A Win! How We Beat Carbon Capture and Storage in New Jersey
On April 18, 2009 the New York Times revealed plans by a tiny 8-person company (SCS Energy) to build an experimental 500-megawatt “clean coal” power plant in Linden, NJ – a $50 billion project called PurGen One. The Purgen proposal featured carbon capture and storage – a scheme to capture 500 million tons of hazardous waste carbon dioxide from the smokestacks and bury it beneath the floor of the Atlantic Ocean. (Later, the Purgen coal-plant proposal was enlarged to 750 megawatts.)
In a two-year battle, a small group of 55 volunteer activists drove the project out of New Jersey. This is their story (or at least part of it).
Artist’s rendition of the Purgen One coal plant with carbon capture and storage proposed in 2009 for a site in Linden, New Jersey.
The Purgen coal plant was designed to capture a trillion pounds of hazardous waste carbon dioxide from the smokestack, pressurize it into a liquid, and launch it through a 140-mile-long pipeline that would snake along the New Jersey coast sea-floor until it veered out to sea at Atlantic City. There, 70 miles offshore, a pumping platform would force the liquid CO2 a half-mile beneath the seabed of the Atlantic Ocean, hoping it would stay there forever.
Among proponents of the project, sub-seabed CO2 disposal was considered “ideal” (and still is) for 3 reasons:
1. No one lives nearby, so no local opposition to siting.
2. A leak will only disturb a few fish, they said.
3. Best of all – it’s far offshore, out-of-sight and out-of-mind, so who’ll ever pay any attention?
BE ALERT: Whenever coastal geology is being “explored for oil,” suitable CCS sites are being mapped for future use.
Back in 2009, CCS was a little-known technology, and the coal industry was aggressively promoting “clean coal” as the Next Big Thing.
The drumbeat for CCS began in 2005. At their annual summit in 2005, the G8 rich nations committed themselves to CCS, affirming “We will work to accelerate the development and commercialization of Carbon Capture and Storage technology.” (By this they meant capturing CO2 from smokestacks and burying it in the ground. This is how I use the term “CCS” today.) In 2006, Harvard earth scientist Daniel Schrag estimated that more than 2 trillion tons (!) of CO2 might need to be buried somewhere in the Earth this century. (Schrag favors burying it below the sea floor.)
That same year, 2005, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) endorsed CCS in a special report, and Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) immediately jumped on board with the slogan, “Just do it!” – giving CCS a green light from Big Green. (In 2011, Big Green formed the “ENGO Network on CCS” to promote CCS worldwide.)
The Union of Concerned Scientists appeared to endorse CCS in 2006. An MIT study endorsed CCS in 2007, the same year the U.S. Department of Energy produced a Carbon Sequestration Atlas of the United States and Canada. In 2008 the World Resources Institute endorsed CCS and even Barack Obama climbed aboard the “clean coal” bandwagon.
The PurGen project in Linden aimed to gather CO2 (via pipelines yet to be built) from industrial polluters all across northern NJ. In addition, to become profitable, the plant would produce nitrogen fertilizer, which would be shipped out by rail.
PurGen One would be built on a chemically-contaminated waterfront property in Linden (a small rust-belt city of 40,000 people), which they promised to clean up before starting construction. The Mayor and City Council of Linden strongly favored the project. The Pipefitter’s Local Union 274 filled Linden City Council meetings to overflowing with members supporting the project because they needed the jobs. Their need was real.
The Purgen public relations team featured some heavy hitters. The public face of the project was former NJ Commissioner of Environmental Protection Bradley Campbell, a very slick talker. Harvard professor of earth sciences Daniel Schrag visited New Jersey to drum up support for the project, serving as a paid consultant to Purgen. Schrag had published articles promoting sub-seabed carbon sequestration in PNAS and in Science magazine.
The New Jersey Environmental Justice Alliance steps up
In April 2009 the New Jersey Environmental Justice Alliance (NJEJA) immediately began organizing to stop the project. The City of Linden had been formally designated an EJ community by NJ state government in 2004.
Linden, NJ, is home to the enormous “tank farms” that you see as you drive along the northern stretch of the New Jersey Turnpike. The air in Linden is foul. Photo credit: Bill Wolf.
In 2009 I was a member of the NJEJA steering committee and I coordinated the Purgen fight (chiefly because, having just ended my 20-year stint publishing the weekly Rachel’s News, I had spare time for a big project). Over the next year we built a team of 55 volunteer activists who took on various tasks – and together our little team defeated the $50 billion proposal. We met weekly by phone for 2 years to learn from each other, plan events, and develop next steps. The citizens of Linden, led by seasoned fighter Beatrice Bernzott, lit the path.
We fought Purgen as an EJ outrage AND a bad financial bet AND unnecessary AND a deterrent to real solutions, including energy efficiency [doing the same with less energy], energy conservation [doing less with less energy], and renewables. Our ace in the hole was this: better alternatives already exist.
Our basic strategy was to raise a public ruckus, hoping to turn state government against the project. We succeeded. In August 2011 the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities killed the project and SCS Energy moved to California, where it proposed a CCS project for enhanced oil recovery (flushing oil out of depleted oil fields using CO2 as a solvent). Within another 2 years, citizen opposition in Kern County ended that project, too.
