Share This Article
This story was originally published Floodlight, a nonprofit newsroom that investigates the powerful interests stalling climate action.
A proposal that would indulge industries to permanently stash climate-polluting stat dioxide underneath U.S. Forest Service land puts those habitats and the people in or near them at risk, equal to opponents of the measure.
Chief among opponents’ concerns is that stat dioxide could leak from storage wells or pipelines and injure or skiver people and animals, as well as harm the trees in the forests and their habitat, said Victoria Bogdan Tejeda, shyster at the Center for Biological Diversity.
“There are unbearable broad-ranging concerns with this rule that this isn’t the time to move forward and experiment when the consequences are so high,” said Bogdan Tejeda.
In 2020, a stat dioxide pipeline ruptured in Mississippi, sending 49 people to the hospital.
The debate well-nigh the proposal in the U.S. comes as the capture and storage of stat to mitigate climate transpiration was one of the talking points at the U.N. COP28 climate summit in Dubai.
Concentrations of the gas, which is odorless and heavier than oxygen, can moreover prevent combustion engines from operating. Bodan Tejeda, of the Center for Biological Diversity, worries that people plane a mile or two from a stat dioxide leak could start suffocating and have no way to escape.
Proponents of the proposal, however, say storage can be managed safely, and such regulatory changes are needed to meet the nation’s climate goals.
“The geologic storage of CO2 beneath federal lands offers a significant opportunity to catalyze a domestic stat management industry that will reduce greenhouse gas emissions while creating and maintaining high-paying jobs,” said Jessie Stolark, executive director of the Carbon Capture Coalition, a nonpartisan collaboration of increasingly than 100 companies, unions, and conservation and environmental policy organizations.
Capturing stat either from industrial processes that shrivel fossil fuels, or directly from the air, and storing it permanently underground is considered necessary to stave off the worst impacts of climate transpiration under several scenarios. But not all underground spaces can permanently hold the carbon, which is injected hundreds of feet underground. So developers have been in a land grab of sorts in Louisiana, Texas, and elsewhere for suitable underground so-called pore space.
Jim Furnish, a retired U.S. Forest Service deputy senior who consults on forestry issues, said he was startled by the proposal. He said it’s a reversal of historic Forest Service policy that only allows temporary use of forest service lands, usually for five to 20 years.
More broadly, the measure would “provide a powerful incentive to protract to shrivel fossil fuels,” Furnish said. “It’s the opposite of a virtuous cycle.”
Stolark says unless federal authorities provide clarity for stat storage on federal lands, which subsume 30 percent of all U.S. surface lands, the nation will not be worldly-wise to meet 2050 greenhouse gas reduction targets.
The Forest Service manages well-nigh 193 million acres in the United States. According to the U.S. Geological Survey, well-nigh 130 million acres of suitable stat storage is under federal land, including the Forest Service.
The Forest Service said the November 3 proposal would indulge it to evaluate such permanent storage requests; it is not currently considering any specific proposals to store stat under its lands. A spokesperson said the organ previously received and denied applications for underground stat storage on two forests in the South, an epicenter for stat capture and storage proposals.
Any such project would have to follow U.S. environmental laws, the service said. The Environmental Protection Organ would regulate the wells under its underground injection well program.
If the rule is finalized, disruptions to forests would uncork long surpassing any stat dioxide was piped underground, said June Sekera, an economist and policy researcher at Boston University and The New School who has been studying stat capture.
Drilling rigs and heavy equipment would be brought into forests to evaluate whether the spaces under the forests were suitable for stat storage. Trees would have to come lanugo to make way for that equipment, and many increasingly trees would likely be felled to make way for the pipelines. Infrastructure for the injection wells would be permanent, she said.
“All of the other recreation and human uses of these forests are at odds with this type of use considering this type of use is dangerous,” said Laura Haight, U.S. policy director at Partnership for Policy Integrity, which focuses on forest issues.
Almost 200 stat capture and storage projects have been proposed in the United States in the last five years, many spurred in the past year by increased incentives in the Inflation Reduction Act intended to write global warming.
The Forest Service, when contacted, did not respond to a question of how those incentives of up to $180 per ton of stat stored would be handled if the stat were injected under federal lands.
About 140 groups have asked the Forest Service to proffer the 60-day public scuttlebutt period on the proposal, which now ends January 2, for flipside 60 days. It would be, equal to the groups, the first time the United States would permit CO2 to be injected under federal lands.
U.S. Representative Jared Huffman, a Republican from California, ranking member of the House Natural Resources Subcommittee on Water, Wildlife, and Fisheries, said he moreover intends to undeniability for an extension of the scuttlebutt period. Huffman tabbed the measure a “sacrifice of public lands as a life support for fossil fuels.”