As a legislator, I am bound by and have sworn to uphold the Constitutions of the United States and Louisiana.  Those are broad but mostly definable parameters.  I am also duty-bound and honor-bound to represent the people who elected me.  Part of that duty is going to Baton Rouge, sitting in meetings and legislative sessions and voting on prosed laws, rules and on the expungement of rules.    I am a representative, and I believe in two-way communication with the people I represent.   I try to always respond to questions offered up by my constituents and fellow citizens, but sometimes, I have to pre-emptively communicate to let the citizens know what is going on, and what might be happening.

This think piece is offered up both to the people I represent and to all Louisiana citizens—as a courtesy.  Something is going on in Louisiana that has both great and potentially very bad potential.  We need to discuss this “thing.”  I offer up these words in a two-part series, because I am told writing too much will lose an audience.  I am ok at summarizing, but I also KNOW that some things merit detail.  This is one of those times.

The topic at hand is Carbon Capture and Sequestration (CCS) and its potential impact on the State of Louisiana.    I am offering my views on this topic as food for thought for citizens and policy makers and law makers.  For the citizens in Louisiana, I implore you to read all of this and to do your OWN research.   This is a VERY SERIOUS topic and the future of our state and the long-term welfare of our beloved Louisiana is in jeopardy.

Quick definition:   CCS, simply put, is a process that isolates/traps and then transports and eventually stores both man made and natural carbon dioxide.   The process is done out of a desire to keep carbon dioxide from getting into the atmosphere.   There is a body of belief that excess carbon dioxide is harming the environment and thus bringing on what we now call “climate change.”     The proponents of CCS often say we need to do this because the activities of man are affecting the environment of the earth and thus are causing changes in the weather patterns.

For those who were bored with junior high and high school science, just remember this:  We breathe in oxygen (O2) and expire (breathe out) CO2.  Trees breathe in CO2 and expire O2.

Carbon dioxide is an exhaust gas from both combustion and respiration.  CO2 is the reason we exhale. When we take in a breath, we take oxygen into our bloodstream through our lungs.  Our bodies use the oxygen to produce the energy we need in order to live, by a process called “cellular respiration.   CO2 is the end product of cellular respiration.  This means that CO2 is the primary carbon source for life on earth.  Plants use CO2 to make sugars and cellulose by a process called photosynthesis. No CO2 will equal NO photosynthesis and no plant life.  No plant life will equal no animal life, because most animals are herbivores – “plant eaters”.  CO2 is essential for life.

People entering into this debate have to decide if they believe man can or has been able to change the climate and thus the weather on our earth.  50 years ago, there was a panic over something called Global Cooling.   Fear mongers were telling the industrialized world that if we didn’t change our consumption of oil and gas, that the world would freeze.  Leonard Nimoy of Star Trek fame made a sobering documentary on this fact.   He and his friends were urging that we had to STOP using gasoline or we’d all be FREEZING in a few years. You’ll struggle finding references to it anymore, but it was a thing.

By the 1990s, the panic radically shifted to something called Global Warming.    The panic over us all burning up came down from the environmental smart folks.

A few years later, we no longer speak of either, but now we speak of “climate change.”   But, the panic and fear mongering is consistent, simply with a new fill in the blank concern that is tied to the exploitation and use of oil and gas.

But CCS is a process that some people are proposing as a way to prevent climate change by reducing the volume of emissions that are generated from various processes and keep them from getting into the atmosphere.  The goal of CCS is to keep exhaust from certain industrial activities from being released, thus saving mankind from what some have called Climate Change.

Unsettled Science

There are people on all sides of the ideological spectrum who love to the phrase “the science is settled.”   Truthfully, most of these people are leftists or tyrants and statists who expect you as a citizen to take their word for it—-and to do as you’re told.  We have heard this moniker a lot during the last 3 or 4 decades, most prominently from the likes of Al Gore who has said for years the science was settled about global warming….until the world did not heat and he started calling it Climate Change.

