Developers Eye Louisiana, Texas Coasts for Offshore Carbon Storage

Is the Gulf of Mexico the “single best opportunity” to store climate-warming gas — or an existential threat to wildlife and people?

The fishers in Gulf of Mexico waters off Cameron Parish, Louisiana, estimate their catch has fallen catastrophically from 1 million tons a season to 150,000 tons since the first liquefied natural gas terminal in the parish began operating eight years ago.

Now, a new industry is being developed in the waters that were once the most productive grounds in the nation for fish, shrimp, and oysters.

Travis Dadar - founder of FISH on the levy at Isle de Jean Charles. He returned to the island with family members to check on Levis Dardar's home- which you can see behind him- Levis home was broken into pieces by Hurricane Francine. Credit: Julie Dermansky / Julie Dermansky LLC

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A company called OnStream CO2 is developing the GeoDura hub, which it says could hold millions of tons of carbon dioxide captured from fossil fuel industries, including LNG terminals, a mile or more below the waters off Cameron Parish’s shores. It would be among the first of its kind in the United States. Currently, there are just a handful of offshore CCS projects in the world.

“These people are book smart, but when it comes to common sense, they have nothing,” said Travis Dardar, a Cameron-based fisher and founder of the group, Fishermen Involved in Sustaining our Heritage (FISH).

According to a report from the Center for International Environmental Law, in the best-case scenario, the injection of captured carbon may temporarily disrupt fisheries because of drilling and seismic testing.

Gulf offshore carbon storage pushed

The geology of the Gulf of Mexico, combined with the fossil-fuel-heavy industries along the coasts of Louisiana and Texas, makes carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) under the Gulf “the single best opportunity for developing a CCS industry in the United States that can effectively address national emission reduction strategies at the required scale,” Tip Meckel, a University of Texas-Austin research scientist, told a congressional committee in 2022.

Acknowledging that potential, Congress directed federal agencies to develop regulations to permit carbon storage under federal offshore waters. Draft regulations, requested by November 2022, have yet to be issued. The U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management told Floodlight it will issue its first draft of a proposed rule next year.

In the meantime, companies have focused on developing carbon storage in the state waters off Louisiana, stretching 3.5 miles from the shore, and Texas, which controls the waters for about 10 miles from the shoreline.

Land grabs onshore and off

The concept of storing carbon under offshore waters was supercharged by the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, which increased tax credits for capturing and permanently storing carbon underground from $39 per ton to $85. This incentive spurred a rush of development in the United States, with about 125 new carbon capture, transport, or storage projects announced since 2022, according to the Clean Air Task Force, a nonprofit that focuses on solutions to the climate crisis.

In August 2023, Castex Carbon Solutions signed an agreement with Louisiana for the rights to store carbon underneath 24,000 acres off Cameron Parish, around Monkey Island, at an initial cost of $7.25 million. Castex is one of the partners of the GeoDura hub, along with Carbonvert and Enbridge.

The OnStream CO2 collaboration says the hub will have the capacity to store 250 million metric tons of captured carbon, or the annual emissions from 58 million gas-powered cars. It has signed a contract with Commonwealth LNG in Cameron Parish to store the 9 million tons of carbon Commonwealth expects to capture each year from its terminal after it is operational.

Offshore CCS raises a litany of concerns

OnStream says its project will be operational in 2028. In addition to completing a geologic assessment of the site — funded in part by the Department of Energy grant — the company will need to build a pipeline to move captured carbon from the nearby industrial hubs of Lake Charles, Louisiana, and Port Arthur, Texas. It will also need to obtain a permit to inject the carbon from the state of Louisiana.

Louisiana is the third state, and the first with a coastline, to receive permission from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to permit carbon sequestration wells. Patrick Courreges, a spokesman for the Louisiana Department of Energy and Natural Resources, says the state will be examining the same things in offshore carbon sequestration projects as it does for the onshore projects.

Another concern, acknowledged by both sides, is the possibility the injected carbon will come back out through abandoned, idle, or older wells. Such concentrated carbon could kill vegetation, sea life, and possibly even the fishers in the waters above.

“Technical evaluations show that the CO2 will not interact with wellbores near the project area,” said Debra James, a spokesperson for OnStream.

Technology largely untested

There are just a handful of operating subsea carbon sequestration projects in the world, and none in the United States.

Two offshore carbon storage projects off Norway’s coast have been called a success. However, the Institute of Energy Economics and Financial Analysis pointed out that even in these well-studied cases, surprises occurred, including carbon migrating unexpectedly underground.

Dardar hasn’t followed the offshore carbon debate closely. But the way he sees it, the presence of any more industry in his corner of Louisiana is “just no good, all the way around.”