Carbon capture has become top of mind for many of the most heavily emitting industries. But capturing the carbon from manufacturing processes is only half the project. Companies that retrofit their plants will need to find underground storage and transport the CO2 to that location.
The company behind the carbon sequestration hub and the sectors planning to use it hope the hub will make the carbon capture process economically viable at scale. It would provide a centralized location near the necessary underground geological formations to consolidate and sequester carbon dioxide from many nearby industrial sources, eliminating the need for each emitting company to create its own pipelines and drill its own wells for carbon transport and storage.
And while the investment in this type of project still has its detractors and uncertainties, the process of starting to build one has already started in the Gulf Coast.
A report released in March from Louisiana State University (LSU) in collaboration with a company building the first such hub in the U.S., Gulf Coast Sequestration (GSC) outlines how these types of hubs could work, why Louisiana is the right fit and the new jobs it will create and the old oil and gas ones it will reinvigorate. It provides a template for what other hubs will need to succeed if this strategy becomes popular. There are 35 commercial capture facilities in international locations such as Australia, Japan, Canada and China.
The LSU report focuses on Gulf Coast Sequestration’s hub being built in Calcasieu Parish, in southwest Louisiana near the Texas border. It plans to be operational by 2025. Gulf Coast Sequestration could not be reached for comment but in a press release about the report CEO of GCS, Gray Stream, said, "At GCS, we are committed to thorough research, including conducting hundreds of models and simulation exercises to examine how our project will impact our environment and our community. This report is another aspect of that research, and we are pleased to have worked with LSU to analyze the project from an economic perspective. The GCS hub represents a forward-looking opportunity to help to grow and sustain American industry and jobs, while also ensuring environmental protection now and in the future."
The hub will support 1,149 jobs nationally during its construction and 375 jobs annually, decarbonizing about 150,000 million metric tons of CO2 in the surrounding fossil-fuel- and carbon-emitting-intensive sectors, according to the report. This is equivalent to taking almost 33,500 cars off the road for one year according the EPA emissions calculator. GCS plans to store over 10 million tons of CO2 per year over the next 30 years.
So why is Louisiana the first state to have such a hub proposed within its boundaries?
It has the emissions
It is a powerful place to deploy carbon capture because the state and those surrounding it are populated by many heavy industries. These include producers of fertilizer, petrochemicals, power, natural gas, iron and steel. These heavy emitters are described as being in "hard-to-abate" sectors, which means they are unlikely to decarbonize through electrifying their core manufacturing and operations.
About half of the U.S. oil refining capacity is in this corridor between New Orleans and Corpus Christi, Texas. According to the report, while the industrial sector accounts for 22 percent of emissions nationwide, in Louisiana it stands at 61 percent. And for a hub like this work, it will need access to a lot of emissions in a relatively localized area.
"These companies are wanting to decarbonize," said Greg Upton, interim executive director of the LSU Center for Energy Studies and an author of the report. "They're looking at all these potential different strategies to do that. And carbon capture is one of those strategies."
We have the sources of emissions and the [right] subsurface has to be there. You want the sequestration location to be in close proximity to where the carbon is going to be captured. Louisiana has both of those things.
According to Brian Snyder, an associate professor of environmental science in the Department of Environmental Science and a report co-author with Upton, these industries also
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