But we also heard a lot about the science being settled during the COVID pandemonium.     We were told without equivocation that (1) COVID was not man-made; (2) COVID could be prevented by wearing paper masks; (3) The COVID family of vaccines could end the pandemic and that taking the shot would prevent you from getting the virus: and (4) That shutting down society, the economy and liberty were critical to ensure public safety. The settled science is what drove all of this.

As it turned out, the science was no where near settled on the climate, just like it is nowhere near settled on COVID.    We need to discuss societal disruption from COVID, but that will come later.  Right now, we’re talking about societal disruption and possible harm from activities the federal and state government in Louisiana are undertaking and, in many ways, forcing on our populace from Carbon Capture and Sequestration (CCS).

PLEASE KEEP READING:   I need to lay groundwork before I talk about what they’re doing to Louisiana and what some WANT to do to Louisiana.    Not all discussions are one or two sentence in length.

Does Carbon Dioxide (CO2) Produced in the United States Harm the Environment or Change the Climate?

There is a message permeating from the pro-CCS crowd that the United States MUST immediately curtail and eventually STOP producing CO2.   Someone somewhere decided that what we produce in our society is having THE detrimental effect on the world’s climate and thus weather, and thus we (the United States) are the linchpin to saving the planet.  If this were really the case, there’d be a lot more people on board with the activities tied to CCS.   The fact is we are NOT the world’s major contributor of CO2 that is released in the atmosphere.   We just aren’t.

China and India right now produce 3 times the volume of CO2 that is released into the earth’s atmosphere.  If the world or the otherwise civilized community really believes that CO2 is a pollutant and harmful, then the everyone needs to gang up on China or India first.    In recent years, the US has achieved reductions in emissions via increases in efficiency and moving from coal to natural gas for power generation.

Neither China nor India come anywhere close to producing the amount of energy they require to power their economy.  China only produces about 30% of the energy that they need.  Both China and India are extremely dependent on coal as their primary fuel.  Coal is the cheapest and most easily transported hydrocarbon fuel and both China and India can be expected to continue to increase their CO2 emissions for the foreseeable future.   No matter what WE do, other producers of CO2 are going to be producing vast quantities of the stuff.

It’s going to happen.

WHAT DOES ALL OF THIS HAVE TO DO WITH LOUISIANA?

Louisiana produces a lot of oil and gas.  In truth, we don’t produce nearly as much as we should.   The previous governor and his policies helped to run off much of the industry and discourage new exploration.   What those folks did to Louisiana might be topic for a book one day, but for now, let it suffice to say that they did disastrous things to our economic framework, which kind of leads us to this moment.

There is an effort under way right now to use Louisiana as a key location for the sequestration of captured carbon.   Yes, there is an effort to make us one of the big “S” locations in the CCS world.

The US federal government has offered up, and, in fact delivered many millions of dollars to the State if we’ll accept and surrender some of our precious land (and lakes) as locations that will be used to “store” (sequester) the carbon that is being extracted from the vicinity around industrial processes and well.

A ton of money and effort are going into creating new or using existing pipelines to extract carbon from wells and then transport it sometimes hundreds of miles to locations where the geology of the earth is believed suitable for storing this captured material.

A number of places around the state have been earmarked as “good” locations for these storage sites.   Some are in south Louisiana near Ponchatoula and some are in western Louisiana—in my home parish of Vernon.      The speed with which all of this happening is mind numbing in the context of government actions.

Just how many dollars are being poured into these projects is unknown, but it is certainly in the multiple millions of dollars.    Players in the oil and gas industry are being used (some say co-opted) to help facilitate this rapid and time sensitive undertaking.    A year ago, the Louisiana legislature signed a number of pieces of legislation that will facilitate the rapid use of these funds and will ostensibly be a big economic benefit to the State of Louisiana.   Ostensibly.   A number of new laws were put on the books last year that are greasing the skids for this new found economic boom that is being forced on us.