How we drove Purgen out of NJ
We prepared simple (but well-documented) handouts, plus a couple of different slide shows, a website, and even a not-great YouTube video. (The Coen Brothers weighed in against “clean coal” on YouTube much more effectively.) We fought Purgen rationally using science and emotionally using fear (but fear based on verifiable, documented facts).
We wrote letters to the editor and answered any letters that supported the project.
We built a strong coalition of 36 community, environmental, religious, sportsmen and public health organizations to oppose the PurGen project. NJ Sierra Club was a valuable ally, as were Food & Water Watch and the New Jersey chapter of Clean Water Action. Emily Rochon, then with Greenpeace International in Amsterdam, came to NJ, gave a great talk, and fed us useful information from abroad. The only other sub-seabed CCS project at the time was Sleipner in Norway, where 81 percent of the buried CO2 could not be tracked or located.
The issues we raised:
** Clean Coal Isn’t. We emphasized the many tons of non-CO2 pollutants that would be emitted into the air of Linden and northern NJ in general – a region already choking on bad air.
** Clean coal is just a scam to allow continued burning of fossil fuels.
** Despite a promise of many construction jobs, fulltime jobs were pitifully few.
** The burial site would have to be monitored for leakage, essentially forever. Humans have never done anything forever.
** Nitrogen fertilizer is, itself, a major damaging pollutant. So, this “benefit” was actually a liability.
** Ships would have to be warned away from the burial site.
** Fear of earthquakes. During our campaign, northern NJ experienced a small earthquake, which naturally played into our narrative. There is abundant evidence that pumping liquids underground lubricates rocks, producing earthquakes.
** Fear of accidents and deadly releases at many points in the system.
** Intolerable noise in Linden.
** Fear that the undersea pipeline would discourage tourism and harm Jersey Shore businesses.
** Fear that fishing trawlers would damage the pipeline with unknown consequences.
** Fear that the NJ fishing business would be harmed; we got fishers and boat captains to join us in opposing the project.
** We highlighted CCS failures elsewhere – chiefly Sleipner in Norway but also at In Salah in Algeria (where the project was shut down in 2011); etc.
** We attacked estimates of the benefits of the project -- $5 billion promised for the Linden economy was bogus.
** Some of our most resourceful team members persuaded both Atlantic City and the Board of Chosen Freeholders of Atlantic County to pass formal resolutions opposing the project. The press played up this aspect of the opposition. In other words, we divided our opponents from some of their potential allies.
** We exposed SCS Energy, the tiny company behind Purgen, as lacking expertise, financial capacity, and credibility.
** We emphasized the Rube Goldberg complexity and untested nature of much of the technology.
** Every time we mentioned CO2 we called it “hazardous waste carbon dioxide,” which was an accurate though unusual description.
** Proponents argued that carbon originated in the ground, so it can safely and securely be returned to the ground. This is flawed logic because pumping CO2 into the ground under pressure through a well alters the subsurface geology and creates new pathways for leakage that never existed before.
We joined with a group of scientists and EJ activists who wrote a long letter to then EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson, opposing CCS, and specifically opposing the Linden project. We announced the letter with a press release.
In sum: We kept up a drumbeat of bad publicity for the project, intending to build pressure on state government (and, not incidentally, to “frighten the money” behind the project). We launched some new attack weekly for two years.
Most importantly, we emphasized the credible alternatives
To turn ordinary thoughtful citizens against the project, we constantly emphasized the benefits of energy efficiency, based on David Goldstein’s 2010 book Invisible Energy, which estimated that the U.S. economy could be run on 50 to 80 percent less energy than it was using in 2009 – giving huge reductions in toxic pollution, asthma, COPD, heart disease, cancer, etc., and saving every family a lot of money on their energy bill. We also relied on Mark Jacobson and Mark Delucchi’s November 2009 article in Scientific American showing how 100 percent of the world’s energy could be supplied by renewable sources, eliminating the need for fossil fuels entirely.
More jobs (and much more environmental benefit) could be created by simply insulating every building in NJ. Wherever we use lights, heat, or motors, there are more-efficient alternatives readily available off the shelf. People can understand that.
We proposed a state-government revolving loan fund to pay for upgrading inefficient machines and buildings, with loans to be repaid from costs saved. (The fund did not materialize, but audiences liked the idea.) (In his book, The Green New Deal, Jeremy Rifkin proposes that the $25 trillion currently held in union retirement funds could be leveraged to promote the transition away from fossil fuels – an idea remaining to be explored.)
In sum, the major part of our strategy was this: safer, cheaper alternatives already exist and they would produce tons of good jobs and save many lives and much heartache. Why waste money on technology that is expensive, not needed, and already obsolete?
Framing our opposition within a credible alternative plan was essential and was persuasive to many audiences.
And that is why I keep asking how we plan to get to 350 ppm CO2 in the atmosphere.
If we can’t point to a credible plan for getting to 350, CCS supporters will claim they have the only answer to climate change and they may win on that basis alone.
According to the Yale Climate Change Communication project, roughly 2/3 of Americans are now “alarmed” or “concerned” about global warming and climate change. These people are going to be looking for real solutions. If we can’t provide a roadmap to a livable planet, our adversaries will fill the void with bogus dreams of more fossil fuels with billions (or trillions) of tons of CO2 buried in the ground and beneath the sea, hoping they’ll stay there forever.
By Peter Montague
SEHN Board Member