St. Martinville – The St. Martin Parish Council considered a resolution opposing Class VI injection wells in the parish that would store carbon dioxide captured from industrial sources below ground.
The council heard from Brendon Dubroc, who read a statement during the Feb. 24 committee meetings from Louisiana State Treasurer Dr. John Fleming.
“I will start by expressing my unequivocal opposition to the variety of carbon capture and sequestration initiatives being advanced in Louisiana,” Fleming said in the statement. “Let me be frank. These technologies are unproven commercially, heavily dependent on government subsidies and riddled with financial and legal uncertainty. “Current federal tax initiatives such as the enhanced 45Q tax credits attract investment but also shift risk to taxpayers when projects fail to meet performance targets or when long-term storage liability remains undefined under existing state law.”
Fleming’s statement said that pending state legislation is focused on clarifying liability, establishing monitoring requirements and protecting landowner rights.
Stored carbon dioxide leads to potential remediation costs that taxpayers should not be asked to absorb, he said.
“Injecting and storing CO 2 underground for generations raises important questions,” Fleming said. “Who is responsible if a leak occurs? Who bears the cost of monitoring and maintenance decades into the future? These are not abstract concerns. They are serious financial and legal risks that deserve scrutiny.
“Experience shows that carbon capture is hazardous. CO 2 leaks can asphyxiate living things and poses risk, especially to rural communities in our state. CO 2 is not a harmless green project with environmental benefits. Instead, it is a scheme that allows certain powerful interests to benefit financially at the public’s expense. Louisiana public officials must act as trustees of natural resources. Proviate companies cannot be lawfully granted the right to use land for hazardous purposes. This is a breach of public trust.”
The statement raised questions about property rights, land use and longterm liability. Using eminent domain for carbon pipelines and underground storage violates property rights, Fleming said. Imminent domain is intended for a public good, not for the good of a few powerful interests.
Injection
Other investments such as coastal restoration, flood protection, worforce development and economic diversification deliver clear benefits for Louisiana families, while gambling on future technological breakthroughs does not.
“Innovation should be welcomed, but not blindly accepted,” the statement read. “Any economic initiative in our state must be met with rigorous standards of fiscal responsibility, transparency and accountability.”
Local resident Wendy Thibodeaux also spoke against carbon capture initiatives.
“Personally, I’m against it,” she said. “We have the Chicot Aquifer that runs under St. Martin Parish. The Chicot Aquifer system underlies approximately 9,300 square miles in Southwest Louisiana, and it’s the primary water source for 15 parishes. It accounts for 48 percent of all the groundwater used in Louisiana. They want to drill half a mile for carbon capture. If it’s in the right area, they’ll drill into the aquifer or past it, which is not good. If carbon capture gas penetrates an aquifer, it will cause groundwater to acidify, triggering chemical reactions that leech elements such as arsenic, lead, manganese, uranium from the surrounding rock. So, it’s not healthy for our environment.”
She added that she hopes the parish council does what’s right.
Council Chairman Chris Tauzin said that council members had met with representatives of other parish governments regarding carbon capture injection sites, and there were no rewards for injecting CO 2 underground.
“It’s for tax credits,” Tauzin said. “It’s not economic development. It doesn’t bring anything back. It does more harm than good, in my opinion, and that’s my opinion only. I’m not trying to influence anybody.”
Tauzin said he’s shared information with council members that had been sent to him by government officials in other parishes.
“It’s coming,” he said. “There’s six proposed sites in the state that’s going to be dug, none in St. Martin Parish, but my biggest concern, I guess, is I’ve been involved in the Atchafalaya Basin and sat on numerous committees and state committees and worked on federal projects with the Atchafalaya Basin. We’ve got a lot of empty (oil) wells here. We’ve got a lot of abandoned wells. And my concern would be, out of sight, out of mind. We have other issues in the basin that we deal with every day. We need to make sure that the basin is there for our kids, their future, very important to the tourism industry.”
Seeing hundreds or thousands of acres of the basin filled with dead alligators and the crawfish industry and fish kills affecting the parish would be terrible, he added.
Dubroc said that the issue has been brought up in legislation in April in subcommittee, asking the Natural Resources subcommittee to let the 64 parishes each have their say. Legislators told him that they couldn’t allow that because if, hypothetically, St. Martin Parish did not want to be involved in carbon capture but Calcasieu Parish did, the state would need to be able to run a pipeline across St. Martin Parish to bring the CO 2 to Calcasieu Parish.
Dubroc said the state is rushing permits for Tier V test wells that are used to see how the land they are drilled into will hold up to the pressure of CO 2
injection. Tier VI sites are permanent storage sites that the state can’t even tell how much CO 2 will be injected. Rapides and Vernon parishes are fighting a proposed Tier VI permanent storage site that would hold more than 200 billion metric tons of CO 2
under Kisatchie National Forest, he said.
The companies planning the sites favor rural communities, he said, because the head count means the companies would have to pay damages to fewer people in the case of a disaster.
Dubroc added that he supports the oil and gas industry, and worked as a chemist who visited industrial superfund sites and tested them for hazardous chemicals. He does not support CO 2 sequestration
in the state.
“Why is Louisiana key to carbon capture sequestration? Why do they keep telling us we are the perfect geological storage?” Dubroc asked. “Well, it’s because we’ve been blindsided by lobbyists.
“It’s all a 45Q tax scam. It’s a Green New Deal scam. We want to produce oil and gas. We want to produce LNG. But we don’t want to store this stuff and let the nation pump this stuff into Louisiana. I’ve been very vocal and very opposed to this.”
Councilman Corey Melancon agreed that CO 2 sequestration is a tax scam.
“A lot of my livelihood, the bulk of my livelihood comes from the oil and gas industry for a long time and it still does to this day,” he said. “I have nothing against oil and gas. I’m still in it up to my ears. This is a scam. This state is basically, for the most part, a giant swamp. You start pumping things underground, and no matter how deep you go, you know that eventually something bad is going to happen.”
Directional drilling trying to avoid aquifers likely will lead to hitting abandoned wells at some point, and contaminating drinking water aquifers, he added.
“This has the potential to be very catastrophic for this state, and it’s a shame because there’s lobbyists … pushing this stuff from around the country to dump it here,” he said.
Dubroc also said that those in favor of carbon capture sequestration compare it to EOR — enhanced oil recovery — storage, which has been done before and largely has been safe. But CO 2 sequestration has not been done and is not the same thing.
“It’s a bipartisan issue here,” Dubroc said. “We have to end these 45Q tax credits and this all goes away and we get back to traditional oil and gas.”