But not everyone is on board with this.   The very fact that this is moving as quickly as it is raises eyebrows.  The very fact that CCS is a government-inspired and propagated effort raises BIG concerns.   The volume of lobbying teams that were employed last year to convince the members of the legislature that this was a good idea that needed to be adopted ASAP was STARTLING.

As all of this is happening, property owners in various locales in Louisiana are receiving letters from “land men” who are trying to secure the rights to both run pipelines across and use the property of private citizens across the state.    While this process is not new, most citizens who have received these letters do not understand the parameters, nor are they being made aware of the ramifications of signing on to one of these agreements.

One of the laws that was pushed through last year put a troubling marker on the ground regarding personal property rights and eminent domain tied to these efforts.

There is great concern regarding CCS in general, and in Louisiana in particular.   One of the big concerns many of us have is the potential harm to the environment from these activities.    The proponents of CCS say they’re doing this because they believe the activities of man are creating these terrible CO2 particles that are supposedly causing climate change (which is not true, by the way).  But some opponents of CCS are standing against the process because of the potential harm to the environment.

Captured CO2 has the potential of being very toxic.   Quite toxic, in fact.    It is so toxic, in fact, that it has to be transported in specialized pipe that costs upwards of $1000 per foot.   Typically, a glass reinforced epoxy lined stainless steel tubing is used for CO2 pipelines.  Further, we all need to know that concentrated CO2 is very toxic; if it comes in contact with water it forms carbonic acid, which is hideously corrosive.  This is why the pipelines are composed of lined stainless steel.   Also, in the event of a gas leak, the CO2 forms a ground-hugging cloud which displaces the air, making it impossible to breathe, because CO2 is 53% more dense than air.  In short, CCS is creating a potential ecological disaster for places it is being sent and reportedly stored.

There was a CCS pipeline rupture a couple of years ago in Satartia, Mississippi.   The effects on the townspeople and ecology were significant, but this story hasn’t been told widely.  It certainly wasn’t spoken of a year ago when the legislature forced a new set of laws down our throats in Louisiana.     I encourage anyone reading THIS article to read the link from National Public Radio on what happened in Mississippi.   A pipeline rupture in Satartia, Mississippi has lessons for future CO2 projects : NPR

To be clear:   The aim for these projects in Louisiana is to capture carbon dioxide (that does not need to be captured, nor is the volume we’re capturing anything but negligible), then pipe it to various locations in Louisiana and to store it, so it won’t effect the climate of the earth.   There’s an undeniable amount of evidence that this CCS is not going to have any effect OTHER than to put the eco system and citizens in these communities at risk and to make some private sector entities very wealthy while tossing crumbs to landowners and potentially taking rights away from landowners as a component of this process.  That’s what happening.

Also, there are at least two bodies of water—Lake Maurepas in SE Louisiana and Vernon Lake in Vernon Parish that are earmarked for these storage locations.       While we’re having this discussion, we also ought to speak of a carbon dioxide release in a lake in the African country of Cameroon and to make sure that ALL involved know what COULD happen if something goes wrong in one of these ventures.    Lake Nyos disaster – Wikipedia.   Please read this article.

We Need to Have a Discussion

It is imperative that the citizens of Louisiana know what is happening.  It is imperative that citizens in the parishes where these sites are coming have FULL understanding of what is coming their way.

Many in the environmental movement speak of our fragile eco-system.  They speak of how dangerous it is for us to interact with nature and or exist as human beings.   I personally don’t think our eco-system is fragile, but I know that it is precious.  I know that we are bound to protect our natural resources and to use them wisely.

We as citizens need to speak of and about what is planned and to hear the potential upsides and downsides to these activities.  As a legislator, I hope to facilitate these discussions and to look into this topic in any way that is appropriate.   Quite frankly, I am concerned.   Others are concerned.   I hope I am wrong about my concerns and I hope someone can ally these concerns.     But, we need to have a discussion as a state.