Carbon Capture and Storage: Underestimating the Ingenuity of Fools
by Carolyn Raffensperger, Executive Director
“A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.”
– Douglas Adams
Peter Warshall, the great biologist and editor of the now-defunct Whole Earth Review, once said that for every recipe that calls for energy, add water.
Warshall’s statement is more wildly true now as we face the energy transition with its massive changes both in consumption and generation of power. Many of us are keenly aware of how much more energy we will need in the future because of emerging technologies like AI and cryptocurrencies. But the mix of energy sources is also changing. One dimension of the energy transition is how desperately the fossil fuel industry is fighting to keep oil, gas, and coal in that mix.
Of course, the fossil fuel giants have figured out a way to both keep extracting fossil energy and claim to be solving the climate problem: carbon capture and storage (CCS). CCS is the fossil fuel industry’s proposal to have its cake and eat it too: capture its CO2 pollutant, compress it, send it through a nationwide sewer system of pipelines, and then force it underground for either long-term burial or, more commonly, to get more oil or gas out of the ground. We are told that these wells for sequestration and enhanced oil recovery are fool-proof and will keep the CO2 underground forever.
If you think these are rare proposals only happening in some remote state, google your own state and “carbon capture and storage” to see what could be coming to you.
We’ve focused on CO2 pipelines connecting the capture facilities with the sequestration or enhanced oil recovery wells, because the pipelines threaten so much land, so many communities, and pose such unique dangers. We knew that a rupture of these pipelines could asphyxiate all breathing things within their kill-zone. We knew that they could pollute the water. We knew that they required lots of energy to capture, compress, and ship the CO2 which meant they only add to the climate burden. We knew the CO2 pipelines were dangerous given the massive failure of a pipeline in Satartia, Mississippi. We had not focused on the grave, vast threat of the underground storage or enhanced oil recovery to water.
Until now.
We just learned that CO2 sequestration wells located at Archer Daniel Midland’s grain processing plant in Decatur, Illinois had leaked. There are only four of these permanent sequestration, Class VI wells that are operating in the United States, although many more are planned for states including Louisiana, Texas, North Dakota, Montana, Pennsylvania, and California (among others).
These wells, designed for the permanent storage of CO2, are regulated by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (US EPA) under the Safe Drinking Water Act. That is, unless US EPA has granted what is called “primacy” to a state, in which case the state regulates the wells and supposedly protects the drinking water for the good of the community. Most of the states, like Louisiana and North Dakota, are eager to get primacy because they could more easily give permits to the good old boys who want to use the CO2 to extract more oil from their moribund and almost depleted wells. The injection wells used for enhanced oil recovery are called Class II wells.
Guess what.
We just got word that those Class II wells are also failing. A recent investigation by the Environmental Integrity Project looked into Texas’ Class II wells and discovered a rapid increase in mechanical integrity test failures starting in 2011. These failures are attributed to CO2 and its corrosive properties. The two main findings of their analysis are:
1) There was a sudden, unexplained increase in significant non-compliance violations (driven mainly by mechanical integrity test failures) starting around 2011.
2) A higher percentage of Class II CO2 injection wells have failed one or more mechanical integrity tests relative to other Class II wells.
On a recent webinar that we convened on the ADM well failure, experts pointed out that when CO2 meets water, it becomes extremely corrosive. It eats metal and cement for lunch. CO2 is extremely difficult to contain safely or to keep away from water.
The dangers to drinking water are extraordinary:
A report by Clean Water Action found that “[w]hen supercritical CO2 reacts with water within oil-producing formations, carbonic acid (H2CO3) is produced, which lowers pH in the formation and creates a corrosive environment…. In addition, the acidic (low pH) environment created with CO2 injection techniques can cause the mobilization and dissolution of certain trace elements and compounds, which impacts these substances’ ability to move in the subsurface.”
What this means is that in a relatively short time—about two weeks, according to a study done by Duke University—CO2 can contaminate a drinking water aquifer by acidifying it and mobilizing heavy metals rendering it unsuitable for human consumption.
Fifty years ago, Congress passed the law known as the Safe Drinking Water Act. That law has proven effective in guaranteeing the right to clean water to most residents of the United States. During the next fifty years, we will face unprecedented challenges to both water quantity and water quality, in large part because of the rapacious appetite for water by the fossil fuel industry, but also its cavalier disregard for water quality. Carbon capture and storage is exhibit A.
If the current plans for the gargantuan expansion of carbon capture sequestration and enhanced oil recovery go through, safe drinking water will be a rarity because the fossil fuel industry will not only have caused climate change, it will have destroyed the aquifers, rivers, and lakes on which our lives depend.
What can we do? We can heed the early warnings of the failure of ADM’s Class VI wells and Texas Class II wells by calling for an immediate halt to carbon sequestration and enhanced oil recovery. We can call for strengthening the Safe Drinking Water Act by filling in the gaps that leave many of our drinking water supplies vulnerable to industrial activities like carbon capture and storage. We can demand that our energy systems going forward prioritize the protection of climate and water.