Progressives are upset about Biden’s openness to a decadeslong GOP talking point — carbon capture and storage technology, or CCS, or “clean coal” — the idea that climate pollution can be bagged and eradicated forever at its source: whether it’s a coal plant or an ethanol refinery. . . .
Heckva tussle. Read the whole thing at Politico.
There's some classic lobbying happening as well--on behalf of the industry. At E & E News' Energywire, Carlos Anchondo and Corbin Hiar reported Monday in Bracewell launches pro-CCS group ahead of funding explosion:
A public policy firm that represents electric utilities and oil companies recently launched a new group to tout technologies that capture carbon from smokestacks as a climate solution.
Bracewell LLP created the Capture Action Project in April as federal officials prepare to spend $8.2 billion on efforts to catch, transport and store carbon dioxide from industrial facilities. It joined a crowded field of groups that are advocating for expanded research, development and deployment of expensive technologies that can filter CO2 from smokestack emissions or suck CO2 from the air.
The unprecedented influx of government support for carbon capture and storage was provided by the bipartisan infrastructure bill President Joe Biden signed into law last year.
The law and lobby firm acknowledged its central role in the Capture Action Project after being contacted by a reporter, but the group’s website names no backers and attributes all of its posts to “CAP Staff.” The group added a media contact to its website after E&E News asked Bracewell about the group’s secrecy.
The Capture Action Project also stands out for the way it targets critics of CCS, according to experts.
“This looks like a glossy effort to showcase the benefits and also try to take out the legs of the opposition” to carbon capture, said Wil Burns, a professor at Northwestern University and a senior fellow at the Institute for Carbon Removal Law and Policy. . . .
[Scott Segal, a Bracewell partner] was at the [Climate Leadership Conference in Virginia] to speak on a panel about Navigator CO2 Ventures LLC, a private carbon capture company that’s now one of Bracewell’s largest lobbying clients.
Navigator is attempting to build a 1,300-mile pipeline network called the Heartland Greenway. The project aims to take CO2 captured from biofuel-makers and other industrial customers in Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota, Nebraska and South Dakota to a sequestration site in central Illinois.
Navigator paid Bracewell $150,000 in the first three months of 2022 to contact federal lawmakers about “policy issues related to infrastructure for carbon capture and sequestration for biofuels,” according to a congressional filing. Only the consulting firm McKinsey & Co. Inc. has disclosed spending as much this year for Bracewell’s lobbying services.
During his conference presentation last week, Segal acknowledged that local pipeline opposition could pose a threat to the plans of Navigator and other companies (Greenwire, May 27).
“You may have heard that there were some pipelines over the last several years to try to build through the Midwest that encountered some tough sledding,” he said, referring to community protests against the Keystone XL and Dakota Access projects. Developer TC Energy Corp. last year abandoned its Keystone plan (Energywire, June 10, 2021).
The opposition, Segal noted, was driven in part by a feeling that the benefits would accrue mainly at the beginning and end of those oil pipelines.
CO2 pipelines are fundamentally different, he argued.
“Communities that have the pipelines as a fact of life here, with respect to Heartland Greenway, also are the communities that benefit from the enhanced value proposition for commodity agriculture and for biofuel production,” Segal said. “That is a very different corporate citizen.”
Targeting critics
Bracewell’s Capture Action Project has sought to undermine some groups that have raised concerns about carbon capture pipelines.
“Recently, a group called Food & Water Watch has been treating those living near potential carbon capture projects to a barrage of adverse arguments, including the unsurprising conclusion that folks would rather not see eminent domain authority used solely for private gain,” CAP staff wrote on the website. The post went on to highlight a February tweet from the environmental organization that said “all pipelines” are disastrous.
“These hardly seem like objective views that people can use to call balls and strikes on projects so important to maintaining energy security and addressing greenhouse gas emissions,” the CAP post said.
A Food & Water Watch representative said Bracewell’s criticism demonstrated that the environmental group’s campaign to “protect Iowa and other states from these dangerous, unneeded carbon capture pipelines is gaining steam.”
“The Capture Action Project expresses an apparent concern for our climate future, but nowhere does it even mention the aggressive shift to clean, renewable energy that will be required to save this planet from deepening climate chaos moving forward,” Emily Wurth, managing director of organizing for Food & Water Watch, said in an email. “We have the solutions to fight climate change — and it doesn’t involve corporate-backed boondoggles like CCS.”
