuit, Oh what state is it? Portant? Is it King County in Oregon that is claiming this is not an act of God, these extreme heat events not an act of God. It's an act of Eccon. But the ability to claim God this is an act of God for whatever the accident is. So everything is a prediction, a plan, a promise, none of which comes true, none of which comes true. If you look at any of the predictions of any of the carbon capture facilities,
none of them are accurate. None of them are accurate about how much storage is blow ground. You look at all the problems that it could fill up much sooner. But you've got this vast pipeline, and how would you know that it is full if you're not measuring what's coming back up. So every single place where they say this is the outcome, I just assume they're lying. And even if they're not lying, they don't have good evidence to back up their claim, and they are never held accountable.
At what point do you say, we are going to pull your permit and we are going to stop giving you funding. So the IRA reduced the amount of emissions of CO two that they actually had to capture to get the credit.
Oh my god.
So the whole thing is rigged to just line the pockets and keep the fossil fuel industry going. It doesn't matter if they got all the CO two or if it stays underground. They got the oil through eor and its predictions are correct, you know, I saw one recently that said eor was going to extend the life of
oil by eighty four years. That's a big number, and I think that the sad part is that it's not clear to us that the architects of the IRA, you know, the really good environmentalists, actually understood this.
I wanted to have you talk a little bit about the issues with self reporting and verification for forty five Q and just how much there is no verifiable climate impact happening here. The first thing to know is that this is a leaky material. CO two has a way of moving through the air, of leaking through pipelines and
all of that. And because we have no cradle to grave tracking, we have no way of actually knowing how much is really being collected, and how much is really hitting well head, and how much is really staying underground, either through sequestration or enhanced oil recovery.
We have no way of knowing. We have ways of tracking hazardous materials. We have hazardous waste manifests, and so every time the hazardous material just hands we track it. We know who got it last, we know where it ends up. We have really good information about volumes for the most part. But with CO two there is no tracking cradle to grave, and so it's just right for both the financial fraud and the climate fraud, and so we don't really know.
Can I also have you talk a little bit about the safety issue and start moving this stuff around and how we're sequestering it when it's actually being stored.
Well, those are two separate issues. The health effects are because CO two is a unique material. It has properties for how it travels that it's heavier than ambient air, and so it sinks down and can stay together and move. So if your CO two pipeline goes through your neighborhood and you live in a basement, that CO two is as likely to go down into your apartment rather than up to the top floors. So it moves in unique ways.
And it acidifies water. And if you think about how much of your body is made out of water, your eyes, the mucous membranes in your nose, and your mouth, these are all watery, aqueous. And just as it can acidify water, it can acidify those parts of our body that it comes in contact with. And we know that it's one of the reasons the ocean is acidifying is because of this unusual property of CO two meeting water forming carbonic acid.
Another property of CO two is that it is toxic in that it has poisonous qualities, and then of course it's an asphyxiant. We have very carefully calibrated mechanisms in our body to get rid of CO two. We are organisms designed to get rid of CO two because it does sidify our bodies and because it can deprive us of oxygen and suffocate you. It's not a pleasant death. We use CO two to euthanize animals and confined animal feeding operations. So this is not a material that's conducive
to life, especially when we concentrate it. When we concentrate it and put it through pipelines and compressor stations and valves and all of those things, we are concentrating a material that moves differently, that is toxic, that's ynysphyxiant, that does nasty things to water with water when it meets water. So for all those reasons, it has health impacts that are very different than oil and gas. So these are not your grandmother's pipelines. They could be lethal. We talk
about the kill zone or a fatality zone. Around a CO two pipeline. We don't talk about that with oil and gas pipelines. So oil leaks out and it has a limited range where it's going to flow. I might be a fairly big area, but we don't start talking about a fatality zone or a kill zone with an oil pipeline. And so these are very unusual. And because of the carbonic acid in a pipeline, if it meets water,
CO two meets water, it's highly corrosive. So pipelines that have CO two with impurities are more likely to leak or rupture or have some other problem associated with them. So all around, these are uniquely dangerous and underregulated. So let's just say we knew that we could have all the right metals, all the right ways to ship this
material somewhere and do it with one hundred percent safety. Well, we know that we can't do that, and we don't even have regulations promulgated by THEIMSA and finalized for CO
two pipelines. Following an accident in Starsha, Mississippi, where there was an explosion of CO two and which caused a lot of health problems in the population that was within a farther away than you might think would be it would experience a problem, and so the FISA, the Pipeline and Hazardous Material Safety Administration, decided to look at why that accident happened and to promulgate a new rule that would actually regulate pipeline construction and CO two pipeline companies.
That rule is not final and we don't know when it will be final It's been held up at omb for some time. And yet a pipeline company in Iowa called the Summit Carbon Solutions Pipeline has solicited permits in multiple states and just been given a permit by the Iowa Utilities Commission, And they gave permission even knowing that the CO two pipeline rule had not been finalized and that the company is not bound by it. Whatever the rule will be, it's not going to be applied retroactively.
