The Oil Industry Wants to Extract the Last Drops on Your Dime: We Can’t Act if We Don’t Know
by Carmi Orenstein, Editor
Paying the polluter to pollute—in the name of climate action! This is the farcical logic of a series of federal incentives, including a major tax credit, that support carbon capture and storage (CCS). Most egregious is the subsidization of “carbon dioxide enhanced oil recovery” (CO2 EOR), a type of CCS. Through this subsidy, we are filling the coffers of the fossil fuel industry using public money, enabling continued drilling, with no sound scientific rationale and no accountability for the practice. In our new report, created together with Bold Alliance and released on August 7, 2024, we bring you up to date on this flagrant misuse of tax dollars.
We have been encouraged over the past couple of years to see increased coverage of the dramatic downsides of CCS and the policies that support it, an increasing media presence to which we have contributed through our research and writings, coalition work, and press conferences. But at the same time we identified a lack of attention to CO2 EOR.
SEHN forms working groups with allies to share information and expertise, strategize, and develop resources for the public, for policy makers, and for frontline activists. We established such a group with member expertise in CO2 EOR technology, law, climate, and health, and from it developed the fully-referenced report, “The False Promise and Potential Health Harms of Carbon Dioxide Enhanced Oil Recovery (CO2 EOR) as a Tool of Climate Mitigation.”
CO2 EOR is the primary end user of carbon capture technology: the oil industry obtains CO2 and injects it into depleted oil fields to release hard-to-get, stuck deposits within the underground rock. In other words, the technology serves to help the industry keep pumping oil. Propped up with a generous 45Q tax credit and unsubstantiated claims of climate benefit, the public deserves to be informed of the details of this practice, including its potential harms.
Launched with a press conference featuring all of its co-authors, the report covers several key areas critical to understanding CO2 EOR and its increasingly problematic federal subsidization. Bold Alliance’s Paul Blackburn explains the geology relevant to the practice, how CO2 EOR relates to other methods of oil “recovery,” and how economics interacts with its feasibility. He outlines the history, present operations, and the industry-planned future of CO2 EOR. “CO2 EOR represents both a last potential major oil extraction opportunity as well as a public-relations talking point in the face of accelerating public concern about global warming.”
SEHN’s Sandra Steingraber and Ted Schettler provide data and analysis on two areas of utmost importance to our mission: climate impacts and health harms. Dr. Steingraber details the flaws of CO2 EOR as a supposed tool to mitigate the climate impacts of fossil fuel extraction, citing the fundamental reasons the practice cannot succeed as a solution. For one, there is a lack of complete emissions accounting, and existing evidence points to actual climate harms: “burning the oil recovered using CO2 EOR generally emits two or more times as much CO2 as is kept underground during CO2 EOR operations.” Further, there is no evidence that CO2 EOR can provide “permanent” sequestration. On the contrary, there are multiple ways that this CO2 injected underground can leak and rise into the atmosphere. Finally, no matter the degree of subsidization, the reality is that many existing CO2 EOR projects are both uneconomical and failing at their objectives. (See a fuller excerpt of this section of the report in the accompanying article.)
Dr. Schettler traces the path of potential health harms of CO2 EOR. CO2 itself displaces oxygen in the ambient air and exposures can be deadly. In the context of CO2 EOR, possibilities for exposure to CO2—as well as to other chemicals involved in or created during the operations—exist at the capture and processing stages, along the route of pipelines, at the point of injection, around the well, and from the resulting “produced water.” Health harms to community members and the work force may result from routine operations or by the many ways processes may fail: leaks or ruptures, blowouts, and unintentional releases. Dr. Schettler describes potential impacts based on the various CO2 EOR industrial situations and associated risks; health harms already documented from, for example, routine venting and flaring operations, and a CO2 pipeline disaster that occurred in 2020, near Satartia, Mississippi, in which “[m]ore than two dozen people were overcome within minutes, some collapsing in their homes or in their cars.”
This is just a brief overview of the critical information contained in the new report. We invite you to read the details and contact us if you have any questions.
SEHN’s executive director Carolyn Raffensperger notes in conclusion, “CO2 EOR is a moral failure, a climate failure, and a threat to public health and the environment, all while being publicly funded.” It is inexcusable that today, on the precipice of Earth’s tipping point, we as a society are bankrolling the fossil fuel industry’s own survival plan—which bears no resemblance to ours. We hope that our report serves as a powerful tool to inform and motivate action, whether as a frontline community (whom the industry routinely disregards as collateral damage), or simply as a taxpayer.