Bracewell’s CCS advocacy group has also targeted the Pipeline Safety Trust. Earlier this year, the safety advocacy group warned that the U.S. is “ill prepared for the increase of CO2 pipeline mileage being driven by federal CCS policy” (Energywire, March 31).
Bracewell dismissed the Pipeline Safety Trust by highlighting its links to the Democratic megadonor George Soros and calling its proposal for increased federal oversight “unnecessary hyperbole and scare tactics that aren’t reflective of reality.”
Later, the post sought to put the safety record of CO2 pipelines in context by noting that they “have had less than half the reported incidents of oil pipelines and caused zero fatalities.” But there are currently 5,000 miles of CO2 pipeline in the U.S., a fraction of the more than 190,000 miles of oil pipelines criss-crossing the nation.
Bill Caram, the Pipeline Safety Trust’s executive director, called Bracewell’s pushback “uncompelling, vague and disingenuous.”
“We have had very productive conversations with regulators and even industry groups who have agreed with the regulatory shortfalls our report identified and I look forward to working with them to help make safer the potential buildout of new CO2 pipelines,” he said in an email.
Public relations experts said CAP appeared to be using green washing tactics used by other industry groups.
“I’ve studied corporate PR and green washing initiatives in different ways and different industrial sectors,” said Daniel Renfrew, an anthropology professor at West Virginia University. “What I see by looking through the website, it definitely follows a familiar playbook of corporate PR.” . . .
Read the rest at Energywire.
It's not all greenwashing on the pro-pipeline front, however. At Bloomberg Law, Daniel Moore reports in Biden’s Pipeline Rules Target Key Link of Carbon Capture Buildout:
The Biden administration’s new rulemaking for carbon dioxide pipeline safety, and a nearly $4 million fine for a 2020 pipeline rupture, are seen as a step toward carbon capture goals that envision building out thousands of miles of pipelines, industry watchers said Friday.
The Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration’s measures arrived on Thursday with a long-awaited investigative report into Plano, Texas-based Denbury Inc.'s pipeline rupture that hospitalized at least 45 people in Satartia, Miss.
The incident prompted national alarm about the safety of carbon pipelines and emergency response readiness as the Energy Department aims to spend billions on carbon technology as a way to meet mid-century climate goals.
“The pipeline network needs to expand in order to address our climate needs, but it has to be done safely,” said John Thompson, technology and markets director at the Clean Air Task Force.
“To address the most pressing climate issues, we’ll need carbon capture, and that will imply some pipelines—and as the pipeline network grows, we have to double down on safety,” Thompson said. “I think this is a start.” . . . .
Another sort of safety is under discussion. At The Bull a couple of weeks ago, Mark Pitz reported in Law Enforcement Gets Advice for Potential Carbon Pipeline Disputes:
Opposition against companies seeking to build carbon capture pipelines in north Iowa has been more vocal than those in support of the projects thus far.
To date, the rate of voluntary easements from landowners to allow construction of the pipelines has been a slow return for both Summit Carbon Solutions and Navigator C02 Ventures. If that trend continues, the companies could seek out the Iowa Utilities Board (IUB) to implement eminent domain to get the remaining easements necessary, which could make things contentious.
Chickasaw County Sheriff Marty Hemann told the Board of Supervisors this week that he attended a recent conference in Des Moines to help law enforcement be prepared, just in case. . . .
Hemann noted that, to date, there haven’t been no problems between landowners and Summit, which is proposing its pipeline start with the Homeland Energy Solutions ethanol plant between New Hampton and Lawler, and then build west from there through Floyd County, Cerro Gordo County and, eventually, to an underground storage facility in North Dakota.
The Navigator carbon pipeline would utilize the Valero Renewables ethanol plant west of Charles City as a starting point for one leg of its Heartland Greenway pipeline and head south into Butler County to the POET Bioprocessing ethanol plant at Shell Rock and, eventually, to Illinois.
The IUB has not approved a permit for either carbon pipeline and isn’t expected to take the measures up until early next year.
Goodness. Will that double negative--wherein "haven’t been no problems between landowners and Summit"--persist. We can't predict here in sunny Summit, which has been overlooked by the captains of industry.
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