Now there's some things that will apply retroactively if there are new emergency management plans or things like that, but any construction requirements for materials or other things will not be applied retroactively to Summit. So what we have is a very hazardous material is underregulated. It's not well accounted for when we move it through the system. And then on top of that, we are not just creating a straight through pipeline. We are creating a vast network of
pipelines of multiple sizes and therefore all these connections. So we're going to be connecting pipelines. They're fairly small in diameter two toess so it can range from four inches to twenty four inches. But all of those connections, all of those transitions between the collection of CO to the compression of it, the putting it into the pipeline, then moving it to a bigger pipeline, the moving it to
a smaller pipeline, whatever it might be. Well, I think they're all going to go to a bigger pipeline as it's going to have feeder pipelines into the main trunkline of the pipeline. But every time you add another feeder line, every time you add one that's the different dimension and connect it to a larger pipeline and have all these pump stations and this vast spider web of pipelines, you
add to the risk. So if you have a straight shot pipeline that's uniform in size, that has the right number of arrestors to stop these ductal these fractures that can just unzip a pipeline. Given the nature of CO two, you know we're in trouble. So I advocate preventing harm that may happen if it's a preventable harm. So there's no reason that we should be paying a polluter for
a known pollutant, a known unusual hazard. And then you know, allowing them to claim land through eminent domain, seizing private land, running it through communities with all of this complexity, and most of these companies are new, they don't have experience managing a pipeline, and all of the things that they say, the assurances they give, we will have multiple generators, we can stop this in seconds. We can do that's we
know from experience. That's not how real life operates. And so this vast network of underregulated pipelines of new companies, the complexity of this, the nature of the material all mean that we are building in hazards that are going to behave unpredictably, and then we are putting it somewhere underground in inadequately characterized geologic formations. But we know what we're looking for. We know what we want in an
underground a vault where it's never going to escape. But most of the places that we are looking at putting the material already have the cap rock which would be required to hold it in place and keep it from contaminating drinking water and all the other things that it can do. But we've already punctured those caprocs in these places with existing oil and gas wells. We don't even know where all of them are. We have abandoned wells
littering the landscape. And we think we're going to put CO two down in the underground, and then they're going to you know, all the ways that CO two can move up the well, leaky casing in a well. When
it's being shot down into the wall, it's endless. And so all of their assurances about we've got this, don't worry, go go shopping at Walmart our demeaning for people who actually have studied this and know anything about the hazards of CO two both as a climate threat, but then when we concentrate it and shove it through pipelines as
a super critical liquid, we are asking for trouble. This is sort of like giving a sixteen year old with a known drug habit the keys to the Ferrari and assuming they're going to stop, they're going to drive thirty miles an hour and stop at every stop sign and be home by eight pm.
Is it still true that PIMSA has not finalized its its rules for CO two pipelines.
One of the things that's worth looking at is FIMSA overall. So FIMSA manages hazardous materials, it's in their name. In the accident in East Palestine, that's under fims's jurisdiction. So the same entity that is supposed to be regulating those trains with hazard's materials is also regulating pipelines with hazardous materials like CO two. So FIMSA itself is an interesting agency and what authority it has or does not have. It is one of the agencies that is most wholly
captured by industry. Their regulations are often directly taken from industry, just lifted from industry recommendations and incorporated by reference. It is a wholly captured entity. And yet they recognized the CO two pipelines were unusually dangerous and underregulated, so they drafted a regulation which we've not seen. It's currently at omb and FIMSA has had its authority sorely limited by
companies that make it do two cost benefit analyzes. So just getting a rule through the cost benefit analysis that they have to do means that they are going to air on the side of the industry. They are not going to err on the side of the public. It's just the way they're set up. It's what Congress, the authority Congress has not given them, and the requirements they put in place to make a rule as weak as possible.
