Editor’s Note: a guest post by Barry Hugghins, a Louisiana Republican State Central Committee member from West Baton Rouge Parish.

I am currently a member of the LAGOP RSCC and the West Baton Rouge RPEC, and I served as a WBR parish council member for 8 years.  In addition, I am also both a scientist and an engineer.  I hold an ACS certified degree in Chemistry, for which I was also voted Phi Beta Kappa, and I also hold a degree in Chemical Engineering.  Both degrees are from LSU and both were awarded with honors.  I have spent almost the entirety of my 50+ year career in the oil industry.

Thus, I think I “check all the boxes” enumerated by Rep. Jessica Domangue in her Hayride guest post last week as pre-requisites for credibility on the issue of carbon capture. So, that being the case, and without regard to Rep. Domangue’s comments about “Alinsky-ism,” I would like to make the following points:

1. Starting off with full transparency, I am 1,000% against Carbon Capture and Sequestration (CCS).  CCS produces no product, will not in any way help the environment or affect the “climate” in any meaningful way, and it is of zero benefit to the public.  It is nothing more than a massive boondoggle.  CCS is simply a science-fiction based cover story for a shameful raid on the public treasury, diverting much needed funds from worthwhile expenditures such as infrastructure, but accomplishing no public purpose; only lining the pockets of the well-connected and their lobbyists.

2. While CO2 flooding for tertiary recovery of crude oil has been used safely and successfully for quite some time, this is NOT the same thing as CCS.  If someone, most likely a lobbyist, has told Rep. Domangue that this is the case, they have lied to her.  These are very different technologies.  To borrow a phrase from one of our least favorite former governors, the lobbyist that “informed” Rep. Domangue about CCS is “entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts.”  The CO2 used in tertiary recovery is produced back to the surface with the oil.  It’s not “sequestered” in an underground formation under pressure.  And, once in place in a formation under pressure, the presence of the sequestered CO2 would certainly act as an impediment to any future oil extraction from a formation at a depth greater than the one used for the CCS.  While it’s technically possible to do so, it would be prohibitively expensive to drill through a CCS formation, so this would have the effect of denying a landowner the opportunity for future income from the extraction of those deeper resources.

3. Contrary to what you have obviously been told, CCS has not been “safely deployed…”.  There are a couple of places where this is being tried on commercial scale, but, like the project that Chevron is struggling with off the western coast of Australia, these attempts have not worked very well.  When dissolved in water, CO2 forms carbonic acid, which is extremely corrosive, as a compressed gas, the CO2 constantly seeks to escape its confinement, and a pipeline spill of super critical CO2 certainly has the potential to be a catastrophic event.

4. Contrary to what Rep. Domangue has likely been told, CCS is not a precondition to doing business in Europe.  This is yet another cover story to support this expensive boondoggle.  There are no doubt “enviro-loons’ in Europe who’d like to see us waste money doing this, but they’ll buy our gas and other products regardless.  Besides, most of Louisiana’s exported LNG is going to Asia.  Is the reader aware that the Japanese now own four of the largest natural gas producers in Louisiana and are seeking to buy up even more?  And, really, do you think Russia and Vladimir Putin will spend one nickel on something as foolish as CCS?  They laugh at us for even considering such foolishness.

5. Finally, CCS is an insult to both the lands and the people of Louisiana and something that people want no part of once they are aware of all the facts surrounding this.  That’s why the CCS folks want to use eminent domain to take what they can’t get consensually.  This amounts to nothing less that the economic rape of a non-consenting landowner.  I can’t imagine that any right-thinking person who supports our state and federal constitutions would in any way support eminent domain for a private purpose, much less for a boondoggle like CCS.

I know most all of those that are impugned in Rep. Domangue’s Op-Ed, and I’m sure that they’d all agree that the 80/20 rule is valid and that unity is important, but not at the expense of principles.  And if being called an “Alinsky-ite” is the price of doing what they think is right, then I’m reasonably sure that everyone that I know would be more than willing to suffer that.