August 2024 Networker: The False Promise of CO2 EOR |
| Volume 29 (8), August 2024 |
Editor's Note from August 2024 Networker |
| Many of us are feeling increasing distress at where our tax dollars are going: directly to war, to industries that manufacture weapons, to the fossil fuel industry and other polluting industries. A New York Times article in March 2024 called corporate fossil fuel subsidies the “zombies of the U.S. tax code… impossible to kill.” Some of the fossil fuel tax breaks go back a century, others have been created in recent years. In May of this year, Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Representative Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) introduced the End Polluter Welfare Act, which remains at early stages in the legislative process in both chambers. Our new report, “The False Promise and Potential Health Harms of Carbon Dioxide Enhanced Oil Recovery (CO2 EOR) as a Tool of Climate Mitigation,” that I introduce in this newsletter and from which Dr. Sandra Steingraber provides an excerpt, sounds the alarm on the federal subsidization of this extreme form of fossil fuel extraction. “Morally sound public policy would not pay the polluter to pollute,” SEHN executive director Carolyn Raffensperger writes in the report’s conclusion. “It would penalize the polluter for damaging the commons.” We’re far from morally sound policy when it comes to CO2 EOR and the tax credits that artificially inflate its economic viability and ignore its impacts to health and environment. There are other kinds of corporate-government relationships that also do not represent the general public’s interests, let alone that of future generations. On a state level, we see continued coziness between government and polluting industries. Below are two examples that intersect with our work.
In 2021, the Ohio River Valley Institute reported that a majority of Pennsylvania voters want to end fracking altogether (and by a 29-point margin, believed “that fracking companies should not receive financial incentives such as tax breaks or subsidies from the state government”). But last year in Pennsylvania, the governor and the Department of Environmental Protection entered into what the state called an “historic collaboration” with CNX Resources Corporation, “a major natural gas producer,” allowing the company to monitor its own fracking sites. Earlier this month, CNX released a report outlining their findings and issuing a blanket dismissal of all research on the health and environmental impacts of fracking to date (the latter served up with a sizeable helping of snark). As co-author of nine editions of the fracking science Compendium, along with colleagues at Physicians for Social Responsibility Pennsylvania and the Fractracker Alliance, I had some thoughts about that, which we were fortunately able to share with Inside Climate News: |
| Orenstein said that peer-reviewed scientific studies on fracking document an “unfolding public health crisis.” “It is deeply alarming that the governor of Pennsylvania aligns himself with a company that denies this fact,” she said. |
| Meanwhile, we continue to monitor an unacceptable situation in California, where there is still no comprehensive cleanup underway of the long- and heavily-contaminated Santa Susana Field Lab (SSFL). There, the Department of Toxic Substances Control (DTSC), a sub-agency of California's EPA and the regulating agency for the state’s toxic sites, has engaged in backroom, confidential deals with the responsible party (Boeing), disregarding previously signed agreements. Boeing, incidentally, is the United States’ largest corporate recipient of federal funding according to “Subsidy Tracker,” having received a total of at least $15 billion (based on extensive though incomplete data on awards primarily granted since fiscal year 2000). Melissa Bumstead, founder and co-director of the frontline organization Parents vs. SSFL, told me recently: |
| Boeing’s influence is seen at every level of government regarding the SSFL, but especially within the DTSC. The DTSC's cleanup decisions are made in favor of Boeing's finances, despite concerns and protests of the public and elected officials. The DTSC accepts Boeing’s data; any independent studies are rejected out of hand. Boeing’s influence has been eating away at democracy within California, and residents living near the toxic SSFL are paying for it with their lives. |
| We can’t act if we don’t know. We are grateful as always for our readers taking in and making use of the information in this month’s Networker. You will find organizations and elected representatives that are challenging this state of affairs. With full participation, we look to the next election cycle to launch new momentum. Carmi Orenstein, MPH, editor |
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.”
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RePercussion Section: The Rebranding of EOR—Same Old Wine, Same Old Bottles, Different Label |
| by Sandra Steingraber, SEHN senior scientist and writer in residence |
| Adapted from the August 2024 report “The False Promise and Potential Health Harms of Carbon Dioxide Enhanced Oil Recovery (CO2 EOR) as a Tool of Climate Mitigation,” prepared by SEHN and the Bold Alliance |
| The goal of carbon dioxide enhanced oil recovery (CO2 EOR) is to squeeze out the veritable last drop of recoverable oil from an oilfield. The assumption is that the injected CO2 will either remain within an escape-proof underground location or will be re-captured and reused if it rises to the surface with the oil it liberates. Indeed, U.S. gas and oil companies have seized on carbon capture as a means to partially offset, on paper, their greenhouse gas emissions without ending fossil fuel extraction or combustion. CO2 EOR is, in fact, the only currently existing commercially available market for millions of tons of captured CO2. All the evidence to date indicates that no regulatory framework or system of economic incentivization can transform CO2 EOR into a meaningful tool of climate mitigation. To the contrary, and for three fundamental reasons, CO2 EOR contributes to the climate problem rather than serving as a climate solution. CO2 EOR suffers from incomplete emissions accounting. The simple bottom line is that burning the oil recovered using CO2 EOR generally emits two or more times as much CO2 as is kept underground during CO2 EOR operations. Even if every CO2 EOR operation were entirely leak proof, with all the captured carbon eternally sequestered in the spaces into which they are injected, those molecules of CO2 serve to displace molecules of crude oil, which, by nature, do rise to the surface. The downstream carbon emissions from burning the oil so extracted, which would otherwise remain in the ground, are not accounted for in industry models. As noted by the two co-founders of the first privately funded company to make use of carbon capture in the United States, every dollar invested in renewable energy eliminates far more carbon emissions than CO2 EOR operations and does so less expensively. In sum, CO2 EOR harms the climate by incentivizing rather than impeding the continued extraction of fossil fuels.
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SEHN’s Carolyn Raffensperger was extensively quoted in a major investigative piece that ran in Vox and Drilled: “These are not your grandmother's pipelines… They could be lethal. We talk about the kill zone or a fatality zone around a CO2 pipeline. We don't talk about that with oil and gas pipelines. These are uniquely dangerous and underregulated.” Iowa Capital Dispatch covered the release of our new report with Bold Alliance on carbon dioxide enhanced oil recovery (CO2 EOR): “‘Enhanced oil recovery is not a public benefit. It is not in the public interest,’ SEHN Executive Director Carolyn Raffensperger said. Sandra Steingraber, a senior scientist with SEHN, pushed back against claims that EOR is environmentally friendly and called EOR the ‘new fracking.’” The report was also noted in Bill McKibben’s online blog, The Crucial Years: “Important new research from the Science and Environmental Health Network on using carbon dioxide captured from powerplants to push yet more oil out of the ground.” SEHN’s Carmi Orenstein, program director of Concerned Health Professionals of New York and Networker editor, provided comment to Inside Climate News for a piece addressing a new report from the Pennsylvania gas extraction company CNX. “It is entirely disingenuous for CNX—which is in business to extract gas—to accuse independent researchers of using ‘ambiguous and suspect statistics to goal-seek to their desired conclusions.’” The article also ran in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and Fast Company. Acting on her own behalf, SEHN senior scientist and writer in residence Dr. Sandra Steingraber has been participating in the ongoing Summer of Heat civil disobedience campaign targeting CitiBank for financing new fossil fuel projects. Common Dreams published the remarks she was not able to deliver due to her arrest. “My responsibility as a plant biologist in this moment in human history is to do more than just teach photosynthesis and praise trees. All the oxygen we breathe is provided to us by plants, and they are in trouble.” |
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