You know, it's supposed to benefit the economy. It's not supposed to protect public health and safety as far as we can tell. And that rule has now gone to OMB and it's under Ohirah, the agency that reviews these rules, and we thought it was going to come out somewhere around March, and it has not been released. You can go on their website and they have public meetings that have been scheduled, meetings with members of the public. I should be clear, not public meetings, but meetings with members
of the public, maybe industry. It might be the landowner in Iowa. I don't know. I think they listed, but I haven't gone and looked in the last week. And the delay in this means that if they don't come out with that rule soon the new administration, if we have a change in administrations, could review that rule and throw it out, start over again or not. So we are in a logjam with that rule, and there's something
that are contingent on that rule passing. California has a moratorium in part on CO two pipelines, not intrust sit sites, but interstates sites and inter sites between sites and off an industry's property. There's a moratorium on COO two pipelines that was passed by the California legislature that prohibits any of these pipelines, specifically the ones that go off site until FILMS finalizes its rule. And Illinois has a similar rule or two years. So Illinois just passed legislation that
also does that. And there are numerous jurisdictions in elsewhere that are smaller, not state but county and jurisdictions and things like that that have also put in place a moratorium until they come out with a rule. So a lot hinges on this. The question came before the Iowa Utilities Commission about whether they should wait for the rule, and they decided not to, and they does not put in place of moratorium on their permit. So that's a
quick run through on safety. There's been a lot of private interest money going into research focused on carbon capture and that has pushed things in this direction as well. So all the ways that corporations can get the public to fund them, and the carbon capture and storage is a good case study for that. So if you start with the tax credit on the federal level that carbon capture and storage is going to garner going forward. That's
a huge amount of money. Huge and then you look at all of the other ways that this fits together. There's a vast economic structure that supports industry and business financially, and then on top of that, there's a huge economic infrastructure that's built on top of the forty five Q tax credits. So everything from the carbon credits that you can buy and sell, there's futures, markets, derivatives, all of these things that are being predicated on the forty five
Q tax credit. And then there's all the ways that the state laws are flying buttresses for things like federal tax credits. So some states actually have mirror laws so that if they get a federal tax credit, that automatically gives them a state credit on their state taxes. So I think there are twenty some odd states that have that kind of parallel tax structures. So if the federal government gives Exxon a tax credit, then the state counts that off of their income that they have to report
for their state taxes. And then there are things like state tax credits in states like Iowa that give companies research. If they do research into various products or whatever else, they get a tax credit for that research. And yet we are starving our public institutions, you know, our Iowa State University from money. And in addition, we have federal laws that are reflected in those state institutions that have set into place a way of transferring technology through these
university publicly funded and industry partnerships. And that's under a whole set of laws that originated with something called the Bidole Technology Transfer Act, where we wanted to get technologies into public hands. The best way to do with that was through private corporations. And that's Following World War Two, we put in place that entire funding structure for R and D.
So there's so little.
Science now that is government and publicly funded that is simply science in the public interest. Oh, this is just parenthetical, believe but Jane Lupchenko, who is president of Triple As, said we needed a new social contract for science, and the reason was that we were now facing a planet that was in dire straits and we were still operating under the old contract, which is we need more widgets for the balance of trade, and so we're not doing
basic science. We're not looking at preventive health measures, or you know, we're developing viagra and glaucoma drugs. We're developing pharmaceuticals that make companies rich for a very long time. And we are funding carbon capture and storage through enormous amounts of money through Department of Energy with loans and grants.
The Transfer Act, which has both construction, well get Maggie to talk about it, but that they can help fund construction as well as then fund the credits under different tax credit structures and they can take their choice or double dip. And there's been a lot of research now on our side trying to look at can they double dip on these and can they both get an ethanol
tax credit and a forty five Q tax credit. Paul's written and said no. But if you look at the big corporate lawyers who defend these guys and do their tax returns. They are looking for every avenue possible to get more public money flowing into the likes of Chevron and Exxon and Summit. So the amount of money that is coming in so many different directions and is not fully accounted in a public ledger. For what this has cost us is unbelievable.
The last thing I wanted to ask you about is that the one place that litigation might be possible is around the pipelines.
Yeah, so this the pipelines are going to be litigated. We all know that. Everybody's saying it. It's and it'll be litigated under a couple of places. But first and foremost is eminent domain. Why should private land be taken from a private landowner and given to another private owner. So that's going to get litigated, and then it will probably be litigated under the Army Corps of Engineer's Permit
fifty eight. So you know, the way we won for the most part Dakota access with the tribes was the Army Corps of Engineers permits, the couple of permits they had to give for the Missouri River with Dakota access, and I'm sure there will be some litigation with nationwide Permit fifty eight, but that tends not to stop stuff. So one of the tactics of these pipeline companies is to rush stuff, to start construction before they've got all
the permits in now. Iowa has said you cannot start construction until you've got North Dakota's permit for the poor space and for the pipeline, and South Dakota's pipeline permit, but the rest of them, they would rush. So even if they don't have all of the other permits that they need, and there's quite a few, including the Army Corps engineers and others, and the Army Corps usually aggregates a bunch of other agency permits US Fish and Wildlife
and all of those, so they will start construction. And then the logic is, you can't stop us now, we've invested so much money. They'll say, when the rule comes out, well, you can't change the rules of the game now, because we've already we are already got at this permit, we've already you know, whatever they've all already done. You can't change anything now, and you can't hold them accountable, and you can't stop construction because they've started, and we saw it.
Really they started without the Army Corps of Engineer's permit in Iowa and without a bunch of other permits, and then it was well, we can't waste that money. Who's going to stop them? You know? And now the DA Code access is actually up and running. The judge Boasberg in Washington said this is not a legal permit, but
they're not making him tear it out. So you know, the question is at what point does litigation actually stop something or when does it just make a lot of nonprofit lawyers crazy and a lot of industry lawyers rich. So the litigation will emerge over time and the pipelines are the best bet and will it stop it? I don't know.
That's it for this time. We'll be back soon with another episode in this series. Don't forget to check out the print stories that are going along with this series as well on our website at drilled dot Media and with various co publishing partners including Rolling Stone and Vox. This episode was mixed and mastered by Peter duff Our. Theme music is Bird in the Hand by four Known, fact checking by Sarah Sneath. Our artwork is by Matthew Fleming.
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